Digital Culture

by Charlie Gere

From our bank accounts to supermarket checkouts to the movies we watch, strings of ones and zeroes suffuse our world. Digital technology has defined modern society in numerous ways, and the vibrant digital culture that has now resulted is the subject of Charlie Gere’s engaging volume.

In this revised and expanded second edition, taking account of new developments such as Facebook and the iPhone, Charlie Gere charts in detail the history of digital culture, as marked by responses to digital technology in art, music, design, film, literature and other areas. After tracing the historical development of digital culture, Gere argues that it is actually neither radically new nor technologically driven: digital culture has its roots in the eighteenth century and the digital mediascape we swim in today was originally inspired by informational needs arising from industrial capitalism, contemporary warfare and counter-cultural experimentation, among other social changes.

A timely and cutting-edge investigation of our contemporary social infrastructures, Digital Culture is essential reading for all those concerned about the ever-changing future of our Digital Age.

 

“This is an excellent book. It gives an almost complete overview of the main trends and view of what is generally called digital culture through the whole post-war period, as well as a thorough exposition of the history of the computer and its predecessors and the origins of the modern division of labor.”—Journal of Visual Culture

 

Genres: Nonfiction, Art, History, Technology, College

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Charlie Gere is Professor of Media Theory and History in the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University. He is the author of Digital Culture; Art, Time and Technology; and Unnatural Theology: Religion, Art, and Media after the Death of God.

Reviews

[Gideon Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gere's Digital Culture is among the best overviews on the topic I've encountered (after spending a summer immersing myself in many books on this subject). This book is readable, current (as of mid-2012) and manages not to immerse one in too much tech-speak. It covers the history of computing from a cultural point of view, and ties in 60s counter culture and arts movements in ways that I never realized were so formative of our current digital environment.

As someone who has studied the history of civilization and tried to connect this to our current day's digital world, I was especially appreciative of how he was able to describe various movements that led to what we would now call digital but which predate even electricity: capitalism, industrialization, intellectual practices of abstraction, algorithms, systems of cybernetic control -- various movements and ideologies from science, industry, economics, math, and language theory that are part of the conceptual infrastructure of our day as much as silicon is part of the technical infrastructure.

I'll never believe that computers are what make up digital culture again. They are a manifestation of other tendencies well under way and that we should appreciate separately from the briefer (though important) history of computation or communications technology. Great perspective.

[Melana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for school. Interesting look at digital culture and how it’s been influenced by or, more often, informed the Cold War and everything since.

[David Kastratović]

davidenko kiborg

[Susanna]

If I had to read this for class, you bet I’m using to my reading goal

[Monika Radclyffe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing new for us, millennials...

[Joy · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are so many things that are considered 'digital'. Gere does an excellent job of showing the how ubiquitous technology has become.