The peer-reviewed book series edited by Christian Fuchs publishes books that critically examine the role of the Internet and digital and social media in society. Critical Communication Theory: New Readings from Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth, and Habermas in the Age of the Internet. The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism Edited by Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano.
The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness Edited by Joan Pedro-Carañana, Daniel Broudy, and Jeffery Klaehn https://doi.org/10.16997/book27. Cover design: www.ketchup-productions.co.uk Series cover concept: Mina Bach (minabach.co.uk) Print and digital versions laid out by Siliconchips Services Ltd.
Introduction: A World That Has Changed, But Has Not Changed
Harvey had correctly identified that a 'sea change' in the organization of capitalism was underway, entering a new and intense phase with the end of the Cold War. Digitality changes all these and more, starting with the total transcendence of the human scale. In part, Harvey attributes the possibility to the ideology of the market and the ideology of postmodernism - to.
The sixth chapter, entitled "Culture of Digitality", will discuss the cultural manifestations of digitality that derive from its roots in the convergence of Californian ideology with neoliberal political economy. 11 Teresa Hayter, David Harvey (eds.) (1994) Factory and City: The Story of the Cowley Car Workers in Oxford.
1989: David Harvey’s Postmodernity: The Space Economy of Late Capitalism
Material standards of living rose for the mass of the population in the advanced industrial countries, and a relatively stable environment for corporate profits prevailed. The ideology that is the condition of postmodernity was fully entrenched in the decade of the 1990s. 18 Typical of the breathless ambitions of many in the business class was Ken'ichi Omahe's world without borders (1990).
32 Zie Andrew Glyn et al. 1990) 'The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age' in The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience, Stephen A. 33 Marc Levinson (2016) An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Rise of the Ordinary Economy .
From Analogue to Digital: Theorising the Transition
A topic at the March 1950 conference was entitled 'Some of the problems concerning digital representations in the central nervous system'. Eisenhower forced an armistice in the Korean War after threatening to use nuclear weapons north of the 39th parallel. As the Industrial Revolution got under way, the potential of technology was separated from the potential of man.
I will therefore turn to a consideration of the analogous man in our present circumstances—the world. It is a useful little book and one of the few that, albeit briefly, refers to analog in a critical comparison with digital in a human context. In the early 20th century, people were excited by the novelty of the telephone, but they also considered it a "fake".
From the perspective of capitalism, people were a necessary but problematic component of production processes. But we must do so from the perspective of the human relationship with technology and the transformed context that digital technology has created. Alienation and reification are based on the distancing of the authentic self from the world through the logic of exploitation of capitalism.
And in our general respect for the market and the postmodern (mostly) men of Silicon Valley122, we take on new (or different) roles as producers and consumers in the networked society. Oxford: Blackwell; Kevin Robins and Frank Webster (1999) Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life. 93 In the previous chapter, I used Ngram to chart the decline of the concept of postmodernism from 1990 to 2008.
The Condition of Digitality: A New Perspective on Time and Space
The crisis of overaccumulation was central to his analysis of the political economy of 1970s capitalism. The crisis of the 1970s was, for Harvey, the political economic context for the biggest 'spatial fix' in the history of capitalism. This passage is often cited as a vivid proclamation of the globalization of our own time.
It directly materializes our thoughts and actions, and we don't even have to be aware of the fact. A contemporary proponent of the widest possible theoretical lens with regard to the analysis of the state of capitalism is Nancy Fraser. However, the damaging effects of digitality on world politics were part of an insidious process of disruption and decay.
In the West, undermining the roots of capitalism's sources of stability and legitimacy has left it in a precarious position. Digital is not primarily about Facebook, or Google or any of the other tech giants. These are only expressions of the logic of informatics in the service of capitalism given much more freely by democratic institutions.
