The digital condition / Felix Stalder ; translated by Valentine A. Pakis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stalder, Felix, author.

Contributor:

Pakis, Valentine A., translator.

Standardized Title:

Kultur der Digitalität. English

Language:

English

German

Subjects (All):

Digital communications--Social aspects.

Digital communications.

Information society.

Information society--Forecasting.

Physical Description:

xi, 204 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

English edition.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2018.

Summary:

Our daily lives, our culture, and our politics are now shaped by the digital condition, in which greater numbers of people are engaged in negotiating meaning in ever more dimensions of life, from the trivial to the profound. They are making use of a complex communication infrastructure, 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 there 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 endeavor, and the underlying role of algorithms and automated decision-making processes that give shape to massive volumes of data. These three characteristics define what Stalder calls "the digital condition." He 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, communications, and cultural studies, and to a wider readership interested in the changing character of culture and politics today. Book jacket.

Contents:

I Evolution 11

The Expansion of the Social Basis of Culture 12

The Culturalization of the World 35

The Technologization of Culture 41

From the Margins to the Center of Society 56

II Forms 58

Referentiality 59

Communality 79

Algorithmicity 101

III Politics 125

Post-democracy 127

Commons 152

Against a Lack of Alternatives 174.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Stalder, Felix. Digital condition.

ISBN:

9781509519590

1509519599

9781509519606

1509519602

OCLC:

1000150389