This book offers an innovative examination of the interactions of science and technology, art, and literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholars in the history of art, literature, architecture, computer science, and media studies focus on five historical themes in the transition from energy to information: thermodynamics, electromagnetism, inscription, information theory, and virtuality. Different disciplines are grouped around specific moments in the history of science and technology in order to sample the modes of representation invented or adapted by each field in response...

This collection of five essays by Germany's most prominent and influential social thinker both links Luhmann's social theory to the question -What is modern about modernity?- and shows the origins and context of his theory. In the introductory essay, -Modernity in Contemporary Society, - Luhmann develops the thesis that the modern epistemological situation can be seen as the consequence of a radical change in social macrostructures that he calls -social differentiation, - thereby designating the juxtaposition of and interaction between a growing number of social subsystems without any...