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The Digital Banal

Author: Zara Dinnen

Publisher: Literature Now

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 9780231184281

Introduction: thinking with the digital banal -- David Fincher's grammar of code -- Jonathan Lethem and Mark Amerika's common writing -- Being social in a post-digital world in Catfish and How should a person be? The signs of a social network -- Twenty years of Californian ideology in The Bug and The Circle -- Refresh, update, wait-or living with the digital banal in Chronic city and Refresh refresh -- Speculating on the real estate of the digital banal -- Conclusion: after the digital banal

The Digital Banal

Author: Zara Dinnen

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-01-02

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0231545401

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Contemporary culture is haunted by its media. Yet in their ubiquity, digital media have become increasingly banal, making it harder for us to register their novelty or the scope of the social changes they have wrought. What do we learn about our media environment when we look closely at the ways novelists and filmmakers narrate and depict banal use of everyday technologies? How do we encounter our own media use in scenes of waiting for e-mail, watching eBay bids, programming as work, and worrying about numbers of social media likes, friends, and followers? Zara Dinnen analyzes a range of prominent contemporary novels, films, and artworks to contend that we live in the condition of the “digital banal,” not noticing the affective and political novelty of our relationship to digital media. Authors like Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Sheila Heti, Jonathan Lethem, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead, Mark Amerika, Ellen Ullman, and Danica Novgorodoff and films such as The Social Network and Catfish critique and reveal the ways in which digital labor isolates the individual; how the work of programming has become an operation of power; and the continuation of the “Californian ideology,” which has folded the radical into the rote and the imaginary into the mundane. The works of these writers and artists, Dinnen argues, also offer ways of resisting the more troubling aspects of the effects of new technologies, as well as timely methods for seeing the digital banal as a politics of suppression. Bridging the gap between literary studies and media studies, The Digital Banal recovers the shrouded disturbances that can help us recognize and antagonize our media environment.

Exposed

Author: Emily Hart

Publisher: Europa Edizioni

Published: 2020-11-30

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13:

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The death of Samantha Grey’s mother and imprisonment of her father made her shut everyone out of her life. Including him. Ten years later, the murder of her father brings them back together and now Detective Nate Evans has two mysteries on his hands: a murder to solve and a past of questions that still gnaw at the surface to face. A past he’s tried hard to bury. One that includes her. As Nate and Samantha are forced to work together to bring justice for the dead, it is clear the case is not the only mystery being unearthed between them. They are led down dark, township alleyways, towards drug-dealer territory, and into the box of a decade old cold case… but how long will they take to realize how deep the roots of this case go? Neither of them are prepared for the trials they face as they start digging through Samantha’s twisted family history and exposing the cost of hidden truths. Will the collision of the past and present destroy what little faith they have in finding healing, or will it be the key to solving the decade old mysteries between them and finding redemption in the chaos? Emily Hart is a young South African author. She’s been involved in humanitarian work in the Middle East and half a dozen African countries, meeting people and seeing places that inspire her writing. Emily lives in Stellenbosch with her family and five chickens.

Deceitful Media

Author: Simone Natale

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0190080361

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"Since its inception, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been nurtured by the dream - cherished by some scientists while dismissed as unrealistic by others - that it will lead to forms of intelligence similar or alternative to human life. However, AI might be more accurately described as a range of technologies providing a convincing illusion of intelligence - in other words, not much the creation of intelligent beings, but rather of technologies that are perceived by humans as such. Deceitful Media argues that AI resides also and especially in the perception of human users. Exploring the history of AI from its origins in the Turing Test to contemporary AI voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri, Simone Natale demonstrates that our tendency to project humanity into things shapes the very functioning and implications of AI. He argues for a recalibration of the relationship between deception and AI that helps recognize and critically question how computing technologies mobilize specific aspects of users' perception and psychology in order to create what we call "AI." Introducing the concept of "banal deception," which describes deceptive mechanisms and practices that are embedded in AI, the book shows that deception is as central to AI's functioning as the circuits, software, and data that make it run. Delving into the relationship between AI and deception, Deceitful Media thus reformulates the debate on AI on the basis of a new assumption: that what machines are changing is primarily us, humans. If 'intelligent' machines might one day revolutionize life, the book provocatively suggests, they are already transforming how we understand and carry out social interactions"--

