The Digital Condition: Class and Culture in the Information Network
| UW-L Author: | Rob Wilkie, Ph.D. English |
| Copyright: | 2011 |
| Publisher: | Fordham University Press |
Wilkie, Rob. The Digital Condition: Class and Culture in the Information Network. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2011.
The acceleration in science, technology, communication, and production that began in the second half of the twentieth century-developments which make up the concept of the digital-has brought us to what might be the most contradictory moment in human history. The digital revolution has made it possible not only to imagine but to actually realize a world in which social inequality and poverty are vanquished. But instead these developments have led to an unprecedented level of accumulation of private profits....It is no longer the case that technology can take on the appearance of a simple or neutral aspect of human society. It is time for a critique of the digital times. In The Digital Condition, Rob Wilkie advances a groundbreaking analysis of digital culture which argues that the digital geist-which has its genealogy in such concepts as the body without organs,spectrality,and diffrance-has obscured the implications of class difference with the phantom of a digital divide. Engaging the writings of Hardt and Negri, Poster, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Haraway, Latour, and Castells, the literature and cinema of cyberpunk, and digital commodities like the iPod, Wilkie initiates a new direction within the field of digital cultural studies by foregrounding the continuing importance of class in shaping the contemporary.
About the Author
Robert Wilkie is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. His essays on digital culture, contemporary media, and pedagogy have appeared in such journals as JAC; Nature, Society and Thought; Textual Practice; and Postmodern Culture. He has also regularly presented his work at the annual conferences of the Modern Language Association and the Society for Literature, Science at the Arts, as well as at recent conferences on digital and visual culture in Estonia and England.