Description: "The Digital and Its Discontents analyzes universal technological principles-in particular, the binary logic-to show that they encourage certain ways of thinking while making others more challenging or impossible. Pointing us toward a more satisfying relationship between our digital lives and our nondigital selves, Aden Evens argues for a radical change in how we incorporate technology into our lives"--
Review Quotes:
"This book argues that the digital's decisive discreteness is actually an intensification of a dominant predigital ideology. Such a perspective supposes a parsable world that blinds us to an actuality of elusive contingency. Drawing on deep understandings of digital technology and philosophy, Aden Evens demystifies crucial arcane features with startlingly lucid and accessible explanations, all while summoning a world that defies explanation."--Katherine Behar, Baruch College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
"The Digital and Its Discontents will be illuminating for anyone who has ever twisted their speech into discrete, mechanical sounds to please a voice-recognition system. Determined to resist the digital imperative to speak, write, think, and ultimately be like a machine, Aden Evens reaches for contingency as the ontological spice that distinguishes actuality from virtuality. And he flavors his formalist approach with vignettes that compare human and digital relationality in scenes that range from playing a video game or a cello to hitting a baseball or squishing a lemon."--Marcel O'Gorman, founding director, Critical Media Lab, University of Waterloo
"Anyone interested in digital studies will undoubtedly find [The Digital and Its Discontents] informative and useful."--CHOICE
"In this thought-provoking, vocabulary intensive examination of digital technologies and their interconnected relationship to the societies that utilize them, Evens ultimately urges readers to adopt a more intentional approach to interactions with the digital world."--The Dartmouth Review
"[The Digital and Its Discontents] is not only important but necessary...so clearly and concisely written, not only with the necessary words but also with engaging flourishes, and it all but reviews itself in what proves to be a brief initial introduction." --Computational Culture