[Commlist] New book: The Digital and Its Discontents

New book
The Digital and Its Discontents*
*Aden Evens & Alexander R. Galloway*

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*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781517916329/the-digital-and-its-discontents/ 
<https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781517916329/the-digital-and-its-discontents/>_*

**

**

*Receive a 20% discount online*:*

*LLS24*

*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 31^st December 2024.Discount only applies to the 
CAP website.

**

"/This book argues that the digital’s decisive discreteness is actually 
an intensification of a dominant predigital ideology. Such a perspective 
supposes a parsable world that blinds us to an actuality of elusive 
contingency. Drawing on deep understandings of digital technology and 
philosophy, Aden Evens demystifies crucial arcane features with 
startlingly lucid and accessible explanations, all while summoning a 
world that defies explanation/."—Katherine Behar, Baruch College and The 
Graduate Center of the City University of New York

  "/The Digital and Its Discontents will be illuminating for anyone who 
has ever twisted their speech into discrete, mechanical sounds to please 
a voice recognition system. Determined to resist the digital imperative 
to speak, write, think, and ultimately be like a machine, Aden Evens 
reaches for contingency as the ontological spice that distinguishes 
actuality from virtuality. And he flavors his formalist approach with 
vignettes that compare human and digital relationality in scenes that 
range from playing a video game or a cello to hitting a baseball or 
squishing a lemon./"—Marcel O’Gorman, founding director, Critical Media 
Lab, University of Waterloo

A groundbreaking critique of the digital world that analyzes its 
universal technological foundations.

Whence that nagging sense that something in the digital is amiss—that, 
as wonderful as our devices are, time spent on smartphones and computers 
leaves us sour, enervated, alienated?/The Digital and Its 
Discontents/uniquely explains that worry and points us toward a more 
satisfying relationship between our digital lives and our nondigital 
selves, one that requires a radical change in the way we incorporate 
technology into our lives.

Aden Evens analyzes universal technological principles—in particular, 
the binary logic—to show that they encourage certain ways of thinking 
while making others more challenging or impossible. What is out of reach 
for any digital machine is contingency, the ontological principle that 
refuses every rule. As humans engage ourselves and our world ever more 
through digital machines, we are losing touch with contingency and so 
banishing from our lives the accidental and unexpected that fuel our 
most creative and novel possibilities for living.

Taking cues from philosophy rather than cultural or media theory, Evens 
argues that the consequences of this erosion of contingency are 
significant yet often overlooked because the same values that make the 
digital seem so desirable also make contingency seem unimportant—without 
contingency the digital is confined to what has already been thought, 
and yet the digital’s ubiquity has allowed it to disguise this inherent 
sterility. Responsive only to desires that meet the demands of its 
narrow logic, the digital requires its users to practice those same 
ideological dictates, instituting a hegemony of thought and value 
sustained by the pervasive presence of digital mechanisms. Interweaving 
technical and philosophical concepts, The Digital and Its Discontents 
advances a powerful and urgent argument about the digital and its impact 
on our lives.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

*Aden Evens*is associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. He 
is author/of Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience/(Minnesota, 
2005) and/Logic of the Digital/.

*Alexander R. Galloway*is professor of media, culture, and communication 
at New York University, Steinhardt.


*University of Minnesota Press| Electronic Mediations | February 2024 | 
264pp | 9781517916329 | PB | £24.99**

*Price subject to change.

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