Our societies have now gone almost fully digital, which is bound to impact the ways in which the self apprehends itself, constructs itself and takes part in society. This collective essay draws upon philosophy, logics, literature and media studies to explore a variety of responses to what is currently at stake in the recomposition of the subject through our daily digital experience. Attempting to chart the digital traces human beings leave behind them, in writing or in archives, it situates them in the larger political, economic and financial frame of our times.
The global web and its digital ecosystem can be seen as tools of emancipation, communication, and spreading knowledge or as means of control, fueled by capitalism, surveillance, and geopolitics. The Digital Frontier interrogates the world wide web and the digital ecosystem it has spawned to reveal how their conventions, protocols, standards, and algorithmic regulations represent a novel form of global power. Sangeet Kumar shows the operation of this power through the web's "infrastructures of control" visible at sites where the universalizing imperatives of the web run up against local values, norms, and cultures. These include how the idea of the "global common good" is used as a ruse by digital oligopolies to expand their private enclosures, how seemingly collaborative spaces can simultaneously be exclusionary as they regulate legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is being redefined online along Eurocentric ideals, and how the web's political challenge is felt differentially by sovereign nation states. In analyzing this new modality of cultural power in the global digital ecosystem, The Digital Frontier is an important read for scholars, activists, academics and students inspired by the utopian dream of a truly representative global digital network.
Across the life course, new forms of community, ways of keeping in contact, and practices for engaging in work, healthcare, retail, learning and leisure are evolving rapidly. This book examines how developments in smart phones, the Internet, cloud computing, and online social networking are redefining experiences and expectations around growing older in the twenty-first century. Drawing on contributions from leading commentators and researchers across the world, this book explores key themes such as caregiving, the use of social media, robotics, chronic disease and dementia management, gaming, migration, and data inheritance, to name a few.
Contrary to optimistic visions of a free internet for all, the problem of the ‘digital divide’ – the disparity between those with access to internet technology and those without – has persisted for close to twenty-five years. In this textbook, Jan van Dijk considers the state of digital inequality and what we can do to tackle it. Through an accessible framework based on empirical research, he explores the motivations and challenges of seeking access and the development of requisite digital skills. He addresses key questions such as: Does digital inequality reduce or reinforce existing, traditional inequalities? Does it create new, previously unknown social inequalities? While digital inequality affects all aspects of society and the problem is here to stay, Van Dijk outlines policies we can put in place to mitigate it. The Digital Divide is required reading for students and scholars of media, communication, sociology, and related disciplines, as well as for policymakers.
This volume explores activism, research and critique in the age of digital subjects and objects and Big Data capitalism after a digital turn said to have radically transformed our political futures. Optimists assert that the ‘digital’ promises: new forms of community and ways of knowing and sensing, innovation, participatory culture, networked activism, and distributed democracy. Pessimists argue that digital technologies have extended domination via new forms of control, networked authoritarianism and exploitation, dehumanization and the surveillance society. Leading international scholars present varied interdisciplinary assessments of such claims – in theory and via dialogue – and of the digital’s impact on society and the potentials, pitfalls, limits and ideologies, of digital activism. They reflect on whether computational social science, digital humanities and ubiquitous datafication lead to digital positivism that threatens critical research or lead to new horizons in theory and society. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. More information about the initiative and details about KU’s Open Access programme can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org.
Digital Technology and the Contemporary University examines the often messy realities of higher education in the ‘digital age’. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives, the book explores the intimate links between digital technology and wider shifts within contemporary higher education – not least the continued rise of the managerialist ‘bureaucratic’ university. It highlights the ways that these new trends can be challenged, and possibly changed altogether. Addressing a persistent gap in higher education and educational technology research, where digital technology is rarely subject to an appropriately critical approach, Degrees of Digitization offers an alternative reading of the social, political, economic and cultural issues surrounding universities and technology. The book highlights emerging themes that are beginning to be recognised and discussed in academia, but as yet have not been explored thoroughly. Over the course of eight wide-ranging chapters the book addresses issues such as: The role of digital technology in university reform; Digital technologies and the organisation of universities; Digital technology and the working lives of university staff; Digital technology and the ‘student experience’; Reimagining the place of digital technology within the contemporary university. This book will be of great interest to all students, academic researchers and writers working in the areas of education studies and/or educational technology, as well as being essential reading for anyone working in the areas of higher education research and digital media research.
The Digital Humanities Coursebook provides critical frameworks for the application of digital humanities tools and platforms, which have become an integral part of work across a wide range of disciplines. Written by an expert with twenty years of experience in this field, the book is focused on the principles and fundamental concepts for application, rather than on specific tools or platforms. Each chapter contains examples of projects, tools, or platforms that demonstrate these principles in action. The book is structured to complement courses on digital humanities and provides a series of modules, each of which is organized around a set of concerns and topics, thought experiments and questions, as well as specific discussions of the ways in which tools and platforms work. The book covers a wide range of topics and clearly details how to integrate the acquisition of expertise in data, metadata, classification, interface, visualization, network analysis, topic modeling, data mining, mapping, and web presentation with issues in intellectual property, sustainability, privacy, and the ethical use of information. Written in an accessible and engaging manner, The Digital Humanities Coursebook will be a useful guide for anyone teaching or studying a course in the areas of digital humanities, library and information science, English, or computer science. The book will provide a framework for direct engagement with digital humanities and, as such, should be of interest to others working across the humanities as well.
One of the most far-reaching transformations in our era is the wave of digital technologies rolling over—and upending—nearly every aspect of life. Work and leisure, family and friendship, community and citizenship have all been modified by now-ubiquitous digital tools and platforms. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory looks closely at one significant facet of our rapidly evolving digital lives: how technology is radically changing our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments. To understand these transformations, this book brings together contributions by scholars from multiple disciplines to wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. As expectations have whiplashed—from Twitter optimism in the wake of the Arab Spring to Facebook pessimism in the wake of the 2016 US election—the time is ripe for a more sober and long-term assessment. How should we take stock of digital technologies and their promise and peril for reshaping democratic societies and institutions? To answer, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing democracy as a philosophy and an institution.
As in all fields and disciplines of the humanities, Jewish Studies scholars find themselves confronted with the rapidly increasing availability of digital resources (data), new technologies to interrogate and analyze them (tools), and the question of how to critically engage with these developments. This volume discusses how the digital turn has affected the field of Jewish Studies. It explores the current state of the art and probes how digital developments can be harnessed to address the specific questions, challenges and problems that Jewish Studies scholars confront. In a field characterised by dispersed sources, and heterogeneous scripts and languages that speak to a multitude of cultures and histories, of abundance as well as loss, what is the promise of Digital Humanities methods--and what are the challenges and pitfalls? The articles in this volume were originally presented at the international conference #DHJewish - Jewish Studies in the Digital Age, which was organised at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) at University of Luxembourg in January 2021. The first big international conference of its kind, it brought together more than sixty scholars and heritage practitioners to discuss how the digital turn affects the field of Jewish Studies.
