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"David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity rationalised capitalism's transformation during an extraordinary year: 1989. It gave theoretical expression to a material and cultural reality that was just then getting properly started – globalisation and postmodernity – whilst highlighting the geo-spatial limits to accumulation imposed by our planet.
However this landmark publication, author Robert Hassan argues, did not address the arrival of digital technology, the quantum leap represented by the move from an analogue world to a digital economy and the rapid creation of a global networked society. Considering first the contexts of 1989 and Harvey's work, then the idea of humans as analogue beings he argues this arising new human condition of digitality leads to alienation not only from technology but also the environment. This condition he suggests, is not an ideology of time and space but a reality stressing that Harvey's time-space compression takes on new features including those of 'outward' and 'inward' globalisation and the commodification of all spheres of existence.
Lastly the author considers culture's role drawing on Rahel Jaeggi's theories to make the case for a post-modern Marxism attuned to the most significant issue of our age. Stimulating and theoretically wide-ranging The Condition of Digitality recognises post-modernity's radical new form as a reality and the urgent need to assert more democratic control over digitality."

chapter 1 Th is Other Temporality -- chapter 2 Th e Ghost in the Machine -- chapter 3 Everything Nowadays is Ultra -- chapter 4 We Are All Still Mesopotamian -- chapter 5 Th e Chronic Distraction of Everyday Life -- chapter 6 Canon -- chapter 7 Considerations on the Prospects for Political Change.

"Connections between time, technology, and the processes of reading and writing make clear the links between experiences of what appear to be quite different phenomena. Reading and writing have functioned together in a particular way to build the world as we have known it for three thousand years. These interacting processes have now been transformed at their core and are building a different world, one where certainties of the previous era are disappearing and being displaced by what the author sees as a chronic and pervasive mode of cognitive distraction. Robert Hassan offers a perspective permeated by a sense of history, beginning with the invention of writing and the development of the skill of reading. Together with technological developments, these provide a unique view of the trajectory of modernity into late-modernity, and illustrate how the arc of progress has transformed. New modes of time, technology, and reading and writing are helping create a faster world where we know less about more-and forget what we know evermore quickly. What is the "time" of a thought? Is it possible to measure thinking? Can we consider knowledge or information, or reading and writing, as having temporal "rhythms"? These are questions Hassan tries to answer. So unfamiliar are we to thinking in such terms that they sound impossible. To a significant degree, time, thinking, and many forms of knowledge are the fruits of subjective experience. We connect experiences at superficial levels, where people have different experiences that may be objectively the same, but our interpretations will always diverge in respect of the "reality" we confront. This intersection of philosophy and communication takes the reader into new realms of analysis."--Provided by publisher.

What are we to make of the information society? Many prominent theorists have argued it to be the most profound and comprehensive transformation of economy, culture and politics since the rise of the industrial way of life in the 18th century. Some saw its arrival in a positive light, where the dreams of democracy, of 'connectivity' and 'efficiency' constituted a break with the old ways. But other thinkers viewed it more in terms of the recurrent nightmare of capitalism, where the processes of exploitation, commodification and alienation are given much freer rein than ever before. In this book

Explaining and comparing the rise and effects of the 'empires' of clock time and 'network time', Empires of Speedargues with power and clarity that our network society is hurtling fast through a volatile present into an increasingly precarious future.

The suffusion of the economy, culture, and society with digital interconnectivity is known as the network society. In this innovative book, Robert Hassan unpacks the dynamics of this new information order and shows how media and politics have been affected. Drawing on ideas from media theory, cultural studies, and the politics of the newly evolving "networked civil society," Hassan argues that the network society is shot-through with contradictions and in a state of deep flux. Vital reading for those wishing to understand the network society. For undergraduate and postgraduate students of medi

