dc.contributor.author | Helmreich, Stefan | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2012-08-16T19:49:11Z | |
dc.date.available | 2012-08-16T19:49:11Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2011-01 | |
dc.identifier.issn | 0037-783X | |
dc.identifier.issn | 1944-768X | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/72176 | |
dc.description.abstract | What sort of image does the planet Earth possess at the opening of the 21st century? If in the 1960s, the Whole Earth, the planet as seen from space, became a cold war, proto-environmentalist icon for a fragile ocean planet, in the 2010s, Google Earth, the globe encountered as a manipulable virtual object on our computer screens, has become an index for multiple and socially various interpretations and interventions; its thicket of satellite images, text legends, and street level photographs can all be tagged, commented upon, modified. In this essay, I examine a kindred image-object, Google Ocean, asking what sort of representation of the planetary sea is in the making in our digital days. Stirring up the century-old classification of signs by semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, I argue that Google Ocean is a mottled mash of icons, indexes, and symbols of the marine and maritime world as well as a simultaneously dystopian and utopian (that is to say, heterotopian) diagram of the sea - though one that floats in a media ecology that tends to occlude its infrastructural history and conditions of possibility. | en_US |
dc.language.iso | en_US | |
dc.publisher | Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, New School University | en_US |
dc.relation.isversionof | http://socialresearch.metapress.com/link.asp?id=98628557448jtj77 | en_US |
dc.rights | Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. | en_US |
dc.source | Helmreich via Michelle Baildon | en_US |
dc.title | From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures | en_US |
dc.type | Article | en_US |
dc.identifier.citation | Helmreich, Stefan. "From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures." Social Research 78.4 (Winter 2011): 1211-1242. | en_US |
dc.contributor.department | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Anthropology Program | en_US |
dc.contributor.approver | Helmreich, Stefan | |
dc.contributor.mitauthor | Helmreich, Stefan | |
dc.relation.journal | Social Research | en_US |
dc.eprint.version | Final published version | en_US |
dc.type.uri | http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle | en_US |
eprint.status | http://purl.org/eprint/status/PeerReviewed | en_US |
dspace.orderedauthors | Helmreich, Stefan | en_US |
dc.identifier.orcid | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0859-5881 | |
mit.license | PUBLISHER_POLICY | en_US |
mit.metadata.status | Complete | |