Technoromanticism

Technoromanticism

Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real

Richard Coyne

This book explores the spectrum of romantic narrative that pervades the digital age, from McLuhan's utopian vision of social reintegration by electronic communication to claims that cyberspace creates new realities.

Technoromanticism pits itself against a hard-headed rationalism, but its most potent antagonists are contemporary pragmatism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, surrealism, and deconstruction—all of which subvert the romantic legacy and provoke new narratives of computing. Thus the book also serves as an introduction to the application of contemporary theory to information technology, raising issues of representation, space, time, interpretation, identity, and the real. As such, it is a companion to Coyne's Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor (MIT Press, 1995).

"This is an excellent and most welcome study of the discourse about computer communications, their narrativity as Coyne says, with particular attention to the classic theme of unity and fragmentation."

—Mark Poster, Professor of History and of Information and Computer Science, University of California at Irvine

"This book provides the most comprehensive philosophical and cultural context for understanding information technologies that I have ever seen."

—N. Katherine Hayles, University of California, Los Angeles

Richard Coyne is Professor and Chair of Architectural Computing, University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor (1995), Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real (2001), and Cornucopia Limited: Design and Dissent on the Internet (2005), all published by the MIT Press.