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Use of technology is an indispensable feature of modernity. But communities imagined along modern lines use technology in multifarious ways, be it print or digital technology. Benedict Anderson in his pathbreaking study of how nation socio-culturally comes into being stresses the decisive role print technology (in the form of newspaper and realist novel) plays in constructing the community of nations. In a globalized world, however, the role of print technology in imagining larger collectivities as well as home is being fast replaced by information and media technology. Nowhere are such uses of the later technologies perhaps as prominent as in diasporas. Diasporic communities, though largely defined by the parameter of deterritorialization, attempt to appropriate and use technology (especially media technology) with a view to “producing locality,” to borrow from Arjun Appadurai. That is to say, diasporas resort to technology to cope with the often traumatic sense of dislocation and minimize the overwhelming sense of insecurity in an alien cultural environment. In the present article, I intend to look closely at the uses of technology in general and media technology in particular by Indian/South Asian diaspora in some of the short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri. The more precise critical agenda here is to examine how Indian/South Asian diaspora utilizes (media) technology to construct “home” or a sense of “homeness” in the selected stories.

Gunilla Bradley has been an intellectual force for more than forty years. The evolution of her thinking led to a theoretical model that posits the convergence of computer, information, and media technologies and how our work and private lives have been transformed by computerization. This essay examines recent research on this convergence in the context of multitasking, including communicative practices in social and interpersonal interactions at work, effects on the quality of work life and job performance, and the dissolving of the boundaries of work and private lives. Convergence has had both positive and negative effects. It has the potential for improving the quality of social and interpersonal relationships and productivity in the workplace, but, at the same time, substantial evidence shows that multitasking has contributed, sometimes significantly, to increases in stress and cognitive load that have impeded job performance. These effects of computerization were identified very early in Bradley’s research investigations, confirming the continued relevance of her research agenda for future work that she proposed more than 20 years ago in her book Computers and the Psychosocial Work Environment.

Reviewed by: Women of the Country House in Ireland, 1860–1914 by Maeve O'Riordan Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga (bio) Women of the Country House in Ireland, 1860–1914, by Maeve O'Riordan; pp. xv + 339. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018, £85.00, $120.00. Maeve O'Riordan's meticulously researched and well-written study, Women of the Country House in Ireland, 1860–1914, reflects the growing interest in the private and public lives of aristocratic women. In one of the first attempts to focus on women of the landed class, Trevor Lummis and Jan Marsh's The Woman's Domain: Women and the English Country House (1990) argued that, even though the home traditionally is defined as the woman's domain, the research into country house living had for a long time been determinedly male-centric. When scholarship set its sights on the landlords, women were either forgotten entirely or assumed to be insignificant; in effect, the popular perception of aristocratic women veered between images of husband-hunters and passive, unhappy victims. Since then, the research into aristocratic women's private lives and their role in the public [End Page 346] and political spheres has grown significantly, redefining many popular misconceptions. Concurrently, the broadly defined category of the British aristocracy has been nuanced by studies of the elites in other parts of the British Isles. O'Riordan's study contributes to this process of nuancing by examining a largely unexplored theme of "the female half of the landed class" in Ireland during the second half of the Victorian era (19). The book spotlights the lives of women in twelve aristocratic families who had houses in Munster. Munster is "chosen as a microcosm of the island of Ireland" and claimed to represent best the "landowning families in the country" (5–6). The sample selected for the study is sufficiently broad to be considered representative and conveniently delineated to enable in-depth analysis. The study "purposely focuse[s] on surviving archival material" and offers a comprehensive analysis of personal records, letters, memoirs, scrap-books, wills, marriage settlements, account books, house inventories, and newspaper cuttings (19). The analysis is complemented by the discussion of artistic and creative works, literary and visual. The aim of the study is to give voice to these women and to examine how they "viewed and acted themselves" (5). While it is not meant as a "road map of social change in Ireland at the time," O'Riordan's book complements such studies by giving a good understanding of what it meant and how it felt to be an aristocratic woman in Ireland from the mid-nineteenth century until World War I (20). While earlier studies tended to concentrate on either the private or public lives of aristocratic women, O'Riordan tries to capture the whole complexity of women's experiences and activities, both in the house and in the wider world. This is a valuable perspective, and on reading the book one gets a fuller picture of the variety of women's roles and the life paths they navigated within the constraints of a patriarchal society. It considers the roles of mothers and wives but also the specific position of unmarried women in aristocratic homes. It gives good insight into the challenges faced by ambitious and artistically talented women and by political activists. The book consists of eight chapters and covers such diverse topics as courtship, marriage, family relations, women's roles in the continuation of family lines, access to education, individual tastes and talents, house management, financial and living arrangements, relations with tenants and servants, philanthropy, and activism. It convincingly argues that "women felt a close connection, and a strong sense of duty, to the house" (48) and "were essential to the continued dominance of a set of ideals which defined the class" (12). In effect, O'Riordan demonstrates that greater insight into the experiences of women is crucial for the understanding of the whole class and that re-gendering the country house is necessary to fully comprehend the functioning of the manorial order. The author explains why aristocratic women living in Munster were loyal predominantly to their class and families rather than to the national cause...

