Critical Theory and the Digital (Critical Theory and Contemporary Society)

"This Critical Theory and Contemporary Society volume offers an original analysis of the role of the digital in today's society. It rearticulates critical theory by engaging it with the challenges of the digital revolution to show how the digital is changing the ways in which we lead our politics, societies, economies, media, and even private lives. In particular, the work examines how the enlightenment values embedded within the culture and materiality of digital technology can be used to explain the changes that are occurring across society. Critical Theory and the Digital draws from the critical concepts developed by critical theorists to demonstrate how the digital needs to be understood within a dialectic of potentially democratizing and totalizing technical power. By relating critical theory to aspects of a code-based digital world and the political economy that it leads to, the book introduces the importance of the digital code in the contemporary world to researchers in the field of politics, sociology, globalization and media studies"-- Provided by publisher Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Contents 8 Acknowledgements 9 Chapter 1 Introduction 14 Why study the digital and software? 26 Chapter 2 From culture industry to computational industries 36 Critical theory 39 The digital and critical theory 50 Chapter 3 The softwarization of society 66 The cyberstructure 84 Financialization and software 94 Chapter 4 Computational ontologies 102 Negative dialectics and fundamental ontology 103 Glitch ontology 106 Chapter 5 The reification of everyday life 134 Reification technologies: Web bugs, beacons and trackers 145 Chapter 6 Computational aesthetics 162 The New Aesthetic 165 Code aesthetics 177 Chapter 7 Critical praxis and the computational 182 Black boxes 185 Reading the digital 198 Chapter 8 Towards a critical theory of the digital 208 Boredom and the gigantic 210 Exhaustive media 218 Notes 228 Chapter 1 228 Chapter 2 230 Chapter 3 230 Chapter 4 232 Chapter 5 232 Chapter 6 236 Chapter 7 236 Chapter 8 237 Bibliography 238 Index 262 Offering an original analysis of the digital revolution and the role it plays in today's society, this book rearticulates critical theory by engaging it with the challenges of our contemporary world This Critical Theory and Contemporary Society volume re-examines critical theory in light of the challenges raised by today's digital revolution.