ABSTRACT
This book is about the impact of contemporary technology and new forms of media on cultural life in the present. In this sense it joins a wide variety of other analyses that have drawn our attention to how computing technologies became a pivotal factor in human experience over the past several decades, not only altering forms of communication and the shape of various industries, but also having a more general eect on social life in its entirety, on politics both local and global, and on “nature” as both our ecological environment as well as what we take to be “natural.” However, the central arguments of this book cut against what largely remains the default conception, or critique, of such phenomena within both cultural theory of the humanities and social sciences as well within popular culture as a whole. Rather than presuming that increased centrality of technology and media within culture has led to an increased standardization, “dehumanization,” or homogenization of culture and human experience, this project argues instead that the fundamental logic of contemporary technology and media has been one of an increased “humanization” of social and technical systems of diverse types, one in which increased flexibility, the mimicking of biological systems of feedback and adaptation in mechanical realms, and the microtargeting of the dispositions and desires of increasingly smaller groups of people have become the key drivers of economic and cultural production in the present.
