Theodore Roszak – författare

As we devote ever-increasing resources to providing, or prohibiting, access to information via computer, Theodore Roszak reminds us that voluminous information does not necessarily lead to sound thinking. "Data glut" obscures basic questions of justice and purpose and may even hinder rather than enhance our productivity. In this revised and updated edition of "The Cult of Information", Roszak reviews the disruptive role the computer has come to play in international finance and the way in which "edutainment" software and computer games degrade the literacy of children. At the same time, he finds hopeful new ways in which the library and free citizens' access to the Internet and the national data-highway can turn computer technology into a democratic and liberating force. Roszak's examination of the place of computer technology in our culture is essential reading for all those who use computers, who are intimidated by computers, or who are concerned with the appropriate role of computers in the education of our children.

When it was published twenty-five years ago, this book captured a huge audience of Vietnam War protesters, dropouts, and rebels - and their baffled elders. Theodore Roszak found common ground between 1960s student radicals and hippie dropouts in their mutual rejection of what he calls the technocracy - the regime of corporate and technological expertise that dominates industrial society. He traces the intellectual underpinnings of the two groups in the writings of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, "Allen Ginsberg" and "Paul Goodman". In a new introduction, Roszak reflects on the evolution of counter culture since he coined the term in the sixties. Alan Watts wrote of "The Making of a Counter Culture" in the "San Francisco Chronicle" in 1969, 'If you want to know what is happening among your intelligent and mysteriously rebellious children, this is the book.The generation gap, the student uproar, the New Left, the beats and hippies, the psychedelic movement, rock music, the revival of occultism and mysticism, the protest against our involvement in Vietnam, and the seemingly odd reluctance of the young to buy the affluent technological society - all these matters are here discussed, with sympathy and constructive criticism, by a most articulate, wise, and humane historian.

What is the bond between the human psyche and the living planet that nurtured us, and all of life, into existence? What is the link between our own mental health and the health of the greater biosphere? In this "bold, ambitious, philosophical essay" (Publishers Weekly), historian and cultural critic Theodore Roszak explores the relationships between psychology, ecology, and new scientific insights into systems in nature. Drawing on our new understanding of the evolutionary, self-organizing universe, Roszak illuminates our rootedness in the greater web of life, and explores the relationship between our own sanity and the greater-than-human world. The Voice of the Earth seeks to bridge the centuries-old split between the psychological and the ecological, and presents an "ecopsychology" which sees the needs of the planet and the needs of the person as a continuum. The Earth's cry for rescue from the punishing weight of the industrial system we have created is our own cry for a scale and quality of life that will free us to become the whole and healthy human beings we were born to be.