When the Russian president divorced his wife in 2013, social media crowds coined plenty of the Internet memes to interpret the news. Anastasia Denisova, Doctoral Researcher at CAMRI, examined the framing of the story in traditional and new media and came to the surprising findings.

At the present Net Work Period of the IT history deep changes are taken place in collaboration between people and human communication, its structure, quantity, and quality. A dominating steering factor for the design and structure of work life as well as private life is the convergence of three technologies, computer technology, tele technology and media technology (ICT). Telecommunication technology has come to play a more a more dominant role in this convergence, especially internet and web technology. Embedded (ubiquitous) computer technology is making the process invisible, and media technology converges within itself (multimedia or cross media). Well functioning organizational and psychosocial communication are an important prerequisite for successful industrial and social change in the ICT society. Managing and working in an organization organized as a network, involves communication between people, groups, units, other organisations, and various combinations of these entities. ICT applications together with deep knowledge and insights in organisational design and management (ODAM) are the keys to social change. The author describes her convergence theory on ICT and Psychosocial Life Environment with special emphasis on psychosocial communication and sustainability in the Net Era of the ICT society.

Analyzes the role of emotions in the religious lives of women from across Germany and Europe from the nineteenth century to the 1970s. Scholarship on women and religion has focused primarily on the intersection between women's religious engagement and their emancipation. This volume goes beyond that to examine the vital role religion has played in the private and public lives of German and European women. Because emotions are central to the expression of religiosity, it draws on approaches from the history of emotions to examine how women understood, felt and practiced religion in their search for meaning. Spanning from the nineteenth century to the 1970s, the volume's essays show how religion helped women make sense of their lives. It also illuminates the degree to which women used religion and its attendant emotional scripts to shape modern society and how religious discourses in turn shaped women's emotions and comportment in the public sphere. The volume builds on recent research that shows that religion-especially the religiosity of women-remained a pressing public concern in modern Europe. From anxieties over the religiosity of Bavarian servants to restrictive norms imposed on Jewish widows, from the interfaith commitments of kindergarten teachers to the autobiographical narratives of aspiring Protestant deaconesses, from the suffering of stigmatics in Germany and Belgium to Irish women's public narratives of their religiosity, this book reveals how women's faith and attendant religious emotions have been central to their public and private lives.

