Critical Digital Studies : A Reader, Second Edition

Since its initial publication, Critical Digital Studies has proven an indispensable guide to understanding digitally mediated culture. Bringing together the leading scholars in this growing field, internationally renowned scholars Arthur and Marilouise Kroker present an innovative and interdisciplinary survey of the relationship between humanity and technology. The reader offers a study of our digital future, a means of understanding the world with new analytic tools and means of communication that are defining the twenty-first century. The second edition includes new essays on the impact of social networking technologies and new media. A new section – “New Digital Media” – presents important, new articles on topics including hacktivism in the age of digital power and the relationship between gaming and capitalism. The extraordinary range and depth of the first edition has been maintained in this new edition. Critical Digital Studies will continue to provide the leading edge to readers wanting to understand the complex intersection of digital culture and human knowledge. Contents 5 Acknowledgments 9 Permissions 11 Introduction 13 CODE BREAKERS 51 1 Traumas of Code 51 2 A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies 71 3 Reframing the Cathedral: Opening the Sources of Technologies and Cultural Assumptions 82 4 Romancing the Anti-body: Lust and Longing in (Cyber)space 97 NEW DIGITAL MEDIA 113 5 All Bugs Are Shallow: Digital Biopower, Hacker Resistance, and Technological Error in Open-Source Software 113 6 Contagion Theory: Beyond the Microbe 132 7 A Conversation with Spirits inside the Simulation of a Coast Salish Longhouse 156 8 Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism 174 9 Archaeologies of Media Art 191 TECHNOLOGY, IDENTITY, AND SURVEILLANCE 205 10 Precision + Guided + Seeing 205 11 Understanding Meta-media 224 12 Black Box, Black Bloc 230 13 Biophilosophy for the 21st Century 239 14 Algebra of Identity: Skin of Wind, Skin of Streams, Skin of Shadows, Skin of Vapour 250 POLITICS, GENDER, AND RELIGION 1 INFORMATION AND POWER 269 15 Communication and Imperialism 269 16 Occupology, Swarmology, Whateverology: The City of (Dis)order versus the People’s Archive 295 17 Tell Us What’s Going to Happen: Information Feeds to the War on Terror 305 18 Grammar of Terrorism: Captivity, Media, and a Critique of Biopolitics 324 19 Virilio’s Apocalypticism 343 GENDER AND SEXUALITY 360 20 The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary 360 21 Haptics, Mobile Handhelds, and other ‘Novel’ Devices: The Tactile Unconscious of Reading across Old and New Media 369 22 Becoming Dragon: A Transversal Technology Study 385 RELIGION AND SOCIETY 405 23 Circuits, Death, and Sacred Fiction: The City of Banaras 405 24 Digital Cosmologies: Religion, Technology, and Ideology 410 25 Technologies of the Apocalypse: The Left Behind Novels and Flight from the Flesh 420 CULTURE, ART, AND COMMUNICATION 101 PERCEPTION 445 26 The Aura of the Digital 445 27 When Taste Politics Meets Terror: The Critical Art Ensemble on Trial 459 28 Distraction and Digital Culture 477 PERFORMANCE 497 29 Metal Performance: Humanizing Robots, Returning to Nature, and Camping About 497 30 Prosthetic Head: Intelligence, Awareness, and Agency 531 31 Simulated Talking Machines: Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head 544 32 Slipstreaming the Cyborg 554 SOUND 568 33 Black Secret Technology (The Whitey on the Moon Dub) 568 34 Material Memories: Time and the Cinematic Image 578 35 The Turntable 586 Bibliography 599 Contributors 613 Since its initial publication, Critical Digital Studies has proven an indispensable guide to understanding digitally mediated culture. Bringing together the leading scholars in this growing field, internationally renowned scholars Arthur and Marilouise Kroker present an innovative and interdisciplinary survey of the relationship between humanity and technology. The reader offers a study of our digital future, a means of understanding the world with new analytic tools and means of communication that are defining the twenty-first century. The second edition includes new essays on the impact of social networking technologies and new media. A new section - "New Digital Media"--Presents important, new articles on topics including hacktivism in the age of digital power and the relationship between gaming and capitalism. The extraordinary range and depth of the first edition has been maintained in this new edition. Critical Digital Studies will continue to provide the leading edge to readers wanting to understand the complex intersection of digital culture and human knowledge