Poster bio & publications

Director, Film Studies Program and
Professor of History, Department of History
Director, Critical Theory Institute, 1989–90 to 1991-92
poster@uci.edu

Since 1997 Professor Poster has completed one project on theorizing electronically mediated communication, the chief direction of his current work.

Poster’s main work in critical theory continues to be concerned with electronic media. In 1995 he published The Second Media Age in which he attempted to confront issues that were not adequately attended to in The Mode of Information in 1990. Specifically, he treated technologies such as the World Wide Web and the Internet, which the earlier volume did not discuss, and issues of politics, race and gender, which he had also not addressed. He presented some of this continuing work to the CTI as a work-in-progress entitled, “Nations, Identities and Global Technologies.”

The Information Subject (2000) is a collection of his earlier work introduced by Stanley Aronowitz.

A second edition of Baudrillard: Selected Writings appeared in 2001.

What’s the Matter with the Internet? appeared with the University of Minnesota Press in 2001. This is an ambitious conceptualization of new media as cultural object. It develops the concept of underdetermination as a means of theorizing the unique cultural properties of the Internet. Since the publication of this book, Professor Poster has written several essays on dimensions of new media not treated in his earlier works. “Workers as Cyborgs: Labor and Networked Computing,” “The Good, the Bad and the Virtual: Ethics in the Age of Information,” “Television, Tape, Internet: Dialectics of the Postmodern,” “Cultural Studies,” “Citizenship and Digital Media” all are about to appear or have recently appeared. He also has edited and introduced the “Culture” section of Sage Press’s Handbook on New Media.

Selected Publications:
Bibliography prepared by Dr. Eddie Yeghiayan
What's the Matter with the Internet? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001.
The Information Subject. New York: G & B Arts International,2000.
Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.
The Second Media Age. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995. version 2.0 of The Mode of Information.
The Mode of Information: poststructuralisms and social context. Chicago: Chicago P, 1990.

Complete texts of out of print books - with original pagination and near original formatting
Foucault, Marxism and History: mode of production versus mode of information. With Ellaine Huynh and Marcus Kanda. Cambridge: Polity Press. New York: Blackwell, 1984.
Critical Theory of Family. With Jamie Poster. A Continuum Book. New York: Seabury P, 1978.
Existential Marxism in Postwar France. With Jamie Poster. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975.