Digital Media: Human-Technology Connection

by Marie Kukula-Tyner, Don Ihde (Foreword by)

Overview

Digital Media: Human-Technology Connection examines what it is like to be alive in today’s technologically textured world and showcases specific digital media technologies that makes this kind of world possible. So much of human experience occurs through digital media that it is time to pause and consider the process and proliferation of digital consumption and humanity’s role in it through an interdisciplinary array of sources from philosophy, media studies, film studies, media ecology and philosophy of technology. When placed in the interpretive lens of artifact, instrument, and tool, digital media can be studied in a uniquely different way, as a kind of technology that pushes the boundaries on production, distribution and communication and alters the way humans and technology connect with each other and the world.

The book is divided into two sections to provide overarching definitions and case study specifics. Section one, Raw Materials, examines pertinent concepts like digital media, philosophy of technology, phenomenology and postphenomenology by author Stacey O Irwin. In Section Two, Feeling the Weave, Irwin uses conversations with digital media users and other written materials along with the postphenomenological framework to explore nine empirical cases that focus on deep analysis of screens, sound, photo manipulation, data-mining, aggregate news and self-tracking. Postphenomenological concepts like multistability, variational theory, microperception, macroperception, embodiment, technological mediation, and culture figure prominently in the investigation.

The aim of the book is to recognize that digital media technologies and the content it creates and proliferates are not neutral. They texture the world in multiple and varied ways that transform human abilities, augment experience and pattern the world in significant and comprehensive ways.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780739186541
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	04/29/2016
Series:	Welten Ostasiens / Worlds of East Asia / Mondes de l'Extreme Orient Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	198
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Stacey O. Irwin is associate professor in the Department of Communication and Theatre at Millersville University of Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Section 1: Raw Materials
Chapter 1: Exploring the Texture
Chapter 2: Describing Digital Media
Chapter 3: Digging
Section 2: Feeling the Weave
Chapter 4: Case: The Screen
Chapter 5: Case: Dwelling in digital Sound
Chapter 6: Case: Earbud Embodiment
Chapter 7: Case: Being-In-The World-With my iPod
Chapter 8: Case: Dubstep
Chapter 9: Case: The Photoshop Aesthetic
Chapter 10: Case: Data mining
Chapter 11: Case: Aggregate News
Chapter 12: Case: Self Tracking
Epilogue

Editorial Reviews

In this rangy text, Stacey O'Neal Irwin traverses and integrates a wide and diverse terrain. She explores the human-technology connection from a variety of approaches and angles, bringing phenomenological sensibilities and ethnographic thick descriptions to the experience of being digitally mediated.Digital Media well captures the spirit and flavor, the overall texture, of today's digital environments.

Corey Anton

Fully in line with her own conceptual perspective, Stacey Irwin weaves an impressive tapestry. Effortlessly mapping the ‘technological texture’ with which digital media overlay our lives nowadays, she not only succeeds in expanding and deepening the field of postphenomenology substantially, she also delivers an essential new contribution to the philosophy of technology as such. Her theoretical survey is crystal-clear, solid and indispensable, but even more of a treat are the empirical cases, in which she playfully though rigorously explores, from a phenomenological angle, many of the digital technologies that characterize contemporary life. Undoubtedly, Digital Media: Human-Technology Connection will become a mainstay of philosophical media research, a book of crucial use to many trying to understand the dynamics of digital media in years to come.

Yoni Van Den Eede

This small volume has an immodest aim—to analyze 'how digital media change our day-to-day lifeworld experience.' This analysis consists primarily of two components. First is a description of 'postphenomenology,' which is described as phenomenology leavened with pragmatism and close attention to the experiences of using specific technologies. The second is a series of 'cases,' which include descriptions of the use of screens, earbuds, portable music players, digitally altered ('photoshopped') images, aggregate news services, and athletic performance monitoring. Straightforward descriptions of these familiar digital media experiences are juxtaposed with metaphors (e.g., the 'siren's song of today'), oracular statements by phenomenologists, and, most especially, open-ended questions ('Is the technological weave in our contemporary world a heavy covering?' or 'If I cannot hear lifeworld sounds, am I less of a citizen?'). Readers should not expect definitive answers to such questions but instead are encouraged to be mindful of how casual, but pervasive, use of digital media can alter basic experiences and thus who people are. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and professionals.

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