The Condition of Digitality
The Condition of Digitality

Author: Robert Hassan

Publisher: University of Westminster Press

Published: 2020-01-10

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 191265668X

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David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity rationalised capitalism’s transformation during an extraordinary year: 1989. It gave theoretical expression to a material and cultural reality that was just then getting properly started – globalisation and postmodernity – whilst highlighting the geo-spatial limits to accumulation imposed by our planet. However this landmark publication, author Robert Hassan argues, did not address the arrival of digital technology, the quantum leap represented by the move from an analogue world to a digital economy and the rapid creation of a global networked society. Considering first the contexts of 1989 and Harvey’s work, then the idea of humans as analogue beings he argues this arising new human condition of digitality leads to alienation not only from technology but also the environment. This condition he suggests, is not an ideology of time and space but a reality stressing that Harvey’s time-space compression takes on new features including those of ‘outward’ and ‘inward’ globalisation and the commodification of all spheres of existence. Lastly the author considers culture’s role drawing on Rahel Jaeggi’s theories to make the case for a post-modern Marxism attuned to the most significant issue of our age. Stimulating and theoretically wide-ranging The Condition of Digitality recognises post-modernity’s radical new form as a reality and the urgent need to assert more democratic control over digitality.

The Condition of Digitality
The Condition of Digitality

Author: Robert Hassan

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9781912656707

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David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity rationalised capitalism's transformation during an extraordinary year: 1989. It gave theoretical expression to a material and cultural reality that was just then getting properly started - globalisation and postmodernity - whilst highlighting the geo-spatial limits to accumulation imposed by our planet. However this landmark publication, author Robert Hassan argues, did not address the arrival of digital technology, the quantum leap represented by the move from an analogue world to a digital economy and the rapid creation of a global networked society. Considering first the contexts of 1989 and Harvey's work, then the idea of humans as analogue beings he argues this arising new human condition of digitality leads to alienation not only from technology but also the environment. This condition he suggests, is not an ideology of time and space but a reality stressing that Harvey's time-space compression takes on new features including those of 'outward' and 'inward' globalisation and the commodification of all spheres of existence. Lastly the author considers culture's role drawing on Rahel Jaeggi's theories to make the case for a post-modern Marxism attuned to the most significant issue of our age. Stimulating and theoretically wide-ranging The Condition of Digitality recognises post-modernity's radical new form as a reality and the urgent need to assert more democratic control over digitality.

The Digital Condition
The Digital Condition

Author: Felix Stalder

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2018-03-16

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1509519610

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Our daily lives, our culture and our politics are now shaped by the digital condition as large numbers of people involve themselves in contentious negotiations of meaning in ever more dimensions of life, from the trivial to the profound. They are making use of the capacities of complex communication infrastructures, currently dominated by social mass media such as Twitter and Facebook, on which they have come to depend. Amidst a confusing plurality, Felix Stalder argues that are three key constituents of this condition: the use of existing cultural materials for one's own production, the way in which new meaning is established as a collective endeavour, and the underlying role of algorithms and automated decision-making processes that reduce and give shape to massive volumes of data. These three characteristics define what Stalder calls 'the digital condition'. Stalder also examines the profound political implications of this new culture. We stand at a crossroads between post-democracy and the commons, a concentration of power among the few or a genuine widening of participation, with the digital condition offering the potential for starkly different outcomes. This ambitious and wide-ranging theory of our contemporary digital condition will be of great interest to students and scholars in media and communications, cultural studies, and social, political and cultural theory, as well as to a wider readership interested in the ways in which culture and politics are changing today.

The Law of Global Digitality
The Law of Global Digitality

Author: Matthias C. Kettemann

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-06-27

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1000603806

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The Internet is not an unchartered territory. On the Internet, norms matter. They interact, regulate, are contested and legitimated by multiple actors. But are they diverse and unstructured, or are they part of a recognizable order? And if the latter, what does this order look like? This collected volume explores these key questions while providing new perspectives on the role of law in times of digitality. The book compares six different areas of law that have been particularly exposed to global digitality, namely laws regulating consumer contracts, data protection, the media, financial markets, criminal activity and intellectual property law. By comparing how these very different areas of law have evolved with regard to cross-border online situations, the book considers whether cyberlaw is little more than "the law of the horse", or whether the law of global digitality is indeed special and, if so, what its characteristics across various areas of law are. The book brings together legal academics with expertise in how law has both reacted to and shaped cross-border, global Internet communication and their contributions consider whether it is possible to identify a particular mediality of law in the digital age. Examining whether a global law of digitality has truly emerged, this book will appeal to academics, students and practitioners of law examining the future of the law of digitality as it intersects with traditional categories of law.

