Imagologies

In 1994, Imagologies by Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen located what was going on with "the internet" in a larger social network of media and capital, and proposed that universities themselves were about to be radically changed.

At the heart of the book is the story of their experience in connecting two philosophy classes, in Finland and the US, using email.

In 1995, mediamatic magazine reviewed the format of the book itself. Relevance to SFW is familiar: the problem of innovative form often leads to difficulty with finding what you're looking for.

link

Imagologies is an enormous stack of slogans, statements, oracles, confessionals, questions and ukases about the role of the (new, mostly) media. The bits of text are often only a few lines long and impossible to assemble into one narrative. Because the book is printed and bound, an order is imposed, but it is rather an arbitrary one. Today's reader, after all, is used to reading books in every way except from front to back, so one adjusts quite easily to Imagologies. Unfortunately there is no index, an instrument that somewhat eases criss-cross reading. I kept having the urge to click on a word to look up the other places where it appeared (a method of navigation which is possible with every word in the electronic Expanded Books).