The digital condition
Subtitle: class and culture in the information network
By: Robert Wilkie
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 239
ISBN-13: 9780823234226; 9780823234233
Subjects: Information superhighway; Social aspects; Social aspects .; Computers; Digital divide; Information technology
Description: "The acceleration in science, technology, communication, and production that began in the second half of the twentieth century--developments that make up the concept of the 'digital'--has brought us to what might be the most contradictory moment in human history. The digital revolution has made it possible not only to imagine but actually to realize a world in which social inequality and poverty have been vanquished. Instead, these developments have led to an unprecedented level of accumulation of private profits. Rather than the end of social inequality, we are witness to its global expansion. Recent cultural theory tends to focus on the intricate surface effects of the emerging digital realities, proposing that technological advances effect greater cultural freedom for all, ignoring the underpinning social context. But beneath the surfaces of digital culture are complex social and historical relations that can be understood only from the perspective of a class analysis that explains why the new realities of the 'digital condition' are determined by the actualities of global class inequalities. It is no longer the case that 'technology' can take on the appearance of a simple or neutral aspect of human society. It is time for a critique of the digital times. In The Digital Condition, Rob Wilkie advances a groundbreaking analysis of digital culture which argues that the digital geist--which has its genealogy in such concepts as the 'body without organs,' 'spectrality,' and 'differance'--has obscured the implications of class difference with the phantom of a digital divide. Engaging the writings of Hardt and Negri, Poster, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Haraway, Latour, and Castells, the literature and cinema of cyberpunk, and digital commodities like the iPod, Wilkie initiates a new direction within the field of digital cultural studies by foregrounding the continuing importance of class in shaping the contemporary."--Book Description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p.         ) and index.
Table of contents: title: The spirit technological; title: Global networks and the materiality of immaterial labor; title: Reading and writing in the digital age; title: The ideology of the digital me.