[Air-L] NEW BOOK on digital technology, ideology, and the new capitalism

Eran Fisher eranfisher at gmail.com
Tue Apr 6 06:03:24 PDT 2010


NEW BOOK from Palgrave:

Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age: The Spirit of
Networks<http://www.amazon.com/Media-New-Capitalism-Digital-Age/dp/0230616070>
/
Eran Fisher (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

This book explores the new terrain of network capitalism through the
transformations of the discourse on technology. Rather than viewing such
discourse as either a true or false reflection of reality, Fisher evaluates
the ideological role that technology discourse plays in the legitimation of
a new form of capitalism. Based on an extensive empirical analysis, the book
argues that contemporary technology discourse at one and the same time
promises more personal empowerment through network technology and
legitimates a more privatized, flexible, and precarious economic
constellations. Contrary to the prevailing assumption that sees network
technology as liberating from the rigidity and pitfalls of a stifling,
Fordist capitalism, the book offers a theoretical framework which sees
contemporary technology discourse as an ideology that legitimates the
economic, social, and political arrangements of the new capitalism.

*Praise*
“Fisher’s brilliant book provides cogent reasons why we should be skeptical
about laptop capitalism and its fluidity and instantaneity of
communication…Fisher helps us understand the age of digitality as, above
all, capitalist.”
--Ben Agger, Professor of Sociology and Humanities, University of Texas at
Arlington

“This carefully researched and skillfully written guide to the networked
world doesn’t just demolish the dreamy visions of Utopia 2.0. It provides
precisely the comprehensive analysis we need to understand their power and
persistence.”
--Vincent Mosco, Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society, Queen’s
University, Canada

“This is an audacious systematic ideology-critique of digital capitalism…It
should be placed on your shelf with Castells's book on informational
capitalism, with Dyer-Witheford's on cyber-Marxism or with Mosco's on the
digital sublime.”
--Uri Ram, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben Gurion University,
Israel

*Table of contents*
Introduction   Technology discourse and capitalist legitimation
PART I
       Ch. 1     Capitalism, technology, and the digital discourse
       Ch. 2     Contemporary technology discourse
PART II
       Ch. 3     Network market
       Ch. 4     Network work
       Ch. 5     Network production
       Ch. 6     Network human
PART III
       Ch. 7     Network cosmology and the exhaustion of critique
       Ch. 8     Networks as the techno-political culture of post-Fordism

*About the author*
Eran Fisher is Lecturer at the College of Management – Academic Studies, and
at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel. He completed his PhD in the
Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York in
2008. He writes on Critical Social Theory, technology, and capitalism, and
the intersection of capitalism and network technology in such publications
as the *European Journal of Social Theory*, *Fast Capitalism*, and *Working
USA: The Journal of Labor and Society*.


Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age: The Spirit of
Networks<http://www.amazon.com/Media-New-Capitalism-Digital-Age/dp/0230616070>(Palgrave,
2010)



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