I invite you to check out my recently published book, The Digital and Its Discontents, from University of Minnesota Press. This book offers a critical examination of the digital in general, focusing not on particular machines or pieces of software or cultural formations but on the foundational principles that make a technology digital. I propose that there is something subtle but essential missing from the world of the digital, something that can be found only outside of digital technologies, and I worry that we are losing touch with that contingency that enriches our lives and our world by generating the unexpected and novel. The book considers how we might recover this missing facet of our humanness without sacrificing the remarkable benefits of digital technologies in our lives.
Some SLSA members kindly blurbed this book prior to its publication…
“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
I expect you can find a copy by now in your university library, or purchase one where academic books are sold. Actually, you should probably buy two, as you’re going to want to read it twice!
Thanks for looking.
Cheers,
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A d e n
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