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 Content: Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Introduction Why study the digital and software? Chapter 2 From culture industry to computational industries Critical theory The digital and critical theory Chapter 3 The softwarization of society The cyberstructure Financialization and software Chapter 4 Computational ontologies Negative dialectics and fundamental ontology Glitch ontology Chapter 5 The reification of everyday life Reification technologies: Web bugs, beacons and trackers Chapter 6 Computational aesthetics The New Aesthetic Code aesthetics. 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.