International audience ; The move toward digitality and its individual-level spread through computer applications (apps) is transforming how we communicate. A major component of this transformation is the political process: both how it is enacted and how effective it is for the promotion of democracy. The political process has become both faster and "lighter". The acceleration of the political process has received considerable attention over the last decade, but the essay introduces the idea of a "lightness" that accompanies acceleration. This is connected to digitality and its concomitant diminution of our inherent human analogue capacities. The analogue capacities that enabled democratic politics in its modern version have been eclipsed by what are their digital antitheses. An analogue engendered political process continues to exist, but it functions at the elite levels of business and government; whereas the digitally-created "lightness" of the virtual sphere constitutes the political process for the growing millions. The essay argues that this is an essentially alienating sphere that offers little by way of the traction and roots necessary for democratic and inclusive politics to grow and flourish.

The essay argues that a proper ethical foundation for the political processes underlying liberal democracy is unattainable in a globalized society made possible through networked computers – and the transformed relationship with temporality that is generated by them. The essay brings together the computer ethics of Norbert Wiener and the temporal ethics of Hans Jonas to show that both original visions for a better world are unrealizable in the unanticipated context of what is termed 'network time'. The essay argues further that to develop an ethical basis for liberal democracy, digital logic and its effects must be contrasted with that which they ceaselessly colonize and marginalize today: an irreducibly analogue world, with analogue politics, analogue technologies and analogue humans who conceived and developed liberal democracy as a cornerstone of the project of Enlightenment. Through contrast and critique, the essay reveals the difficulty for any ethico-political project within the digital and argues that the present post-modern relationship with computing, in which 'market forces' determine technological forms and applications, is socially destructive and must be brought under a new aegis of democratic and common responsibility.

I argue that we cannot allow time, and our understandings of it, to be elusive any longer. For reasons I shall develop below, our relationship with time is at present undergoing another profound transformation through the influence of networked information and communication technologies (ICTs). This transformation is political as well as technological, and its radical nature has made salient the question of time and the pressing need to consider time as a sovereign realm in the same way that we consider space to be. Adapted from the source document.

Marx and Engels warned that class struggle would result "either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." This essay argues that through the effect of neoliberal networked economy, we have had both a "revolutionary reconstitution of society" and the "common ruin" of both bourgeois and proletarian classes. Their "common ruin" is expressed through their lack of viability as the basis for their respective democratic projects—liberalism and socialism. The revolution in information technologies and the rise of the neoliberal network society has transformed the nature of political power that had been founded upon traditional industrial forms of production and social–political organization. The essay develops a theory of technological change and a subsequent transformation in our relationship with time. By emphasizing the dialectic of technological–temporal change in the nature and quality of political power, we see that the very basis of both power and politics has become transformed in ways that negatively affect the potential of democratic forms of power, liberal, or socialist. The essay ends with a call for a new political approach to time, a "temporal sovereignty" to revive and renew the basis of democracy within a networked society.

The essay argues that the dynamic conjunction of neo-liberal globalization and the information technology revolution has created not only a new relationship with time – which itself is having an immensely consequential (if under-theorized) effect – but also a transformed
relationship with the written word. Today reading and writing are increasingly conducted through liquid crystal display – a new technological form of the ancient technology of the printed word. The printed word has become liquid. This essay argues that liquid and accelerated and burgeoning
volumes of words that are overwhelmingly oriented towards market-driven instrumentalized ends are creating a deficit in the accumulation and tradition of critical knowledge production and its dissemination. The negative effects of the knowledge deficit are manifold, but the most salient is
in the realm of politics, where questions of power, agency and the democratic process become increasingly problematic.

The essay analyses the global economic crisis from a critical perspective on the function of capital accumulation in space-time. It argues that the relative 'speed of collapse' is a historically new phenomenon that has been generated through the neoliberal and ICT driven mode of capitalism that has dominated since the 1970s. The 'speed of collapse', I argue, will be followed by a rapid financially led recovery that signals not that the system is self-stabilizing and durable, but that the system is out of control. This lack of control and the irreconcilable effects of space-time upon a constantly accumulating capital with fewer and fewer profitable outlets mean that a future system crisis is both inevitable and will carry greater destructive resonance.