Description:
This is the first systematic theorization of digital modernity, arguing that the digital age cannot be understood apart from the long historical arc of modernity.
Review Quotes:
A sweeping view of how our digital age unfolds from the long history of modernity with all its tensions of determinism versus contingency, and Western universalism versus global multiplicity. Smithies's astonishingly broad, detailed, and interlaced knowledge of computation, philosophy, and history undergirds a powerful guiding message.
Alan Liu, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara
Digital Modernity is an essential guide for anyone seeking to understand not just what digital technologies do but how they are deeply entangled in modernity's contested pasts and what they mean for our collective futures.
Katherine Bode, Professor of Digital Literary Studies, Australian National University
The great contribution of James Smithies is to learn and to bridge the digital revolution and the tradition of critical theory and sociology. This is pioneering work, full of insight and provocation, addressing both text and context, opening up the pathways of understanding.
Peter Beilharz, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, La Trobe University