Digital Culture

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From our bank accounts to supermarket checkouts to the movies we watch, strings of ones and zeroes suffuse our world. Digital technology has defined modern society in numerous ways, and the vibrant digital culture that has now resulted is the subject of Charlie Gere's engaging volume.

In this revised and expanded second edition, taking account of new developments such as Facebook and the iPhone, Charlie Gere charts in detail the history of digital culture, as marked by responses to digital technology in art, music, design, film, literature and other areas. After tracing the historical development of digital culture, Gere argues that it is actually neither radically new nor technologically driven: digital culture has its roots in the eighteenth century and the digital mediascape we swim in today was originally inspired by informational needs arising from industrial capitalism, contemporary warfare and counter-cultural experimentation, among other social changes.

A timely and cutting-edge investigation of our contemporary social infrastructures, Digital Culture is essential reading for all those concerned about the ever-changing future of our Digital Age. "This is an excellent book. It gives an almost complete overview of the main trends and view of what is generally called digital culture through the whole post-war period, as well as a thorough exposition of the history of the computer and its predecessors and the origins of the modern division of labor."-- Journal of Visual Culture

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction: What is Digital Culture?
• 1 The Beginnings of Digital Culture
• 2 The Cybernetic Era
• 3 The Digital Avante-garde
• 4 The Digital Counter-culture
• 5 Digital Resistances
• 6 Digital Nature
• 7 Digital Culture in the Twenty-first Century
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Photographic Acknowledgements
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The heroes in this narrative are those who "resist" technology; the narrative frameworks are, in order, old Marxism, the development of digital technology, the Cold War, cybernetics, the new Marxism, Thatcherism, Reaganism, deconstruction, cyberpunk, and hackers. The technology narrative is reasonably complete, although Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer is not digital, but analog; Shockley did not merely exploit the invention of the transistor, but was one of its inventors; and virtual reality and the artists who employ it are worth more than a one-word mention. The causes behind the development of digital technologies are offered broadly in terms of the Cold War, and specifically, in the venality and paranoia of the military and politicians in Washington and London. Those who resist and subvert these technologies receive approbation, such as artist Raymond Johnson, composer John Cage, and philosopher/psychologist pair Deleuze and Guattari. Those who advance the technology and the propositional knowledge behind it are accused of advancing the cause of neoliberalism, and thereby are trivialized. It is too bad the author did not embrace digital publishing in thought, word, and deed; if he had done so, a few trees might have been saved. ^BSumming Up: Not recommended. C. S. Peebles Indiana University-Bloomington