Handbook of Research on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Literacy in the Digital Age
Handbook of Research on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Literacy in the Digital Age

Author: Taskiran, Nurdan Oncel

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2019-11-29

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 1799815366

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The fast pace of technology in this day and age has made it difficult for individuals to stay informed without becoming lost in the folds of an information overload. Methods used to narrow down information are becoming just as important as providing the information to be discovered. The Handbook of Research on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Literacy in the Digital Age is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the significance of being literate in the age of speed and technology. While highlighting topics such as e-advertising, mobile computing, and visual culture, this publication explores the major issues society has in the information age and the methods of innovative achievements of public or private institutions. This book is ideally designed for researchers, academicians, teachers, and business managers seeking current research on a variety of social sciences in terms of the digital age.

Analog
Analog

Author: Robert Hassan

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-01-03

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0262371820

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Why, surrounded by screens and smart devices, we feel a deep connection to the analog—vinyl records, fountain pens, Kodak film, and other nondigital tools. We’re surrounded by screens; our music comes in the form of digital files; we tap words into a notes app. Why do we still crave the “realness” of analog, seeking out vinyl records, fountain pens, cameras with film? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Robert Hassan explores our deep connection to analog technology. Our analog urge, he explains, is about what we’ve lost from our technological past, something that’s not there in our digital present. We’re nostalgic for what we remember indistinctly as somehow more real, more human. Surveying some of the major developments of analog technology, Hassan shows us what’s been lost with the digital. Along the way, he discusses the appeal of the 2011 silent, black-and-white Oscar-winning film The Artist; the revival of the non-e-book book; the early mechanical clocks that enforced prayer and worship times; and the programmable loom. He describes the effect of the typewriter on Nietzsche’s productivity, the pivotal invention of the telegraph, and the popularity of the first televisions despite their iffy picture quality. The transition to digital is marked by the downgrading of human participation in the human-technology relationship. We have unwittingly unmoored ourselves, Hassan warns, from the anchors of analog technology and the natural world. Our analog nostalgia is for those ancient aspects of who and what we are.

Virtual Memory
Virtual Memory

Author: Homay King

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2015-10-23

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 082237515X

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In Virtual Memory, Homay King traces the concept of the virtual through the philosophical works of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben to offer a new framework for thinking about film, video, and time-based contemporary art. Detaching the virtual from its contemporary associations with digitality, technology, simulation, and speed, King shows that using its original meaning—which denotes a potential on the cusp of becoming—provides the means to reveal the "analog" elements in contemporary digital art. Through a queer reading of the life and work of mathematician Alan Turing, and analyses of artists who use digital technologies such as Christian Marclay, Agnès Varda, and Victor Burgin, King destabilizes the analog/digital binary. By treating the virtual as the expression of powers of potential and change and of historical contingency, King explains how these artists transcend distinctions between disembodiment and materiality, abstraction and tangibility, and the unworldly and the earth-bound. In so doing, she shows how their art speaks to durational and limit-bound experience more than contemporary understandings of the virtual and digital would suggest.

Critique and the Digital
Critique and the Digital

Author: Erich Hörl

Publisher: Diaphanes

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783035802429

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In this volume the editors gather diverse perspectives on one agreed-upon condition: that the computational power of today's world has fundamentally transformed all aspects of this very world. This requires the investigation and questioning not only of the possible sites of critique but also of the concept of critique as such. If there used to be a critical subject constituted in the cultural techniques of modernity, and if digitality, as a condition, indicates itself as a product of modernity while at the same time somehow being its very ending, what are the determinable ramifications? Digitality severely alters the critical subject and its spatio-temporal relations, and therefore interferes with its potentiality to be a critical subject. The authors of this volume therefore do not proclaim a crisis of critique, but rather ask how and what critique in the digital might be, to then look at specific settings of critique and critical practices. With contributions by Clemens Apprich, Timon Beyes, Mark Hansen, Erich Hörl, Holger Kuhn, Luciana Parisi, Ying Sze Pek, Claus Pias, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Judith Sieber, Lotte Warnsholdt.

The Condition of Postmodernity
The Condition of Postmodernity

Author: David Harvey

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 1992-04-08

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780631162940

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In this new book, David Harvey seeks to determine what is meant by the term in its different contexts and to identify how accurate and useful it is as a description of contemporary experience.

Communicating with Memes
Communicating with Memes

Author: Grant Kien

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-06-03

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1498551343

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Communicating with Memes: Consequences in Post-truth Civilization investigates the consequences of memetic communication, the causes of these consequences, and what action—if any—should be taken in response. Communicating with memes across social media networks has become a commonplace activity in today’s world, despite the fact that just years earlier, this mode of communication was a rarity. The rapid adoption of this new mode of communication through ubiquitous social media and device use is resulting in a major transformation of the ways in which we think and behave in our digital world. From the election of Donald Trump, to online harassment and identity theft, to the resurgence of once-eradicated diseases due to the anti-vaxxer movement, Grant Kien analyzes fourteen major consequences of this shift and confronts the question of how to approach these consequences.