Critical Digital Studies

by Kroker, Arthur

• ISBN13: 9780802095466
• ISBN10: 0802095461
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-09-26
• Publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr

Summary

From the spectacular emergence of new media innovations such as blogging, podcasting, flashmobs, mashups, and RSS feeds to video-sharing websites, like MySpace and YouTube, and online role-playing games, contemporary society, culture, and politics are being transformed continuously by new digital communication technology. In Critical Digital Studies , internationally renowned theorists Arthur and Marilouise Kroker lead the search for a new method of understanding digitally mediated culture. Digital studies is a rapidly expanding field that encompasses the research interests of social scientists and humanities scholars, multimedia artists, and activists. With this ground-breaking reader, we are introduced to a new style of thought that has emerged directly from Internet culture itself. Critical Digital Studies is inspired by the same spirit that gave rise to the Open Architecture Movement, Shareware, Web 2.0 – a creative mashup, mixing the enduring human demand to understand the world around us with the new means of analysis, communication, and living that define the twenty-first century. Among the contributors are: Sara Diamond, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Lynn Hershmann, Lev Manovich, Charles Mudede, Stephen Pfohl, and Stelarc. An indispensable resource for instructors and students in digital studies programs, Critical Digital Studies is a comprehensive, creative, and fascinating look at a digital culture that is struggling to be born, survive, and flourish.

Author Biography

Arthur Kroker is the director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, and Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture, and Theory at the University of Victoria. Marilouise Kroker is senior research scholar in the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture at the University of Victoria. She is co-editor of the electronic peer-reviewed journal Ctheory.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Critical Digital Studies: An Introduction	p. 1
Code Breakers
Traumas of Code	p. 25
A Game of Cat's Cradle: Sign Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies	p. 45
Reframing the Cathedral: Opening the Sources of Technologies and Cultural Assumptions	p. 56
Romancing the Anti-body: Lust and Longing in (Cyber)space	p. 71
Technology, Identity, and Surveillance
Precision + Guided + Seeing	p. 87
Understanding Meta-media	p. 106
Warcraft and Utopia	p. 112
The Age of Blur and Technology	p. 122
Biophilosophy for the 21st Century	p. 132
Hypervirus: A Clinical Report	p. 143
Algebra of Identity: Skin of Wind, Skin of Streams, Skin of Shadows, Skin of Vapour	p. 158
The Ambiguous Panopticon: Foucault and the Codes of Cyberspace	p. 175
Politics, Gender, and Religion
Information and Power
Communication and Imperialism	p. 205
Tell Us What's Going to Happen: Information Feeds to the War on Terror	p. 231
Grammar of Terrorism: Captivity, Media, and the Critique of Biopolitics	p. 250
Infomobility and Technics: Some Travel Notes	p. 268
Gender
The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary	p. 277
When Taste Politics Meet Terror: The Critical Art Ensemble on Trial	p. 286
Virtually Queer? Homing Devices, Mobility, and Un/Belongings	p. 303
Religion and Society
The Passion of the Social: Reflections on the Seattle Rave Killings	p. 325
Digital Cosmologies: Religion, Technology, and Ideology	p. 336
Technologies of the Apocalypse: The Left Behind Novels and Flight from the Flesh	p. 346
Terri Schiavo: Bride of 'Compassionate Conservatism'	p. 368
Cities
21st Century Graffiti: Detroit Tagging	p. 378
Circuits, Death, and Sacred Fiction: The City of Banaras	p. 387
Louis Armstrong International Airport: A Post-Katrina Meditation	p. 392
Culture, Communication, and Media
Perception
Welcome to Google Earth	p. 397
Distraction and Digital Culture	p. 417
The Rebirth of the Author	p. 437
Bodies
Metal Performance: Humanizing Robots, Returning to Nature, and Camping About	p. 442
Prosthetic Head: Intelligence, Awareness, and Agency	p. 476
Simulated Talking Machines: Stelarc's Prosthetic Head	p. 489
Slipstreaming the Cyborg: Interview with Christina McPhee	p. 499
Sound
Black Secret Technology (The Whitey on the Moon Dub)	p. 513
The Turntable	p. 523
Silent Theory: Aurality, Technology, Philosophy	p. 535
Bibliography	p. 561
Contributors	p. 575
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