Digital Condition
* Book: The Digital Condition. By Felix Stalder. Polity, 2017
URL = https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/The+Digital+Condition-p-9781509519590 pdf
Description
"Our daily lives, our culture and our politics are now shaped by the digital condition as large numbers of people involve themselves in contentious negotiations of meaning in ever more dimensions of life, from the trivial to the profound. They are making use of the capacities of complex communication infrastructures, 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 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 endeavour, and the underlying role of algorithms and automated decision-making processes that reduce and give shape to massive volumes of data. These three characteristics define what Stalder calls 'the digital condition'. Stalder 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 and communications, cultural studies, and social, political and cultural theory, as well as to a wider readership interested in the ways in which culture and politics are changing today."
Review
Kelly Herman:
"Initially, Stalder identifies three major historical tendencies at the foundation of the digital condition: the dismantling of heteronormativity, the spread of the knowledge economy, and the shift from postcolonialism to cultural hybridity. Stalder promulgates an extensive historical account tracing labor markets to events of social and cultural empowerment. He explains how, through media developments, displays of tremendous social movements instill societal transformations in cultural values. Stalder uses the term “culturization of the economy” to underscore the importance of creative industries. He emphasizes the importance of media as it portrays and reproduces enactments of social progressions, which in turn reorganized society in a way that is evident in the construction of a digitally displaced society. Stalder discusses the characteristics of media that share underlying values of “portrayal” or “mediation,” but his examples distract rather than focus the argument."