Digital Culture

"While few would contest the impact of the computer on the world of work, Digital Culture reveals its seismic effects on our social, cultural and political lives. In the last twenty years digital technologies in the form of mass media, TV, music and film have both converged with digital forms, such as the World Wide Web and video games, to surround us with a seamless digital mediascape, and integrally affected developments in art, music, film and literature." "Charlie Gere maps the set of cultural symptoms that gave rise to digital culture - among them the information needs of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century and of warfare in the twentieth, as well as counter-cultural experimentation and neo-liberalism in the post-war era - and the responses that they in turn produced: the arrival of cybernetics, artificial intelligence, the personal computer, ARPANET and the Internet, but also movements such as feminism, structuralism, deconstruction, punk and the culture that has grown up around Silicon Valley." "The result is a stimulating analysis that, by tracing digital thinking from its roots in the late eighteenth century to its avant-garde manifestations - whether in H. G. Wells's World Brain, John Cage's 4'33" or Cyberpunk - reveals digital culture to be neither radically new nor ultimately technologically driven, but uniquely all-pervasive."--BOOK JACKET.

Charlie Gere is reader in New Media Research and the director of the Institute for Cultural Research at Lancaster University.