Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture

ISBN-13: 9781441175281 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 288 str.

Alan Kirby

Opis

A bold new challenge to postmodern theory
The increasing irrelevance of postmodernism requires a new theory to underpin our current digital culture. Almost without anybody noticing, a new cultural paradigm has taken center stage, displacing an exhausted and increasingly marginalized postmodernism. Alan Kirby calls this cultural paradigm digimodernism, a name comprising both its central technical mode and the privileging of fingers and thumbs inherent in its use. Beginning with the Internet (digimodernism's most important locus), then taking into account television, cinema, computer games, music, radio, etc., Kirby analyzes the emergence and implications of these diverse media, coloring our cultural landscape with new ideas on texts and how they work. This new kind of text produces distinctive forms of author and reader/viewer, which, in turn, lead to altered notions of authority, 'truth' and legitimization. With users intervening physically in the creation of texts, our electronically-dependent society is becoming more involved in the grand narrative. To clarify these trends, Kirby compares them to the contrasting tendencies of the preceding postmodern era. In defining this new cultural age, the author avoids both facile euphoria and pessimistic fatalism, aiming instead to understand and thereby gain control of a cultural mode which seems, as though from nowhere, to have engulfed our society. With new technologies unfolding almost daily, this work will help to categorize and explain our new digital world and our place in it, as well as equip us with a better understanding of the digital technologies that have a massive impact on our culture.

Recenzje

[Digimodernism] provides a convincing explanation for the plethora of cultural phenomena and practices Kirby groups under digimodernism. Kirby's concepts and examples offer a challenging new lens through which to investigate the world. Catriona Bonfiglioli, Media Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Discourse & Communication

Spis treści

Introduction1. The Arguable Death of Postmodernism2. The Digimodernist Text3. A Prehistory of Digimodernism4. Digimodernism and Web 2.05. Digimodernist Aesthetics6. Digimodernist Culture7. Toward a Digimodernist Society?Conclusion - EndlessNotesWorks Cited

O autorze

Alan Kirby is a writer and researcher in twentieth-century literature and culture. He has published on subjects including Stephen Poliakoff, John Fowles, spy fiction, and James Joyce. He received his PhD from the University of Exeter and is currently based in Oxford.