Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: From Culture Industry to Computational Industries Chapter 3: The Softwarization of Society Chapter 4: Computational Ontologies Chapter 5: The Reification of Everyday Life Chapter 6: Computational Aesthetics Chapter 7: Critical Praxis and the Computational Chapter 8: Towards a Critical Theory of the Digital Bibliography Endnotes Index
This Critical Theory and Contemporary Society volume re-examines critical theory in light of the challenges raised by today's digital revolution.
David M. Berry is Reader in the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex, UK.
In demystifying the digital and bringing it into the realm of
critical theory [this] book remains a timely and important
work.
*Political Studies Review*
An informed and wide-ranging attempt to confront the computational
epoch with the tools of Frankfurtian social analysis . . . There is
insight in every chapter.
*Review 31*
'Adorno will not be your Facebook friend.' Instead of lamenting the
cultural elitism of the Frankfurt School, David Berry reopens
critical theory's conceptual toolbox with a renewed curiosity.
These days the theorist is no longer a prophet who ponders the
world divorced from the materiality of communication. It is not
enough to merely explore the technosphere, there is an urgency to
radically question digital technologies. In this age of conflict,
the neoliberal consensus culture is taken to task by critical
theory David-Berry-style. In line with the info-activism of
Wikileaks and Snowden, Berry instructs us how to read the black box
that dominates our everyday lives and helps us to develop a new
vocabulary amidst all the crazes, from speculative realism to
digital humanities.
*Geert Lovink, Media Theorist, Amsterdam*
Berry's timely book engages with a broad range of topics that
define our digital culture. It guides us to the political
materiality of software culture with excellent insights.
Importantly, this book updates critical theory for the digital
age.
*Dr Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art, author of What is
Media Archaeology? (2012)*
In this lucid, learned and highly original book Berry confronts the
nature of digital knowledge in society through the re-invigorated
lens of Critical Theory asking how we can regain control of the
knowledge structures embedded in the digital technologies that we
increasingly rely upon in daily life.
*Michael Bull, author of Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban
Experience*
Critical Theory and the Digital offers an important new addition to
critical theory that explores questions raised by the digital in
light of the work of the Frankfurt school. Providing an accessible
and critical appraisal of the digital world we live in today, the
book argues that critical praxis must today be rethought in light
of digital technologies and the affordances that are made available
to state, corporate and civil society actors. The book offers both
a theoretical and a political contribution: the former through its
exploration of how the digital can be read, written, and hacked
critically; the latter through its discussion of how the digital
can be transformed by political action and the organisation of
digital resistance.
*Christian De Cock, University of Essex, UK*
Unlike many media studies scholars who refer to the Frankfurt
School’s critique of the cultural industries only to show its
inapplicability to the open source world of the digital age, David
Berry accomplishes the remarkable feat of re-instating that
critique for the new brave world that is afforded by digital
technology. Easily moving between Heidegger, Adorno and Stiegler,
Berry mobilizes a formidable array of theoretical resources in aid
of what he calls ‘iteracy’, an emerging competence in tracking the
contexts in which ‘being digital’ is continually formed and
re-formed. The result is a milestone in both critical theory and
the digital humanities.
*Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology,
Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK*
Bringing dialectical critique to digital culture, David Berry
replenishes the legacy of the Frankfurt School in order to devise
strategies to live within and against the real-time streams of
computational capitalism. Fusing critical theory with the political
economy of social media (think Facebook and Twitter), the
surveillance paranoia of NSA, the wild party of Hacklabs, the
secret autonomy of cryptography, and the accelerated economy of
algorithmic trading, Berry registers the contours of the black box
that defines digital labour and life.
*Ned Rossiter, Institute for Culture and Society, University of
Western Sydney, Australia*
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