Digital Culture by Charlie Gere
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
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.
A provocative concept from the book is the idea that in the modern world people have been fashioned into data objects (even prior to computers):
"...people are made visible as pieces of digital data. They are individuals, but their individuality is rationalized and normalized in a system of signs that also homogenizes them as a mass, and makes them interchangeable and manipulable as data."Yikes. I've heard of people being objectified, but am I data-objectified by virtue of being a citizen of our modern world? We're all just a number, and that number is some combination of zeroes and ones.
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