Knowledge is not ‘a thing’ and not a mere pool of data which can be managed. Knowledge is the process of learning. So what really matters is the question of how the process of learning changes in context with Social Media and Social Network Technologies. Gregory Bateson’s definition of Learning III, the “learning about how to learn to learn” predicted very early what kind of learning culture is needed today to meet the requirements of a world which becomes more closely and quickly connected and dependent on networks in all aspects of work and private life. With their theory of Connectivism George Siemens and Stephen Downs offered not only a learning theory that fits those needs exactly, but also a tool: MOOCs. They surely are not the “digital Tsunami” many proclaim (and fear) but – consciously used - could open the door to a new culture of learning in the clouds.KeywordsBatesonConnectivismMOOCsLearningKnowledgeKnowledge- SharingKnowledge-CreationLearningNetworksLearning TheoryParadigm Shift

Reviewed by: The Radio Hobby, Private Associations, and the Challenge of Modernity in Germany by Bruce B. Campbell Christian Henrich-Franke (bio) The Radio Hobby, Private Associations, and the Challenge of Modernity in Germany By Bruce B. Campbell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Pp. 370. The Radio Hobby, Private Associations, and the Challenge of Modernity in Germany By Bruce B. Campbell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Pp. 370. In the technical modernity of the twentieth and twenty-first century, we are used to mass media, which in our private and professional lives enables us to experience events and people around the globe directly and in real-time. Technologies to communicate electronically and individually are an unquestioned part of human life. Yet at the turn of the twentieth century, such a connectivity was unimaginable. Guglielmo Marconi had just presented the possibilities of wireless communications to the public without fully understanding the physical and technical characteristics of his transmissions. In The Radio Hobby, Private Associations, and the Challenge of Modernity in Germany, Bruce B. Campbell invites us on a journey to the early history of radio communication, or "radio telegraphy," as it was called by contemporaries in the beginning. Campbell zooms in on radio (not broadcasting) as a hobby, along with private associations for it, like the Deutsche Funktechnische Verband founded in 1925. He tells the story of the often-neglected social structures that grew around mass media like radio, television, and the home computer, and which helped people use and understand new technologies. In contrast to other works on radio hobbyists—or radio amateurs as they are officially called—which are mostly interested in technical development or institutional aspects, Campbell places German hobbyists within the broader picture of societal change. Campbell emphasizes three factors in describing the challenge of technical modernity. First, he zooms in on Germany and German radio associations between the 1920s and the 1950s. The German case is particularly interesting because of the strong German tradition of associations and the very different political and social regimes that shaped the ways people were able to use, understand, and develop radio technology. Of course, he references other countries and places as well because radio hobbyists were (and still are) an international community. Second, radio was the first transnational mass medium that directly, in real-time and without a state operator, connected the private household with places far away. Third, hobbyists, who were a comparatively small community, played a key role as inventors and scientists for the development and adoption of other media technologies. The book is structured strictly chronologically. It starts with the beginning of radio at the turn of the twentieth century and the German radio before the start of regular broadcast transmissions in the early 1920s. Next, [End Page 648] Campbell describes the history of the "Radio Hobby" in Germany against the background of a changing political and social history of Germany, from the Republic of Weimar, over the national socialist times, to the Cold War and the coming into being of the Federal Republic of Germany up to the 1950s, when radio was reborn as a hobby. Campbell's book fills a gap in the history of science and technology, as it emphasizes the crucial role of hobbyists for technical progress, instead of focusing solely on the well-researched companies, standard-setting committees, engineers, or the military. In the case of radio, this applies to aspects like receiver equipment, field strength measurement, or propagation characteristics. Representatives of the hobbyists' international association, the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU), participated in conferences of global standard-setting bodies like the International Telecommunication Union throughout the twentieth century. It reminds us of shifting our attention to non-professional driving forces behind industrialized countries' transition to technical modernity. Amateur radio is an outstanding and rewarding example, as the private associations offer a broad range of journals and archives, useful in uncovering the social dynamics of (semi-)private associations. In this book, Campbell demonstrates in a very convincing way how people in Germany integrated new technologies in their daily lives and thus came to terms with a technical modernity between the 1920s and the 1950s. Radio hobbyists founded numerous and complex organizations, subdivided into national...

