Our daily lives our culture & our politics are now shaped by the digital condition as large numbers of people involve themselves in contentious negotiations of meaning in ever more
Dimensions of life from the trivial to the profound They are making use of the capacities of complex communication infrastructures currently dominated by social mass media such as Twitter & Facebook on which they have come to depend Amidst a confusing plurality Felix Stalder argues that are three key constituents of this condition the use of existing cultural materials for one's own production the way in which new meaning is established as a collective endeavour & the underlying role of algorithms & automated decision-making processes that reduce & give shape to massive volumes of data These three characteristics define what Stalder calls 'the digital condition' Stalder also examines the profound political implications of this new culture We stand at a crossroads between post-democracy & the commons a concentration of power among the few or a genuine widening of participation with the digital condition offering the potential for starkly different outcomes This ambitious & wide-ranging theory of our contemporary digital condition will be of great interest to students & scholars in media & communications cultural studies & social political & cultural theory as well as to a wider readership interested in the ways in which culture & politics are changing today