Digination
Subtitle: identity, organization, and public life in the age of small digital devices and big digital domains
By: Robert C. MacDougall
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Lanham, Md
Language: eng
Number of pages: 309
ISBN-13: 9781611474398; 9781611474404
Subjects: Digital media; Telecommunication; Mass media; Information society; Social aspects; Technological innovations; Information technology
Description: From the publisher. The shift from orality to literacy that began with the invention of the phonetic alphabet, and which went into high-gear with Gutenberg's printing press more than 500 years ago, helped make the modern world. Some commentators have argued that this shift from orality to literacy marked a much broader, cultural shift of cataclysmic proportions. Today, with everything from e-mail to blogs, iPods and podcasts, through Google, Yahoo, eBay, and with cutting-edge smart phones, we find ourselves developing relationships with these newest communication tools that aren't simply allowing us to communicate faster, farther and with more ease than ever before. We aren't just moving around ideas, data, and information at unimaginable speed and scale. Our interminglings and fusions with digital communication technologies are also altering both individual and group consciousness in fundamental ways --^

how we form and sustain relationships, how we think and perceive, what it means to see and to feel. We are remaking human identity once more, and manufacturing a new kind of culture along the way. The processes bound up in our digination may well be consequential to the trajectory of human evolution. That time-honored trope: the notion that technology is not the problem, rather, it's how people use technology that's the problem is shown to be wanting. Highlighting Marshall McLuhan's "tetrads" or laws of media as a primary tool of analysis, R.C. MacDougall argues in line with other media ecologists that it's not so much how we use certain tools that matters, it's that we use them. More than any other technological form perhaps, communication technologies play particularly powerful and systemic roles in our culture, or any culture for that matter.^

Late adopters and even abstainers are not exempt from the psychological, social and cultural effects (and side-effects) of modern digital communication technology. While there are certainly varying degrees of immersion -- that is to say, while some of us live in the high-rise downtown district, some at the city limits, and still others out in the proverbial "woods" -- we all live in Digination today.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Understanding our digination; title: Lost logos: finding the art and argument in McLuhan's message; title: Indigenous e-mail: identity construction at the oral/textual interface; title: Blogs: the new news medium; title: Information, interactivity, and the denizen of digination; title: Search engineering and the emerging information ecology; title: Portable digital music devices and the sound-tracked lifeworld; title: Podcasting and the lifeworld: from sound track to narrative track; title: Knitting, napping, and notebook computers (and other mnemotechnical systems); title: Ebay ethics: prefiguring the "digital democracy"; title: Media ecology and a biological approach to understanding our digination.