[ecrea] New Book: Critical Theory and the Digital (2014)

New book Critical Theory and the Digital.

http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/critical-theory-and-the-digital-9781441166395/

Some blurb:

This Critical Theory and Contemporary Society volume offers an original 
analysis of the role of the digital in today's society. It rearticulates 
critical theory by engaging it with the challenges of the digital 
revolution to show how the digital is changing the ways in which we lead 
our politics, societies, economies, media, and even private lives. In 
particular, the work examines how the enlightenment values embedded 
within the culture and materiality of digital technology can be used to 
explain the changes that are occurring across society.

Critical Theory and the Digital draws from the critical concepts 
developed by critical theorists to demonstrate how the digital needs to 
be understood within a dialectic of potentially democratizing and 
totalizing technical power. By relating critical theory to aspects of a 
code-based digital world and the political economy that it leads to, the 
book introduces the importance of the digital code in the contemporary 
world to researchers in the field of politics, sociology, globalization 
and media studies.

Some comments:

“'Adorno will not be your Facebook friend.' Instead of lamenting the 
cultural elitism of the Frankfurt School, David Berry reopens critical 
theory's conceptual toolbox with a renewed curiosity. These days the 
theorist is no longer a prophet who ponders the world divorced from the 
materiality of communication. It is not enough to merely explore the 
technosphere, there is an urgency to radically question digital 
technologies. In this age of conflict, the neoliberal consensus culture 
is taken to task by critical theory David-Berry-style. In line with the 
info-activism of Wikileaks and Snowden, Berry instructs us how to read 
the black box that dominates our everyday lives and helps us to develop 
a new vocabulary amidst all the crazes, from speculative realism to 
digital humanities.” –  Geert Lovink, Media Theorist, Amsterdam

“Berry's timely book engages with a broad range of topics that define 
our digital culture. It guides us to the political materiality of 
software culture with excellent insights. Importantly, this book updates 
critical theory for the digital age.” –  Dr Jussi Parikka, Winchester 
School of Art, author of What is Media Archaeology? (2012)

“In this lucid, learned and highly original book Berry confronts the 
nature of digital knowledge in society through the re-invigorated lens 
of Critical Theory asking how we can regain control of the knowledge 
structures embedded in the digital technologies that we increasingly 
rely upon in daily life.” –  Michael Bull, author of Sound Moves: iPod 
Culture and Urban Experience

“Critical Theory and the Digital offers an important new addition to 
critical theory that explores questions raised by the digital in light 
of the work of the Frankfurt school. Providing an accessible and 
critical appraisal of the digital world we live in today, the book 
argues that critical praxis must today be rethought in light of digital 
technologies and the affordances that are made available to state, 
corporate and civil society actors. The book offers both a theoretical 
and a political contribution: the former through its exploration of how 
the digital can be read, written, and hacked critically; the latter 
through its discussion of how the digital can be transformed by 
political action and the organisation of digital resistance.” –  
Christian De Cock, University of Essex, UK

“Unlike many media studies scholars who refer to the Frankfurt School’s 
critique of the cultural industries only to show its inapplicability to 
the open source world of the digital age, David Berry accomplishes the 
remarkable feat of re-instating that critique for the new brave world 
that is afforded by digital technology. Easily moving between Heidegger, 
Adorno and Stiegler, Berry mobilizes a formidable array of theoretical 
resources in aid of what he calls ‘iteracy’, an emerging competence in 
tracking the contexts in which ‘being digital’ is continually formed and 
re-formed. The result is a milestone in both critical theory and the 
digital humanities.” –  Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Chair in Social 
Epistemology, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK

“Bringing dialectical critique to digital culture, David Berry 
replenishes the legacy of the Frankfurt School in order to devise 
strategies to live within and against the real-time streams of 
computational capitalism. Fusing critical theory with the political 
economy of social media (think Facebook and Twitter), the surveillance 
paranoia of NSA, the wild party of Hacklabs, the secret autonomy of 
cryptography, and the accelerated economy of algorithmic trading, Berry 
registers the contours of the black box that defines digital labour and 
life.” –  Ned Rossiter, Institute for Culture and Society, University of 
Western Sydney, Australia

Best

David



---

Dr. David M. Berry
Reader

Silverstone 316

School of Media, Film and Music
University of Sussex,
Falmer,
East Sussex. BN1 8PP

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/125219
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