Overview
TIMELY: The book takes on some of the most topical and hotly debated issues both in popular culture and academic circles concerning digital technology and the digital society.
CONTRIBUTION TO FIELD: The book offers an innovative theoretical framework to explain the hegemonic discourse on digital technology. While there is plenty written on digital technology, most of it tends to be technophilic or technophobic. Based on a rigorous empirical analysis of a case study, the book is unique in explaining the sociological underpinning of the digital discourse. The analysis offered in the book is crossdisciplinary, engaging both media studies and traditional sociological categories.
GOOD APPROACH: This book is located within the thriving field of the analysis of the culture of capitalism. It reflects and contributes to a renewed interest in sociology in the cultural dimensions of economic life.
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Introduction: Technology Discourse and Capitalist Legitimation
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Part I
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Part II
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Part III
Keywords
About this book
Reviews
"Fisher's brilliant book provides cogent reasons why we should be skeptical about laptop capitalism and its fluidity and instantaneity of communication. As we surf, text, and post, we are actually becoming more enmeshed in the cyber-networks of command and control that, now as before, bear down heavily. Fisher helps us understand the age of digitality as, above all, capitalist." - Ben Agger, Professor of Sociology and Humanities, University of Texas at Arlington
"This carefully researched and skillfully written guide to the networked world doesn't just demolish the dreamy visions of Utopia 2.0. It provides precisely the comprehensive analysis we need to understand their power and persistence." - Vincent Mosco, Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society, Queen's University, Canada
"This is an audacious systematic ideology-critique of digital capitalism. By meticulously exposing the underlying assumptions and consequences of the digital technology discourse, the book evinces how a seemingly neutral network that creates 'friction free capitalism' germinates a neo-capitalist 'iron cage.' The book reconnects the semiotic and material societal levels. It should be placed on your shelf with Castells' book on informational capitalism, with Dyer-Witheford's on cyber-Marxism or with Mosco's on the digital sublime." - Uri Ram, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben Gurion University
"Fisher’s brilliant book provides cogent reasons why we should be skeptical about laptop capitalism and its fluidity and instantaneity of communication.As we surf, text, and post, we are actually becoming more enmeshed in the cyber-networks of command and control that, now as before, bear down heavily.Fisher helps us understand the age of digitality as, above all, capitalist." - Ben Agger, Professor of Sociology and Humanities, University of Texas at Arlington
"This carefully researched and skillfully written guide to the networked world doesn’t just demolish the dreamy visions of Utopia 2.0. It provides precisely the comprehensive analysis we need to understand their power and persistence." - Vincent Mosco, Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society, Queen’s University, Canada
"This is an audacious systematic ideology-critique of digital capitalism. By meticulously exposing the underlying assumptions and consequences of the digital technology discourse, the book evinces how a seemingly neutral network that creates ‘friction free capitalism’ germinates a neo-capitalist ‘iron cage.’ The book reconnects the semiotic and material societal levels. It should be placed on your shelf with Castells's book on informational capitalism, with Dyer-Witheford's on cyber-Marxism or with Mosco's on the digital sublime." - Uri Ram, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben Gurion University, Israel
"An important reminder that the relationship of information science to the economy, society, and politics is not an extramural and peripheral issue for information science, but constitutive of the discipline itself. And his book is well worth reading." - David Bade, University of Chicago, Journal of Documentation
"Given that Fisher is dealing with a topic that touches on a range of social domains, this book will be of interest to a wide assortment of scholarly concerned about changes in the world of technology, work, and capital accumulation. Even political economists, who often shy away from discourse analysis, will learn much about the wider social forces that buttress changes to informational capitalism." - Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age
Book Subtitle: The Spirit of Networks
Authors: Eran Fisher
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106062
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture Collection, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2010
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-137-31081-1Published: 18 September 2013
eBook ISBN: 978-0-230-10606-2Published: 15 March 2010
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 259
Topics: Media Studies, Sociology of Culture, Regional and Cultural Studies, Sociology, general, Industries, Communication Studies