The Digital Cult : A New Theocracy Between Media and Memory.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nicolosi, Guido.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Digital media--Social aspects.

Digital media.

Technology and civilization.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (292 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Bradford : Ethics International Press Limited, 2024.

Summary:

Media and memory are linked by an intimate relationship. Every act aimed at fixing, memorizing, or commemorating, requires the mediation of some form of material or immaterial support: walls, objects, languages, technologies, media. This important new book reconstructs the evolution of this inseparable relationship, from cave art to modern digital devices, also investigating its various social implications. The author highlights the possible cognitive, ethical, educational and political risks linked to the onset of a new "religious" cult of digital media. In a society in which the task of processing, accumulating and retrieving information increasingly takes place within the Internet, digital devices, and Artificial Intelligence, the stakes are very high. It is not just a matter of understanding what the risks are of a possible weakening of our ability to remember, and therefore also to know the world, but to understand who or what owns and controls our individual and collective memory. Ultimately, it is about understanding what is happening to our identity. Faced with the disturbing advent of an inexorable "technological theocracy", the author calls for principles and practices of a new "digital secularism". The book was translated from the original Italian by Dr. Emanuele Liotta.

Contents:

Intro

Acknowledgements

In medias res

Pierre Musso

Introduction

Notes

Memory And Media

Memory and society

Continuity and materiality in memory processes

Bodies, Memory and Media

Memory, orality and writing

Memory and technological determinism

The print media

Memory, images, imagery

Archives of memory

Radio, television and collective memory

Memory and Digital Media

Digital media and cultural memory

Digital Media and Cognitive Memory

Media and Memory Between Art and Religion

Media as meta-objects between memory and the imaginary

Media, Art and Spirituality

Material objects for immaterial needs

The "paradox of mediation": Industrial and communicative religion

The sacralization of media

"Haunted by algorithms"?

The metaphysics of Artificial Intelligence, or the machine à gouverner

Secularization of society, and sacralization of the digital: the "cult of the Internet" and the new technological theocracy

Conclusions: What Margins for a New Laïcité of Digital Media?

Medium/medium: Gaze, word and silence in contemporary religiosity

Alfonsina Bellio

Bibliography.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Part of the metadata in this record was created by AI, based on the text of the resource.

ISBN:

1-80441-801-3

OCLC:

1468530156