Technology and Democracy: Toward A Critical Theory of Digital Technologies, Technopolitics, and Technocapitalism

✍ Scribed by Douglas Kellner

• Publisher: Springer VS
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 305
• Series: Medienkulturen im digitalen Zeitalter
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

As we enter a new millennium, it is clear that we are in the midst of one of the most dramatic technological revolutions in history that is changing everything from the ways that we work, communicate, participate in politics, and spend our leisure time. The technological revolution centers on computer, information, communication, and multimedia technologies, is often interpreted as the beginnings of a knowledge or information society, and therefore ascribes technologies a central role in every aspect of life. This Great Transformation poses tremendous challenges to critical social theorists, citizens, and educators to rethink their basic tenets, to deploy the media in creative and productive ways, and to restructure the workplace, social institutions, and schooling to respond constructively and progressively to the technological and social changes that we are now experiencing.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
1 Introduction: Technology and the Demands of Democracy
For a Critical Theory of Digital Technology
Theorizing Technocapitalism and the Information Society
Metaphors and Ideologies for the Technological Society
Technocapitalism, the Infotainment Society and the Info-Entertainment Postindustrial Complex
Technopolitics and New Public Spheres
Some Concluding Remarks
2 Metaphors of Cyberspace and Digital Technologies
Anthropomorphic Metaphors, the Self, and the Body
Metaphors of Activity and Movement
Nature and the Naturalizing of Technology
Travel and the Frontier: Metaphors of Adventure
Military and Space Metaphors
Metaphors of Technoculture
Some Concluding Comments
3 Technology and Alienation
Technophobia vs. Technophilia
Alienation and Technology
Appropriate and Sustainable Technology
Concluding Comments
4 The Media, Democracy, and Spectacle
The Rise of Partisan Corporate Broadcasting Programs and Networks and the Obama Era
The Trump Era
The Trump Resistance
The COVID-19 Spectacle and the Downfall of Trump
5 Intellectuals, Citizens, and Digital Technologies in a New Era of Struggle
The Public Sphere and the Intellectual
Sartre, the Public Intellectual, and the Postmodern Challenge
New Technologies, New Public Spheres, and New Intellectuals
New Tasks for the Public Intellectual
Alternative and Oppositional Media
From the 2011 Arab Uprisings Through Occupy and the Trump Resistance
Media and Cultural Activism in the Trump Era
Concluding Remarks
6 Globalization, Technopolitics and Revolution
Theorizing Globalization Critically
Technopolitics and Oppositional Political Movements
The Global Movement against Capitalist Globalization
Technopolitics: A Contested Terrain
Toward a Cosmopolitan Globalization
Some Concluding Remarks on Technopolitics and Globalization
7 Virilio, War, and Technology
Speed, Politics, and Technology
War, Technology, and Civilization
Disappearance and Loss: Virilio’s Complaint
Virilio, Baudrillard and the Present Moment
War, Cinema, and Representation: Vision Machines
Summing Up: Virilio, War, and Technology
8 The Vicissitudes of High-Tech War
Cyberwarriors and Cyberwar
Infowar and Technological Armageddon
Donald Trump, Cyberwar, and the Russian Intervention
Trump, Russia, and Election 2016
Social Media Complicity in Trump’s Election and Trump’s Assault on Democracy
9 Kubrick’s 2001 and Vision of Techno-Dystopia
Stanley Kubrick’s Visionary Cinema
The Demise of Democracy and the Individual in 2001
Multiple Allegories of 2001: A Multiperspectivist Reading
10 Digital Technologies, Multi-Literacies, and Democracy: Toward a Reconstruction of Education
Digital Technologies and Literacies in a Changing World
Technology, Democratic Civics Education, and Critical Digital Literacies
Toward the Reconstruction of Education
References