Chaos Media: A Sonic Economy of Digital Space

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Description

The contemporary media landscape might be described in simple terms as a digital terrain where real and virtual worlds collide. Stephen Kennedy investigates the concept of our digital space leading up to the digital turn of the 1990s to fully understand how our perceptions of orientation in space in time was altered. Chaos Media: A Sonic Economy of Digital Space re-thinks the five fundamental paths to our contemporary understanding of the digital age: cultural, political, economic, scientific, and aesthetic, and ties them together to form a coherent whole in order to demonstrate how critical thinking can be reconfigured using a methodological approach that uses 'chaos' and 'complexity' as systematic tools for studying contemporary mediated space. Kennedy introduces the concept of Sonic Economy, a methodology that allows for a critical engagement with the heterogeneous elements of an information society wherein the dispersion of discrete elements is manifest but not always clearly visible.

Reviews

Digitally induced sound has become a key element of contemporary societies, moving back and forth across various media as both shuttle and content. But appreciating this fact is not the same as understanding it. This book is a step towards understanding this new sonic economy, one which never makes the mistake of reducing it to just matters of political economy. It therefore provides a rich and accomplished account of new forms of sonic patterning and their spatial manifestations which is simultaneously a technological reckoning and a signpost to the future. * Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor and President, University of Warwick, UK *
We all too often privilege sight, at the expense of the other senses. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from Leibniz to McLuhan to complexity theory, Stephen Kennedy explains why this is wrong, especially when it comes to the digital spaces that we inhabit today. Chaos Media calls on us to make an acoustic turn, and to listen to those aspects of our technological environment that cannot be visualized * Steven Shaviro, Professor of English, Wayne State University, USA. *

Author Bio

Stephen Kennedy is a researcher and lecturer in critical theory and the digital arts at the University of Greenwich, UK.