The Digital Condition

by Felix Stalder

Our daily lives, our culture and our politics are now shaped by the digital condition as large numbers of people involve themselves in contentious negotiations of meaning in ever more dimensions of life, from the trivial to the profound. They are making use of the capacities of complex communication infrastructures, currently dominated by social mass media such as Twitter and Facebook, on which they have come to depend.Amidst a confusing plurality, Felix Stalder argues that are three key constituents of this the use of existing cultural materials for one's own production, the way in which new meaning is established as a collective endeavour, and the underlying role of algorithms and automated decision-making processes that reduce and give shape to massive volumes of data. These three characteristics define what Stalder calls 'the digital condition'. Stalder also examines the profound political implications of this new culture. We stand at a crossroads between post-democracy and the commons, a concentration of power among the few or a genuine widening of participation, with the digital condition offering the potential for starkly different outcomes.This ambitious and wide-ranging theory of our contemporary digital condition will be of great interest to students and scholars in media and communications, cultural studies, and social, political and cultural theory, as well as to a wider readership interested in the ways in which culture and politics are changing today.

220 pages, ebook

Published January 26, 2018

Reviews

[Pau Todó · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book combines the scale and depth of Manuel Castells's research, with that astonishingly revealing vision of a Zygmunt Bauman.
I've been reading too much bad literature filed under "Tech & Internet" lately. From Adam Alter to Nicolas Carr or Eli Peiser -just to name the celebrities. Then I came across a Swiss professor's blog interested in Digital Commons, and saw that he had also published a book against the usual suspects of the Internet. Where I expected another "j'accuse" against a particular digital device or corporate platform, I found an essay that can be read both, as an academic work on cultural & Internet studies, or as an historical account of the Western culture from the 70s to the present day. Stalder proposes Referenciality, Communality and Algorithmicity as the cultural processes that changed our culture. Those 3 factors take place within post-democratic societies (according Colin Crouch's definition). Once the author defines the terms and explain how do they interplay, we are invited to confront them with the tools and principles of the Digital Commons.
If you made it here, you might also want to know what are those 3 elements.
Referenciality refers to our ability to create new meaning out previous sociocultural material (say, from Dj's to Culture Jammers), Communality are the networked groups based on voluntary action (all the new civic and cultural initiatives using Internet as a context and discourse). Algorithmicity needs no further explanations. Yo can Google it :)
The work of a networked sum of volunteers (the Commons), intensely busy in the creation of new contexts and meanings (through Referenciality) that challenge the old relations of power, enters now in conflict with an elite of technology-determinist "representatives" equipped with the latest algorithms (Algorithmicity) and behavior persuasion systems, offering us startlingly smart cities in exchange of a modest data contribution.
I won't spoil you the end. I do sincerely recommend you to discover it by yourself.