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You email your report, check the position of your shares in the stock market on the PDA alerts, while you play your latest A. R. Rahman favourite on the iPod, and upload the new patches for your favourite simulation game all with(in) the same 3x5 device that fits snugly into your palm. Whether it is the games you play online, the blogs and photographs you share over Facebook with your friends, the 3G enabled phone on which you get directions to the Italian restaurant for dinner, everyday life is now digital.
Digital Cool examines life in the age of New Media. From Facebook to internet dating, from condensed networked cities to mobile phones, from iPads to iPhones, transgenic art to robotics, Twitter and cyberspace avatars to Wikis it traces how human lives are not only heavily mediated by Cool technologies, but how the technologies themselves are mediated by human lives.
The volume proposes that Digital Cool is simultaneously individualisation with its make-believe detachment (Cool), and a fierce collectivism facilitated by the New Media. We have the young man waiting for the tube while swishing the pages of the recent bestseller on his iPad, indifferent to his surroundings, and we have the fury of the mainly online Pink Chaddis campaign (2009), or even the collaborative practice of radical political and media critique through blogs on Kafila.org.
Whether it is President Obamas first State of the Union address during which some members of the US Congress kept up continuous tweets, or the news of the crash of US Airways Flight 1549 into the Hudson with its incredible landing and rescue Twitter is the preferred mode of updating the world of eventful and ordinary news. While sharing videos through YouTube, one finds a new form of participatory culture and belonging emerge.
The author thus shows how new forms of the community, political activism, identity-making are empowered, enthused, informed and mediated by digital technology.
Culture jamming, participatory journalism and commons knowledge are all components of the activist new media but also of popular culture.
It is wide-ranging, accessible and incisive with a comprehensive Introduction, consolidated Bibliography and also an extensive Index. ISBN-9788125047308
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Pages : 264
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