Digital Hermeneutics: Philosophical Investigations In New Media And Technologies

Description

This is the first monograph to develop a hermeneutic approach to the digital—as both a technological milieu and a cultural phenomenon. While philosophical in its orientation, the book covers a wide body of literature across science and technology studies, media studies, digital humanities, digital sociology, cognitive science, and the study of artificial intelligence. In the first part of the book, the author formulates an epistemological thesis according to which the “virtual never ended.” Although the frontiers between the real and the virtual are certainly more porous today, they still exist and endure. In the book’s second part, the author offers an ontological reflection on emerging digital technologies as “imaginative machines.” He introduces the concept of emagination, arguing that human schematizations are always externalized into technologies, and that human imagination has its analog in the digital dynamics of articulation between databases and algorithms. The author takes an ethical and political stance in the concluding chapter. He resorts to the notion of "digital habitus" for claiming that within the digital we are repeatedly being reconducted to an oversimplified image and understanding of ourselves. Digital Hermeneutics will be of interest to scholars across a wide range of disciplines, including those working on philosophy of technology, hermeneutics, science and technology studies, media studies, and the digital humanities. Cover......Page 1 Half Title......Page 2 Series......Page 3 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 Acknowledgments......Page 8 Overture: The Idealism of Matter......Page 10 Introduction......Page 26 1 The Virtual Invaded the Real......Page 32 1.1 The Semantic Theory of Information (STI)......Page 36 1.2 Ethical, Ontological, and Technological Consequences of the STI......Page 41 1.3 Philosophy of Information: A Hermeneutic Approach......Page 44 2 The Real Invaded the Virtual......Page 52 2.1 Digital Sociology, Part One......Page 56 2.2 Intermezzo: Bruno Latour......Page 60 2.3 Digital Sociology, Part Two......Page 68 Conclusion......Page 80 Introduction......Page 92 3 Imaginative Machines......Page 98 3.1 Productive Imagination......Page 100 3.2 From Imagination to Emagination......Page 105 3.3 Emagination, Big Data, and New Algorithmic Machines......Page 112 4 We Have Never Been Engineers......Page 124 4.1 The General Theory of Schematization......Page 127 4.2 Engineers vs Bricoleurs......Page 131 4.3 Automatic Art......Page 134 Conclusion......Page 144 Finale: The Indifferent Ones......Page 152 Index......Page 171