Drone

Object Lessons

De: Adam Rothstein

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But what are drones? The word encompasses everything from toys to weapons. And yet, as broadly defined as they are, the word “drone” fills many of us with a sense of technological dread. Adam Rothstein cuts through the mystery, the unknown, and the political posturing, and talks about what drones really are: what technologies are out there, and what’s coming next; how drones are talked about, and how they are represented in popular culture.

It turns out that drones are not as scary as they appear—but they are more complicated than you might expect. Drones reveal the strange relationships that humans are forming with their new technologies.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

©2015 Adam Rothstein (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Reseñas de la Crítica

Readers interested in technology and/or warfare will very much enjoy reading Drone… Adam Rothstein did an admirable job, writing about every aspect of drones in detailed and organized fashion… [T]hose keenly interested in the subject will gobble this up. (George Erdosh)

[Rothstein's] book is a rich collection of vignettes about how to imagine and comprehend the drone ... [Drone] really excels in tackling the multiple meanings, symbols, and narratives attached to drones, all of which provide a bird’s eye view (drone’s eye view?) of the terrain of contemporary debate ... for those beginning a research project, or just the curious, this small book packs a big punch. (Ian G. R. Shaw, University of Glasgow)

Adam Rothstein’s Drone test[s] the water on what this technology might yet prove to be as it is successively explored and its limits and possibilities (military and civilian) discovered. What shall drones be? (Julian Yates)