{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","title":"Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781349379743","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","id":"8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","uuid":"8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","title":"Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks","normalized_title":"mediaandnewcapitalisminthedigitalagethespiritofnetworks","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781349379743","isbns":["9781349379743","9780230106062"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":258,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Media%20and%20New%20Capitalism%20in%20the%20Digital%20Age%20The%20Spirit%20of%20Networks","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a/search"},"page":{"printed_page":27,"pdf_page":33,"physical_index":33,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"66cb06ab14e3420c7a85877a196a5775bd814f27eb7aa01f73845d957cc1f75c"},"chapter":"Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age","content":"2001) during the 1980s and 1990s. Such analyses assert contemporary technology discourse to be an ideology of the free market, according to which network technology is leading to “the apotheosis ofthe market—an electronic exchange within which everybody can become a free trader” (Barbrook and Cameron 1996, emphasis mine), that is, an embodied ideal of the free market (Robins and Webster 1999, 67). Likewise, in The Digital Sublime (2004), Mosco understands the digital discourse as the myth of our time. By insisting on digital technology as ushering a historical break, it “mask[s] the continuities that make the power we observe today . . . in the global market . . . very much a deepening and extension of old forms of power” (Mosco 2004, 83).\n\nSuch works analyze the digital discourse as an ideology in the Marxist sense of the term: an ideational veil that conceals material contradictions. While such approach is insightful in its own right, it also misses an aspect of the digital discourse that I like to highlight in my analysis. Rather than assessing the truth value of the claims made by the digital discourse, I endeavor to decipher the particular historical form that such discourse assumes and assess its legitimation value. Analyzing the digital discourse as a sociological unit of analysis in its own right (i.e., as a social reality in itself rather than simply a report on social reality) will give us insight into the particular form that technology discourse assumes. Such analysis will show the dual character of contemporary technology discourse, which promises both an overcoming of the alienating components of capitalism because of its integration with network technology and a naturalization and depoliticization of the continuation, and even exacerbation, of its exploitative components.\n\nBy investigating the discourse on technology this book hopes to achieve two goals: first, to register the new keywords and terms, frameworks and truisms, metaphors and models that are used to account for the new lived realities of contemporary digital capitalism, and second, to explain the hegemonic, ideological, and legitimatory dimensions of this new discursive universe. In short, this book will explain the texts and subtexts of the new techno-political order of capitalist societies. The multiple social, political, and ideological coordinates of technology make its study dynamic, contingent, and historical and require the analysis of technology’s specific constellations in a particular point of time. Hence, a study of the digital discourse highlights both the continuity and changes in the history of the discourse on technology in modernity.\n\nWith these particular theoretical and analytical lenses I hope to show the digital discourse to be not a simple description of the realities of network capitalism but rather a discourse that legitimates—through a “technologistic” framework (Webster and Robins 1999)—the new constellations of power entailed by the new stage of capitalism. At the center of this discourse, I argue, is the promise—anchored in network technology—of capitalism to enhance individual emancipation by alleviating alienation and the concurrent suppression of the promise to enhance social emancipation by alleviating exploitation, which has been a staple of the legitimation discourse on technology during Fordism.\n\nCapitalism<sub>,</sub> Technology<sub>,</sub> and the Digital Discourse\n\n27","previous_page":26,"next_page":28}