The stories we tell about ourselves and our communities. This is a book about stories created in imaginary play and the way they impact upon our lives. From childhood we learn about ourselves from the stories other people tell us and the stories we tell about ourselves. From these stories we begin to form our identity and a sense of self. Some of these stories make us proud and strong in the sense of who we are, but this is not always so.

This is the first book that shows English teachers how to incorporate teaching about the moving image into their classroom practice. This book builds on teachers' knowledge of teaching about advertising, newspapers and visual adaptions of literary texts, without technical jargon.

 

THIS IS NOT AN IT BOOK.

This is a book about (among other things) information and entropy, cybernetics and thermodynamics, mailing lists and talk shows, the electronic Ummah and chaos theory, web rings and web logs, mobile robots, cellular automata and the New Economy, open-source programming and reality TV, masses and multitudes, communication management and information warfare, networked political movements, open architecture, image flows and the interplay of affects and meanings in the constitution of the common.

It is a book, that is, about a cultural formation, a network culture, that seems to be characterized by an unprecedented abundance of informational output and by an acceleration of informational dynamics.

Macbeth extolled “sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,” in Shakespeare’s great tragic play of the same name. Soothing rest is not all that shut-eye provides, however. As sleep and cognition researchers Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen explain in their feature article in this issue, the brain is very busy during a night’s slumber. It is processing and sorting all the things we learned during the day, making valuable memories more resilient and tossing away irrelevant details. It finds hidden relations among our recollections and works to solve problems that arose during our waking hours. Turn to page 22 for our cover story, “Quiet! Sleeping Brain at Work.”

There is nothing like a good yarn to pluck our emotional strings, as Jeremy Hsu writes in “The Secrets of Storytelling,” beginning on page 46. Stories are one of humanity’s universals—they appear in all cultures—and certain themes arise repeatedly in tales around the world. Why do these narratives have such power over our feelings? The study of stories reveals clues about our evolutionary history and the roots of emotion and empathy. Indeed, as you will learn from Hsu’s article, the stories we tell explain much about ourselves.

The more you know about your digital camera and about digital photography, the more you’ll enjoy taking pictures and the better your pictures will be.

Of course, the best way to see examples of good photographic techniques is in full color, and Digital Photography For Dummies, 5th Edition gives you exactly that — plenty of beautiful, colorful photos that show you what you can accomplish and start the ideas popping.