Postcolonial Egypt has witnessed significant cultural and political developments, and undoubtedly it has been a challenging era for writers attempting to negotiate a physical and ideological space within the public and private spheres. Ideologies of national self and national others have simultaneously been advocated and questioned by successive generations of contemporary women writers. In an era in which the conflict between a modern western-orientated narrative of the self is often pitted in direct opposition to an Islamic fundamentalist outlook on life, and used to polarize cultural differences in reductive ways, the modern Egyptian literary writer has an even greater challenge ahead of them. Three women writers, Latifa Zayyat, Ahdaf Soueif and Rehab Bassam, who have in different ways striven to restore the delicate balance between the personal and the public, represent three important modes of modernity. Where Zayyat focuses on the relationship of the whole to the self and the nation to the individual, Soueif focuses on the hybrid, the self and the other. Soueif’s work seeks to occupy a ground common to Arab and western culture alike. Rehab Bassam, on the other hand, initially began her literary career on weblogs. This new medium is reshaping our understanding of the dynamics of public and private, and is one that inevitably will influence how current modes of modernity are being shaped in contemporary Egyptian writing. The three writers attempt to find a common ground of cultural interaction between modern secularism, globalization and indigenous literary forms that can be developed into a meaningful communal narrative: present and future.

Postmodernism, as a mode of the contemporary short story, has been clearly established and recognized by short story theorists. But postmodern theory, as pervasive as it has become among academics in the last half century, has scarcely been applied to the short story genre in particular. Many contemporary scholars, nonetheless, are currently making use of certain postmodern thematic approaches to help them determine meanings of particular short stories. T Short story theory began with Edgar Allan Poe's review of Twice-Told Tales, a collection of stories by his contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne. But theoretical discussions of the short story languished until modernism and the new criticism provided impetus for further development. Surprisingly, though, the next large critical movement, postmodernism, failed to address the short story as a genre. But while there is little postmodern theory concerning the short story, contemporary scholars have used certain postmodern critical approaches to help determine meaning. This book demonstrates the effect of postmodern theory on the study of the short story genre. The expert contributors to this volume examine such topics as genre and form, the role of the reader, cultural and ethnic diversity, and feminist perspectives on the short story. In doing so, they apply postmodern theoretical approaches to international short stories, be they in the traditional mode, the modern mode, or the postmodern mode. The volume looks at fiction by Edith Wharton, Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, and other authors, and at Iranian short fiction, the postcolonial short story, the fantastic in short fiction, and other subjects.

Exploring Tehran’s urban modernity through the Iranian novel, this paper argues that the identities of modern urban space and modern female subjectivities are constructed in an intertwined relation. Focusing on two novels that depict life in Tehran in the early twentieth century, I investigate the idea of the street as a new urban space, and wandering on the street as a new urban practice, particularly as understood by the novels’ female characters. The portrayal of the “modern woman” through her practices of using urban space, her visibility on the street - or the lack of it - and her relationship to the consumption of commodities presents two contrasting modes of Iranian modernity, one intellectual, the other concerned with the liberation of the body. I suggest that these novels both identify and help to create versions of “desirable” and “undesirable” modernity that remain relevant in the Iran of today.

The article focuses on examining the expression of sexual elements as well as the search for the female character's ego in the two short stories Lao vao lua and Dem noi lua by Nguyen Thi Thuy Vu by applying Freud's psychoanalytic theory and Sartre's existentialism. Firstly, the preoccupation with pleasure and neglect of the body represents an escape from sadness in reality. Secondly, the rejection of life manifests as self-destruction of the ego. Thirdly, after experiencing ups and downs in life, the female character reflects on her own private life and becomes aware of her existence in relation to life itself. The body and the ego are two aspects that are closely related to each other when considering the character's life. This study contributes to affirming the role of female characters in expressing the artistic concept of human beings as well as the creative personality of the writer in her short stories.

The Technological Gaze

Charles Cros (1842–1888) is known primarily for his poems, "Le Hareng saur" most especially, and is often cited for his scientific work on mechanical sound recording and color photography, among manifold other ventures. He also wrote short fiction, some of which, as this article proposes, contains nuanced critiques of the trajectory new media technologies might follow in the nineteenth century and beyond. Taken together, "Un drame interastral" (1872) and "Le Journal de l'avenir" (1880) evoke attitudes of both wonder and deep skepticism, in both utopian and dystopian settings, about the future uses of audiovisual technologies, namely the phonograph, the telephone, and the photophone. This article demonstrates how the two texts envision potentially dangerous entanglements between political centralization and these new media technologies.