13 Dwayne Winseck (2011) “The Political Economies of Media and the Transformation of the Global Media Industries” in Political Economies of Media, Dwayne Winseck and Dal Yong Jin (eds.) New York: Bloomsbury, p.23. 16 Dwayne Winseck (2011) ‘The Political Economies of Media and the Transformation of the Global Media Industries’. 19 A good example of the timeliness of the atmosphere, where the user was still unaware of the process, finally came to the attention of the public in 2015.
The Economy of Digitality: Limitless Virtual Space and Network Time
Contemporary globalization began in earnest when the deregulatory effects of the Washington Consensus began to be felt in the mid-to-late 1980s. However, this does not mean that workers and the poor are able to be part of the financial system in ways that would they provided stability and a source of income. Many thousands of risky loans were made in the previous decade to a large segment of the low-wage working class.
It is here that we can see the concrete expression of the business imperative at the heart of the web. Ong also noted that the sign 'releases the unheard potential of the word'.59 This is an important observation. They are populated by the workers of the world who function simultaneously as producers and consumers.
However, our analysis shows that the business case can be compelling regardless of the level of capital intensity.71. Digitality thus has the power of a central strategic imperative of the world's most powerful military and the economy that supports it.85. To his credit, all of this is well documented in The New Imperialism, and Harvey accurately reflects the ongoing journey of the classical mode of accumulation as an aspect of contemporary globalization.
47 For an example of the latter, see Howard Rheingold (2000) Virtual Community: Home on the Electronic Frontier. 48 For an excellent analysis of the privatization process as it happened, see Dan Schiller's Digital Capitalism (2000). It is not mentioned, and Rumsfeld appears briefly, and only as a member of the neoconservatives who were bent on war.
The Culture of Digitality
However, the cultural legacies of DVD or CD-ROM are more difficult to discern. It succumbed almost immediately to the blitzkrieg popularity of the iPhone and was discontinued in 2008. And so, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the progressive and collective "political struggle" is almost everywhere facing defeat or in retreat.
This constant change in the content of culture, even entire cultural styles, is the sign of life's infinite fecundity. All this leads to the conclusion that Williams was prescient in his identification of the materiality of communication with regard to the concept of base-superstructure and hegemony in the context of culture formation. Others in the 1960s New Left felt energized to offer some form of critique of the commodified 'superstructural reality' that permeated everyday life and actually saw capitalism and its trademark logic as the problem.
The gap between the desired and the achieved states of happiness leads to the increased fascination with the allurements of the markets and the appropriation of commodities.73. And in the prescribed postmodern style of the time, Williamson refuses to engage in a direct critique of capitalism, only its manifestations. In the last sentences of 'The Culture Industry', Adorno and Horkheimer deliver the last blow of the negative dialectic about cultural production and consumption.
In his early works and following McLuhan and Debord, Baudrillard recognizes the profound power of the electronic image. The first is that the electronic image greatly increases the power and reach of the trademark. It can colonize time and space and the consciousness of the individual (as a consumer) far more easily than the material object.
Digital Alienation
At the root is a mixture of economic complication coupled with the allure of computer "magic". However, the lack of novelty in mass culture may not be much for many people. For twentieth-century analog capitalism, this was an ongoing and growing problem, reaching the point of cultural crisis in the last quarter of the century.
In the 1980s, Fredric Jameson wrote about the nature of emergent postmodernism in culture (and postmodernity as a cultural epoch). As mentioned before, network time should be considered as a shaping force of the culture of digitality. They constitute the signs and symbols of the present, instantaneous and impulsive.
And they are of the kind and quality that Raymond Williams would recognize as "ordinary" and essentially human and human. These fissures took ideological and cultural form in the postmodern "state," which was the antithesis of forms of ideological and cultural fusion that had been pushed to the edges. Intellectually, this manifests itself as an avoidance of the idea of progress and an abandonment of any sense of history, etc.
But the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, for all its darkness, did not advocate hopelessness. One of the effects of modern communication technology is that there is no outside where we can heal. See their (2010) 'Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital "Prosumer"', Journal of Consumer Culture.
