The New Media Invasion: Digital Technologies and the World They Unmake

Description

From the 15th century until the mid-1990s, media based on the printed word--books, magazines, handbills, newspapers, and journals--dominated society. Today, an onslaught of digital media centered on the Internet is developing at a breathtaking pace, destabilizing the very idea of printed media and fundamentally reshaping our world in the process. This study explores how Internet entities like Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Google, and gadgets such as digital cameras, cell phones, video games, robots, drones, and all things MacIntosh have affected everything from the book industry and copyright law to how we conduct social relationships and consider knowledge. Including a chronology of significant events in the history of the digital explosion, this investigation of the often overlooked shadow side of new technology chronicles life during a radical societal shift and follows the process whereby one world disintegrates while another takes its place. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here. 1 Amazon.com, the Kindle and the Collapse of the Book Industry Some Concluding Comments to Part I: A Miniature History of Capitalism (or, The Evolution of Aladdin's Cave) PART II A Collection of Gadgets for a Museum of the Future Acknowledgments Incipit Introduction to a Catastrophic Bifurcation First, a Brief Note on the Self-Luminous Nature of the New Technologies PART I: IN WHICH THE INTERNET RECREATES THE WORLD-AS-CAVERN 1. Amazon.com, the Kindle and the Collapse of the Book Industry 2. YouTube and the Twilight of Copyright 3. On Facebook We're All Being Flattened Together 4. Wikipedia; or, The Catastrophe of Knowledge 5. WikiLeaks and the Death of Culture 6. On the Metaphysics of Google Earth Some Concluding Comments to Part I: A Miniature History of Capitalism (or, The Evolution of Aladdin' PART II: A COLLECTION OF GADGETS FOR A MUSEUM OF THE FUTURE 7. The Mythology and Metaphysics of the Macintosh 8. Digital Photography and the End of the Visionary Image 9. How Cell Phones Disrupt the Flows 10. The Killing Eye: Video Games, Surrogate Violence and the Dismantling of Social Machines 11. Robots, Drones and the Disappearance of the Human Being 12. A Few Words on the Ovei Pod and the End of History Some Concluding Comments to Part II: A Miniature History of War and Technology (Since 1815) Postscript on the Dialectic of Art and Technology Appendix: Chronology of Key Events Notes Bibliography Index