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Book Cover
E-book
Author Stalder, Felix, author

Title The digital condition / Felix Stalder ; translated by Valentine A. Pakis
Published Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2018]
©2018

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Description 1 online resource (149 pages)
Contents Intro; Table of Contents; Title page; Copyright page; Preface to the English Edition; Acknowledgments; Introduction: After the End of the Gutenberg Galaxy; Notes; I: Evolution; The Expansion of the Social Basis of Culture; The Culturalization of the World; The Technologization of Culture; From the Margins to the Center of Society; Notes; II: Forms; Referentiality; Communality; Algorithmicity; Notes; III: Politics; Post-democracy; Commons; Against a Lack of Alternatives; Notes; End User License Agreement
Summary 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. style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;" /> style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;" />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. style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;" /> style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;" />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
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references
Notes Print version record
Subject Digital communications -- Social aspects
Information society.
Information society -- Forecasting
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Popular Culture.
Digital communications -- Social aspects.
Information society.
Information society -- Forecasting.
Form Electronic book
Author Pakis, Valentine A., translator
ISBN 9781509519637
1509519637
9781509519613
1509519610