From the 15th century until the mid-1990s, media based on the printed word--books, magazines, handbills, newspapers, and journals--dominated society. Today, an onslaught of digital media centered on the Internet is developing at a breathtaking pace, destabilizing the very idea of printed media and fundamentally reshaping our world in the process. This study explores how Internet entities like Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Google, and gadgets such as digital cameras, cell phones, video games, robots, drones, and all things MacIntosh have affected everything from the book industry and copyright law to how we conduct social relationships and consider knowledge. Including a chronology of significant events in the history of the digital explosion, this investigation of the often overlooked "shadow" side of new technology chronicles life during a radical societal shift and follows the process whereby one world disintegrates while another takes its place. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Table of Contents:
Table of Contents Acknowledgments      Incipit      Incipit      Introduction to a Catastrophic Bifurcation      When Worlds Close Down Extinction Event The Internet vs. the Printing Press The Internet and Radio Destabilizations First, a Brief Note on the Self-Luminous Nature of the New Technologies      PART I: IN WHICH THE INTERNET RECREATES THE WORLD-AS-CAVERN      1. Amazon.com, the Kindle and the Collapse of the Book Industry      Word vs. Byte Not a Bookstore A Transcendentalist Operation E-Readers Retrievals and Disappearances 2. YouTube and the Twilight of Copyright      Glass-Cased Installation An Evanescent Horizon Partial Objects Electronic Decay Rate Founders Cultural Memory Free Movies The Gutenberg Episteme Diasporic Public Spheres The Hitler Parodies 3. On Facebook We’re All Being Flattened Together      Faciality The Mask Is Inimical to Facebook You Have Friend Request The Disappearance of Neighborhoods The World Isn’t Flat, You Are 4. Wikipedia; or, The Catastrophe of Knowledge      Not an Encyclopedia A Miniature History of the Book Back to Wikipedia Knowledge Crisis Borges, Prophet of Wikipedia Who Needs It? 5. WikiLeaks and the Death of Culture      Intelligible Sphere Armor of Light The Cultural Function of Secrets Disrupting Culture The Death of the Event The Event That Never Happened Information War 6. On the Metaphysics of Google Earth      Some Concluding Comments to Part I: A Miniature History of Capitalism (or, The Evolution of Aladdin’s Cave)      PART II: A COLLECTION OF GADGETS FOR A MUSEUM OF THE FUTURE      7. The Mythology and Metaphysics of the Macintosh      The Myth The Commercial The Subtle Body of the Text Luminous Technology The One Non-Negotiable Element of the Personal Computer A Brief History of Invisible Worlds Digital Subtle Matter in Cyberspace 8. Digital Photography and the End of the Visionary Image      The World’s First Photograph Syncopated Images A Confession The Necessity of the Negative Literal Images Photographic Haiku Edward Weston Mapplethorpe’s Daydream The Luminous Images of Edward Burtynsky The Loss of Visionary Coherence The Elimination of the Hand Elegy for Analogue 9. How Cell Phones Disrupt the Flows      Derailment Revolutions Human Prostheses of the Matrix The Invasion Disembodied Voices 10. The Killing Eye: Video Games, Surrogate Violence and the Dismantling of Social Machines      Prophet of the Labyrinth Decoding the Flows The Individual as Epic Hero Grand Theft Auto and J.G. Ballard World of Warcraft: Hell Is Other People 11. Robots, Drones and the Disappearance of the Human Being      How Drones Retrieve Aristotelian Physics Video Game Training The Eye of Horus Heroic The Two Revolutions Become The Equation Facts and Figures The Superfluous Human The Hive Society 12. A Few Words on the Ovei Pod and the End of History      Electronic Isolation Tank The Bygone Age of the Macrosphere The Personal (and Very Private) Microsphere Some Concluding Comments to Part II: A Miniature History of War and Technology (Since 1815)      Postscript on the Dialectic of Art and Technology      Appendix: Chronology of Key Events      Notes      Bibliography      Index