“[A] lively account of the cultural and intellectual history of how Americans have lived with image and information since the mid-nineteenth century.” —Peter Simonson, author of Refiguring Mass Communication Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, once compared the perfect search engine to “the mind of God.” As the modern face of promiscuous knowledge, however, Google’s divine omniscience traffics in news, maps, weather, and porn indifferently. This book, begun by the late Kenneth Cmiel and completed by his close friend John Durham Peters, provides a genealogy of the information age from its early origins up to the reign of Google. It examines how we think about fact, image, and knowledge, centering on the different ways that claims of truth are complicated when they pass to a larger public. To explore these ideas, Cmiel and Peters focus on three main periods—the late nineteenth century, 1925 to 1945, and 1975 to 2000, with constant reference to the present. Cmiel’s original text examines the growing gulf between politics and aesthetics in postmodern architecture, the distancing of images from everyday life in magical realist cinema, the waning support for national betterment through taxation, and the inability of a single presentational strategy to contain the social whole. Peters brings Cmiel’s study into the present moment, providing the backstory to current controversies about the slipperiness of facts in a digital age. A hybrid work from two innovative thinkers, Promiscuous Knowledge enlightens our understanding of the internet and the profuse visual culture of our time. “With a clear voice and careful evidence, Promiscuous Knowledge offers fascinating glimpses into important people and practices from across the centuries.” —Fred Turner, author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture

"Histories of communication are still relatively rare birds, but this one is distinctive on several grounds. The two authors are/were undisputed giants in the field. Ken Cmiel, the originator of the book, still unfinished when he suddenly died in 2006, was a cultural historian of communication; his best friend, John Peters, is one of the world leaders in the intellectual history of communication. In completing that unfinished manuscript, Peters has performed astonishing prestidigitation here in creating an effective hybrid: he retains the core of Cmiel's account, while creating a unique book that, courtesy of Peters, brilliantly spins out the solid Cmielian core and its material traces into gorgeous reflections on aspects of how we make our way through a world of images and information. Promiscuous Knowledge constructs a cultural and intellectual history of information, images, and conceptions of knowledge since the 17th century, with an emphasis on the American context since the 19th century. Cmiel/Peters sketch the way in which various containers for information-knowledge, expertise, abridgment, books, digests, encyclopedias, museums, etc.-have variably organized gluts of information, and how these containers have eroded since the 1970s. A parallel throughline traces social attitudes and practices around images and key media for circulating and experiencing them. Cmiel envisioned the largest contour of the book as a contribution to the history of truth and truth-making. His protagonists are pictures and facts, images and information. They enact a process of gradual dismantling, erosion, or collapse of the mass culture system from last century into the present. Promiscuous knowledge has a new face, courtesy of the online universe full of filter bubbles, echo chambers, and fake news. Google offers a single portal to a churning mass of confusion; it lacks a principle of inclusion/inclusivity, it has no way of framing the whole. Peters has shaped what Cmiel started out with into a better Trump-era book than an Obama-era book. And he has retained its core: a brief history of how we left the world of fact for the world of information"--

Birkhead reveals a world in which males and females vie with each other as they strive to maximize their reproductive success. Color illustrations.

The book marks the circulation of the term "promiscuous feminist methodology" and registers its salience for educational researchers who risk blundering feminist theories and methodologies in chaotic and unbridled ways. The sexism embedded in language is what makes the notion of promiscuous "feminists gone wild" tantalizing, though what the book puts forth is how the messy practice of inquiry transgresses any imposed boundaries or assumptions about what counts as research and feminism. What can researchers do when we realize that theories are not quite enough to respond to our material experiences with people, places, practices, and policies becoming data? As a collection, the book provides how various theories researchers put to work "get dirty" as they are contaminated and re-appropriated by other ways of thinking and doing through (con)texts of messy practices. In this way, gender cannot simply be gender and promiscuous feminist methodologies are always in-the-making and already ahead of what we think they are. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.