The Participant by Christopher M Kelty

The Participant by Christopher M Kelty

Participation is everywhere today. It has been formalized, measured, standardized, scaled up, network-enabled, and sent around the world. Platforms, algorithms, and software offer to make participation easier, but new technologies have had the opposite effect. We find ourselves suspicious of how participation extracts our data or monetizes our emotions, and the more procedural participation becomes, the more it seems to recede from our grasp. In this book, Christopher M. Kelty traces four stories of participation across the twentieth century, showing how they are part of a much longer-term problem in relation to the individual and collective experience of representative democracy. Kelty argues that in the last century or so, the power of participation has dwindled; over time, it has been formatted in ways that cramp and dwarf it, even as drive to participate has spread to nearly every kind of human endeavor, all around the world. The Participant is a historical ethnography of the concept of participation, investigating how the concept has evolved into the form it takes today. It is a book that asks, "why do we participate?" And sometimes, "why do we refuse?"

Christopher M. Kelty is professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds appointments in the Institute for Society and Genetics, the Department of Information Studies, and the Department of Anthropology. He is the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780226666761
ISBN 10	022666676X
Title	The Participant
Author	Christopher M Kelty
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The University of Chicago Press
Year published	2019-11-22
Number of pages	344
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable