Digital Media: HumanTechnology Connection

(Hardback)

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Digital Media: Human-Technology Connection examines what it is like to be alive in todays technologically textured world and showcases specific digital media technologies that make this kind of world possible. So much of human experience occurs through digital media that reflection on the process and proliferation of digital consumption has become necessary. This book takes on that task through an interdisciplinary array of sources including philosophy, media studies, film studies, media ecology, and philosophy of technology. When placed in the interpretive lenses of artifact, instrument, and tool, digital media can be studied in a uniquely different way that pushes the boundaries on production, distribution, and communication and alters the way humans and technology connect with each other and the world. In the first section, Raw Materials, Stacey ONeal Irwin examines pertinent concepts like digital media, philosophy of technology, phenomenology and postphenomenology . In the second, Feeling the Weave, Irwin uses the postphenomenological framework, to explore empirical cases focused on deep analysis of screens, sound, photo manipulation, data-mining, aggregate news and self-tracking. Postphenomenological concepts like multistability, variational theory, microperception, macroperception, embodiment, technological mediation are explored. Digital Media demonstrates that digital media technologies and digital content are not neutral. They texture the world in multiple and varied ways that transform human abilities, augment experience, and pattern the world in significant ways.

Reviews

This small volume has an immodest aimto analyze 'how digital media change our day-to-day lifeworld experience.' This analysis consists primarily of two components. First is a description of 'postphenomenology,' which is described as phenomenology leavened with pragmatism and close attention to the experiences of using specific technologies. The second is a series of 'cases,' which include descriptions of the use of screens, earbuds, portable music players, digitally altered ('photoshopped') images, aggregate news services, and athletic performance monitoring. Straightforward descriptions of these familiar digital media experiences are juxtaposed with metaphors (e.g., the 'siren's song of today'), oracular statements by phenomenologists, and, most especially, open-ended questions ('Is the technological weave in our contemporary world a heavy covering' or 'If I cannot hear lifeworld sounds, am I less of a citizen'). Readers should not expect definitive answers to such questions but instead are encouraged to be mindful of how casual, but pervasive, use of digital media can alter basic experiences and thus who people are. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and professionals. * CHOICE *
Fully in line with her own conceptual perspective, Stacey Irwin weaves an impressive tapestry. Effortlessly mapping the technological texture with which digital media overlay our lives nowadays, she not only succeeds in expanding and deepening the field of postphenomenology substantially, she also delivers an essential new contribution to the philosophy of technology as such. Her theoretical survey is crystal-clear, solid and indispensable, but even more of a treat are the empirical cases, in which she playfully though rigorously explores, from a phenomenological angle, many of the digital technologies that characterize contemporary life. Undoubtedly, Digital Media: Human-Technology Connection will become a mainstay of philosophical media research, a book of crucial use to many trying to understand the dynamics of digital media in years to come. -- Yoni Van Den Eede, Free University of Brussels
In this rangy text, Stacey O'Neal Irwin traverses and integrates a wide and diverse terrain. She explores the human-technology connection from a variety of approaches and angles, bringing phenomenological sensibilities and ethnographic thick descriptions to the experience of being digitally mediated.Digital Media well captures the spirit and flavor, the overall texture, of today's digital environments. -- Corey Anton, Grand Valley State University

Author Bio

Stacey O. Irwin is associate professor in the Department of Communication and Theatre at Millersville University of Pennsylvania.