Reproductions of Banality

Author: Alice Yaeger Kaplan

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 145290149X

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Reproductions of Banality was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. An established fascist state has never existed in France, and after World War II there was a tendency to blame the Nazi Occupation for the presence of fascists within the country. Yet the memory of fascism within their ranks still haunts French intellectuals, and questions about a French version of fascist ideology have returned to the political forefront again and again in the years since the war. In Reproductions of Banality, Alice Yaegar Kaplan investigates the development of fascist ideology as it was manifested in the culture of prewar and Occupied France. Precisely because it existed only in a "gathering" or formative stage, and never achieved the power that brings with it a bureaucratic state apparatus, French fascism never lost its utopian, communal elements, or its consequent aesthetic appeal. Kaplan weighs this fascist aesthetic and its puzzling power of attraction by looking closely at its material remains: the narratives, slogans, newspapers, and film criticism produced by a group of writers who worked in Paris in the 1930s and early 1940s — their "most real moment." These writers include Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Lucien Rebatat, Robert Brasillach, and Maurice Bardeche, as well as two precursors of French fascism, Georges Sorel and the Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti, who made of the airplane an industrial carrier of sexual fantasies and a prime mover in the transit from futurism to fascism. Kaplan's work is grounded in the major Marxist and psychoanalytic theories of fascism and in concepts of banality and mechanical reproduction that draw upon Walter Benjamin. Emphasizing the role played by the new technologies of sight and sound, she is able to suggest the nature of the long-repressed cultural and political climate that produced French fascism, and to show—by implication — that the mass marketing of ideology in democratic states bears a family resemblance to the fascist mode of an earlier time.

Email and the Everyday

Author: Esther Milne

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2024-07-02

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 0262552663

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An exploration of how email is experienced, understood, and materially structured as a practice spanning our everyday domestic and work lives. Despite its many obituaries, email is not dead. As a global mode of business and personal communication, email outstrips newer technologies of online interaction; it is deeply embedded in our everyday lives. And yet—perhaps because the ubiquity of email has obscured its study—this is the first scholarly book devoted to email as a key historical, social, and commercial site of digital communication in our everyday lives. In Email and the Everyday, Esther Milne examines how email is experienced, understood, and materially structured as a practice spanning the domestic and institutional spaces of daily life. Email experiences range from the routine and banal to the surprising and shocking. Drawing on interviews and online surveys, Milne focuses on both the material and the symbolic properties of email. She maps the development of email as a technology and as an industry; considers institutional uses of email, including “bureaucratic intensity” of workplace email and the continuing vibrancy of email groups; and examines what happens when private emails end up in public archives, discussing the Enron email dataset and Hillary Clinton's infamous private server. Finally, Milne explores the creative possibilities of email, connecting eighteenth-century epistolary novels to contemporary “email novels,” discussing the vernacular expression of ASCII art and mail art, and examining email works by Carl Steadman, Miranda July, and others.

The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction

Author: Daniel O'Gorman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 629

ISBN-13: 1134743777

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The study of contemporary fiction is a fascinating yet challenging one. Contemporary fiction has immediate relevance to popular culture, the news, scholarly organizations, and education – where it is found on the syllabus in schools and universities – but it also offers challenges. What is ‘contemporary’? How do we track cultural shifts and changes? The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction takes on this challenge, mapping key literary trends from the year 2000 onwards, as the landscape of our century continues to take shape around us. A significant and central intervention into contemporary literature, this Companion offers essential coverage of writers who have risen to prominence since then, such as Hari Kunzru, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, Ali Smith, A. L. Kennedy, Hilary Mantel, Marilynne Robinson, and Colson Whitehead. Thirty-eight essays by leading and emerging international scholars cover topics such as: • Identity, including race, sexuality, class, and religion in the twenty-first century; • The impact of technology, terrorism, activism, and the global economy on the modern world and modern literature; • The form and format of twenty-first century literary fiction, including analysis of established genres such as the pastoral, graphic novels, and comedic writing, and how these have been adapted in recent years. Accessible to experts, students, and general readers, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of contemporary literature.