Backing Into The Future

Essays defending the classics look at the works of Homer, Catullus, and Ovid, and discuss Athenian democracy, the Emperor Caligula, translation, and teaching the classics

The revolution will not be televised. But will it be online instead? When the Internet first took off, we heard a lot about its potential for social change. We heard it would revitalize democracy. We heard it would empower us. We heard we would all be publishers, working together to create a new public sphere. Future Active tests such claims. With fierce intelligence and wit, Graham Meikle takes us behind the digital barricades and into the heart of Internet activist campaigns. In the first in-depth look at this global phenomenon, the author talks to key players in the Indymedia movement and introduces us to the activists behind gwbush.com, the website that provoked the President to declare there ought to be limits to freedom. The founder of Belgrade radio station B92 explains how they used the net to thwart Milosevic's censorship, while McLibel trial defendant Dave Morris talks about the role of the McSpotlight website. And pioneer hacktivists the Electronic Disturbance Theater introduce us to virtual sit-ins and electronic civil disobedience - while US military analysts offer a different perspective on this kind of information warfare. Future Active is an accessible, comprehensive, and supremely readable introduction to the world of online activism. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in how hackers, culture jammers, and media activists have not only incorporated recent technology as a tool for change, but also redefined what counts as activism.

Who has brought the world of ancient Greece and Rome to life for the uninitiated reader and scholar alike.

How maturing digital media and network technologies are transforming place, culture, politics, and infrastructure in our everyday life. Digital media and network technologies are now part of everyday life. The Internet has become the backbone of communication, commerce, and media; the ubiquitous mobile phone connects us with others as it removes us from any stable sense of location. Networked Publics examines the ways that the social and cultural shifts created by these technologies have transformed our relationships to (and definitions of) place, culture, politics, and infrastructure. Four chapters—each by an interdisciplinary team of scholars using collaborative software—provide a synoptic overview along with illustrative case studies. The chapter on place describes how digital networks enable us to be present in physical and networked places simultaneously—often at the expense of nondigital commitments. The chapter on culture explores the growth and impact of amateur-produced and remixed content online. The chapter on politics examines the new networked modes of bottom-up political expression and mobilization. And finally, the chapter on infrastructure notes the tension between openness and control in the flow of information, as seen in the current controversy over net neutrality.

Fashioning the Future in Roman Greece: Memory, Monuments, Texts uses literature, inscriptions, art, and architecture to explore the relationship of elite Greeks of the Roman imperial period to time. This wide-ranging work challenges conventional thinking about the temporal positioning of imperial Greece and the so-called 'Second Sophistic', which holds that it was obsessed above all with the Classical past. Instead, the volume establishes that imperial Greek temporality was far more complex than scholarship has previously allowed by detailing how contemporary cultural output used the past to position itself within tradition but was crafted to speak to the future. At the same time, the book emphasizes the value of interdisciplinary analysis in any explication of elite culture in Roman Greece, since abundant extant evidence reveals its purveyors were often responsible for the production of both literature and material culture. Strazdins shows how these two modes of cultural production in the hands of elites, such as Herodes Atticus, Arrian, Aelius Aristides, Lucian, Dio Chrysostom, Polemon, Pausanias, and Philostratus, exhibit a shared rhetoric oriented towards posterity and informed by a heightened awareness of the fragility of cultural and personal memory over large spans of time. The book thus provides a sophisticated analysis of the tensions, anxieties, and opportunities that attend the fashioning of commemorative strategies against the background of the 'Second Sophistic' and the Roman empire, and details the consequences of embroilment with futurity on our understanding of the cultural and political concerns of elite imperial Greeks.

Farsighted and fascinating predictions for a new world order Veteran international correspondent Paul Starobin masterfully mixes fresh reportage with rigorous historical analysis to envision a world in which the United States is no longer the domi­nant superpower. Following an insightful study of America's global ascendency, Starobin provides the reasons for America's waning influence and explores five possible paths for the future, each of which is already in the making: A global chaos that could be dark or happy; a multipolar order of nation-states; a global Chinese imperium; an age of global city-states; or a universal civilization leading to world government. Starobin's tone is somber but in the end hopeful-the world after America need not be a disaster for America, and may even be liberating.

A Bird in the Hand is not a "how to" book, but a "how so" book in which the reader is invited to travel with Leah Kostamo on the wild ride of salmon saving, stranger welcoming, and God worshiping as she and her husband help establish the first Christian environmental center in Canada. Avoiding simplistic prescriptions or clichd platitudes, Leah wrestles with issues of poverty, justice, and the environment through the narrative of her own life experience. The lived-theology and humility of voice conveyed in these pages draws readers to new and creative ways to honor the Creator as they are inspired to care for creation.

U.S. national security is a subject that has been under intense scrutiny since the end of the Cold War. What constitutes such security for the United States as this country approaches the new century? Are the ends, ways, and means of our national security and national military strategies sufficient to provide for the nation's future? And above all, as this country celebrates the 50th anniversary of the National Security Act of 1947, are the institutions that resulted from that act still sufficient for the post-Cold War era? With these questions in mind, the Strategic Studies Institute and Dickinson College's Clarke Center co-sponsored the series of lectures on American national security after the Cold War which are contained in this volume. The lectures take four different, yet complementary, perspectives. Professor Ronald Steel reminds us of the intellectual revolution embodied in the act that moved America from the concept of "defense" to one of "national security" and relates this concept to our attempts to define post-Cold War national security interests. Dr. Lawrence Korb reviews the evolution in our national security establishment since the 1947 act. Dr. Morton Halperin's focus is the continuing tension between secrecy in the name of national security and the openness required in a democratic society, with a commentary on continuing threats to civil liberties. In the concluding essay, Ambassador Robert Ellsworth surveys the key strategic challenges facing the United States as we enter the 21st century.