Glossary of names and terms

CHARLES BABBAGE
Babbage, "the Victorian engineer and one of the many people to be credited with the invention of the computer, designed a 'difference engine' to perform the repetitive calculations that clerks (known as 'computers' before the word was applied to machines) had to make to draw up the tables that were becoming increasingly important to industry and trade" (Woolley, p. 46).

 

See also:

• Alan Turing

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  DANIEL BELL

American academic known for his theories on the "postindustrial society." He believes that in this new type of society, "it is now science, knowledge, technological research, rather than industrial production and the extraction of surplus value" that is most important. 2/98 See also:

• Marx
• Gramsci for comparison.

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DICK HEBDIGE
Hebdige is a negative commentator on postmodernism; changes in style away from '70s - '80s social realism have led to a neglect of social issues. Hebdidge talks of a 'representation crisis' in two terms: political representation (for example in Parliament) and cultural representation. (In films, TV, etc., how is your national, gender, racial, etc., represented?)

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MARVIN MINSKY
MIT scientist well known for his radical views on artificial intelligence. Minsky is a follwer of what is known as hard AI, the idea that computers can simulate, rather than just imitate, human intelligence; in fact, the human brain is nothing more than a "soft machine," and it will eventually be outclassed by superior silicon-based "brains". These new machines might even succeed us in the next stage of evolutionary development as the supreme "beings" on the planet.
See also:

• Artificial Intelligence

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HERBERT MARCUSE

Frankfurt School scholar, believed in transcendent critique: Marcuse took the present-day world and critiqued it in relation to an idealized, postulated ideal. In other words, he critiqued the present by looking to a better future, i.e., an optimistic, Utopian model.

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IMRE MOHOLY-NAGY
A member of the Russian Constructivist movement of the 1920s and technological determinist. For Moholy-Nagy, the photograph fundamentally changed the way we see the world. In other words, "the activity of taking photographs and looking at them encourages the human eye to evolve into a new state, with radically new goals." To him, terms such as abstract seeing, intensified seeing, rapid seeing, etc. "exemplify new configurations of human sight generated out of the relationship of technology and human activity. The camera, so to speak, is woven into the eye" and, according to Moholy-Nagy, the eye changes as a result (Burnett, p. 12). "Increasingly, as the camera eye has come to stand for, if not stand in for, the human eye, the perspective of Moholy-Nagy has taken root as one of the fundamental assumptions of industrially advanced societies" (Burnett, p. 14).
See also:

• Modernity

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NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE
Researcher into Artificial Intelligence, among other things (more to come).

See also:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Alan Turing

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SUSAN SONTAG
Susan Sontag is a well-known cultural critic and realist of sorts. Referring to photography, for example, she argues (in On Photography) that photographs are "traces of reality." Sontag describes photos as "relics of people as they once were" thus emphasizing the direct indexical and iconic links between the photograph and reality. Barthes, in contrast, emphasizes the referential aspects of the photograph in his final book Camera Lucida in 1984 (Wells, p. 39).

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