The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present - Softcover

Basar, Shumon; Coupland, Douglas; Obrist, Hans Ulrich

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141979569 ISBN 13: 9780141979564

Publisher: Penguin, 2015

Synopsis

Planet Earth needs a self-help book, and this is it

The future is happening to us far faster than we thought it would and this book explains why

Fifty years after Marshall McLuhan's ground breaking book on the influence of technology on culture The Medium is the Massage, Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist extend the analysis to today, touring the world that's redefined by the Internet, decoding and explaining what they call the 'extreme present'.

The Age of Earthquakes is a quick-fire paperback, harnessing the images, language and perceptions of our unfurling digital lives. The authors invent a glossary of new words to describe how we are truly feeling today; and 'mindsource' images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists. Wayne Daly's striking graphic design imports the surreal, juxtaposed, mashed mannerisms of screen to page. It's like a culturally prescient, all-knowing email to the reader: possibly the best email they will ever read.

Welcome to The Age of Earthquakes, a paper portrait of Now, where the Internet hasn't just changed the structure of our brains these past few years, it's also changing the structure of the planet. This is a new history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket.

About this title

Product Description:

Age of Earthquakes

Review:

Brainy book that will rock your world (Evening Standard)

Absolutely amazing (Jon Snow Channel 4 News)

An email-like, culturally-perceptive exploration of our digital realities... a mix between a dystopian modern glossary, Internet memes, multiple-choice dropdowns, mindsourced images and a fair bit of wisdom, it is a self-help book for the "last generation that will die" (AnOther Magazine)

A philosophical Anarchist Cookbook for the online era, when we are in touch with everyone at once all the time, or like to feel that we are... Like Marshall McLuhan's iconic dictum "the medium is the message" or the staccato bursts of meaning of George W.S. Trow's essay-book In the Context of No Context, The Age of Earthquakes is an abstract representation of how we feel now about how we are now. It's a book insistently engaged with the present tense... Perhaps it is the 21st century's first book-meme (Pacific Standard)

Many of us feel like technologies of the future are arriving too slowly, but a new philosophy-cum-modern-self-help book suggests that, in fact, it's dawning on us faster than we ever thought possible (Vice)

A pocket-sized primer on our blossoming obsolescence (Kate Sutton Art Forum)

Age of Earthquakes = panic-inducingly addictive (Penny Martin, editor of The Gentlewoman)

It's a fun, visual and easy read. Verdict: In the future all books will be written this way (Sultan Saood Al Qassimi)

An abstract representation of how we feel about our digital world (Hello!)

I don't know about you but I would very much like a guide to this brave new world (Huck)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0141979569
• ISBN 13: 9780141979564
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256