602 Reviews Franz Kafka: Gesellschaftskrieger. Eine Biografie. By Bernd Neumann. Munich: Fink. 2008. 662 pp. 39.90. ISBN 978-3-7705-4689-3. Bernd Neumann's generally quite readable, sometimes opinionated, and at all times carefully thought-out lifeof Franz Kafka is a welcome addition to the field of Kafka biography in German. After Peter Andre Alt's Franz Kafka: Der ewige Sohn (Munich: Beck, 2005) and the first two parts of Reiner Stach's biographical trilogy (Die Jahreder Entscheidungen (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2003) and Die Jahre der Erkenntnis (2008)), this field is suddenly growing rapidly, afteryears inwhich all there was in German were the biographies by Max Brod, first published in 1937, and Klaus Wagenbach, who published an account of Kafka's youth in 1957. Neumann has much to say that is new and challenging. While Stach concentrates more on the life than thework, which made that life significant in the firstplace, and Alt iswont to separate the two into discrete chapters, Neumann attempts a synthesis. He looks for clues in the life to help him interpretKafka's short fictions and three unfinished novels and evidence in thewriting to draw conclusions about Kafka's life.He argues persausively thatKafka needed crises, either in his private life (such as his decision to woo Felice Bauer) or in the world outside which impinged directly on him (the outbreak of the FirstWorld War), for his literary writing to flourish.One reason thathe leftsomuch incomplete is thathe wrote in sudden, fitfulbursts. Neumann follows both Alt and JamesHawes (Excavating Kafka (London: Quer cus, 2008)) in emphasizing Kafka's dissolute youth in the bars and bordellos of turn-of-the-century Prague. Getting this part of his life straight,which his friend Brod and partner in correspondence Milena Jesenska did so much to mystify, does away with preconceptions of either his saintly or tortured sexual innocence when approaching his depiction ofwomen and relations between the sexes. That he simply did not fancy Felice is now an accepted truth for his biographers, but agreement has not yet been reached regarding what held him back with Milena. Neumann is also strong on Jewish identity, on Kafka's interest in his work in theArbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt fiirdas Konigreich Bohmen, inparticu lar his veneration of his boss and mentor Robert Marschner, and on his social engagement, which articulated itself through his work. Neumann contends that his interest in thewell-being of his fellow citizens reaches idealistic proportions under Marschner, whose zeal for institutional reform of the AUVA, which had been set up in emulation of Bismarck's embryonic welfare state inGermany, was inspiring. In fiction, the result isDer Verschollene and Karl Rossmann's advocacy of thewronged Stoker he bumps into as he prepares to disembark inNew York. For Neumann the shipwhich has carried them across the ocean is to be understood as the 'ship of state', no less. Kafka was interested inwork in other ways and for other reasons, as he was serious about establishing himself as a professional, property-owning bourgeois. The asbestos factorywas not a wheeze dreamt up by his family to keep him away MLR, 105.2, 2010 603 from his true vocation, but his own idea which he pursued with enthusiasm until it started to go wrong. In contrast to his firstnovel, Der Procefi and Das Schlofi are parables of failed Jewish assimilation intomainstream, gentile society. One reason that the heroes of both novels are apparently distracted from their trials or quests by women is that 'marrying out' was thought to be one way for a Jewishman to overcome his non-acceptance by themajority. Another is the slightly skewed erotic attraction between the two on account of their difference, which Kafka was aware of from experience. It is tobe hoped that thisbook will revive debates about Kafka's literary reactions to events and developments in theworld, in other words the relationship between hiswriting and society and politics. Recently the emphasis has been onmetaphysics and the presence of theworld in his fiction has been seen as metaphorical. It is high time the pendulum swung back. Swansea University Julian Preece JosephRoth'sMarch into History: From theEarly Novels to 'Radetzkymarsch' and 'Die Kapuzinergruft'. By Kati Tonkin...