Promiscuous Knowledge : Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History

Cmiel, Kenneth; Peters, John Durham

ISBN 10: 022661185X / ISBN 13: 9780226611853

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2020

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 35527790-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Promiscuous Knowledge : Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022661185X
• ISBN 13: 9780226611853
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, once compared the perfect search engine to “the mind of God.” As the modern face of promiscuous knowledge, however, Google’s divine omniscience traffics in news, maps, weather, and porn indifferently. This book, begun by the late Kenneth Cmiel and completed by his close friend John Durham Peters, provides a genealogy of the information age from its early origins up to the reign of Google. It examines how we think about fact, image, and knowledge, centering on the different ways that claims of truth are complicated when they pass to a larger public. To explore these ideas, Cmiel and Peters focus on three main periods—the late nineteenth century, 1925 to 1945, and 1975 to 2000, with constant reference to the present. Cmiel’s original text examines the growing gulf between politics and aesthetics in postmodern architecture, the distancing of images from everyday life in magical realist cinema, the waning support for national betterment through taxation, and the inability of a single presentational strategy to contain the social whole. Peters brings Cmiel’s study into the present moment, providing the backstory to current controversies about the slipperiness of facts in a digital age.  A hybrid work from two innovative thinkers, Promiscuous Knowledge enlightens our understanding of the internet and the profuse visual culture of our time.

About the Author

Kenneth Cmiel was professor of history and American studies and director of the Center for Human Rights at the University of Iowa. He is the author of A Home of Another Kind, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and Democratic Eloquence. John Durham Peters is Marķa Rosa Menocal professor of English and film and media studies at Yale University. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Marvelous Clouds, Courting the Abyss, and Speaking into the Air, all published by the University of Chicago Press.