Description:
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Sometime in the mid-1990s we began, often with some trepidation, to enroll for a service that promised to connect us--electronically and efficiently--to our friends and lovers, our bosses and clients. If it seemed at first like simply a change in scale (our mail would be faster, cheaper, more easily distributed to large groups), we now realize that email entails a more fundamental alteration in our communicative consciousness. Randy Malamud's Email is written for anyone who feels their attention and their intelligence--not to mention their eyesight--being sucked away, byte by byte, in a deadening tsunami of ill-composed blather and meaningless internet flotsam. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Brief description: Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).
Review Quotes:
"This involving and innovative volume's aggregation of ephemera will no doubt delight the social historian ... The snappy prose and keen engagement help pull together the text into an engaging and successful snapshot of collective experience." --Times Higher Education
"In this slyly subversive little book, part rhapsody, part diatribe, Randy Malamud can't leave e-mail alone. His exuberant rants and riffs give us a new perspective on our infernal electronic inboxes. A fast, funny, compulsive read." --Mikita Brottman, Professor of Humanistic Studies, Maryland Institute College of Art, USA, and author of An Unexplained Death: The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere (2018) and The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men's Prison (2016)