Digimodernism

Digimodernism by Alan Kirby

Almost without anybody noticing, a new cultural paradigm has come center stage, displacing an exhausted and increasingly marginalised postmodernism. Dr. Alan Kirby calls this cultural paradigm digimodernism, a name comprising both its central technical mode and its privileging of the fingers and thumbs in its use. The increasing irrelevancy of postmodernism requires a new theory to underpin our current digital culture. Beginning with the Internet (digimodernism's most important locus), then taking into account television, cinema, computer games, music, radio, etc., Kirby analyzes the emergence and implications of these diverse media, coloring our cultural landscape with new ideas on texts and how they work. This new kind of text produces distinctive forms of author and reader/viewer, which, in turn, lead to altered notions of authority, 'truth' and legitimation. With users intervening physically in the creation of texts, our electronically-dependent society is becoming more involved in the grand narrative. To clarify these trends, Kirby compares them to the contrasting tendencies of the preceding postmodern era. In defining this new cultural age, the author avoids both facile euphoria and pessimistic fatalism, aiming instead to understand and thereby gain control of a cultural mode which seems, as though from nowhere, to have engulfed our society.

[Digimodernism] provides a convincing explanation for the plethora of cultural phenomena and practices Kirby groups under digimodernism… Kirby’s concepts and examples offer a challenging new lens through which to investigate the world-- Catriona Bonfiglioli, Media Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia * Discourse & Communication *

Alan Kirby is a writer and researcher in twentieth-century literature and culture. He has published on subjects including Stephen Poliakoff, John Fowles, spy fiction, and James Joyce. He received his PhD from the University of Exeter and is currently based in Oxford.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781441175281
ISBN 10	1441175288
Title	Digimodernism
Author	Alan Kirby
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Continuum Publishing Corporation
Year published	2009-05-01
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable