50 years ago, Marshall Mc Luhan called out the end of modernity. Since then, cultural opportunities have multiplied enormously. Today, this change produces a culture of the digital. The internet is a medium with specific forms of culture and exchange.
Three of them are characteristic:
- Referentiality – the use of existing material for the production of cultural objects;
- Communality – resources are made accessible and meanings are stabilized through a collective frame;
- The principle of algorithms – automated decision-making reduces information overload.
The aim of Stalder’s essay is to identify and describe two political tendencies in the digital culture: Post-democracy and commons. Digitality points to historically new possibilities for linking human and non-human actors. Find here a summary of the very interesting book of Felix Stalder.
Friedrich A. Kittler was a controversial scientist: His enthusiasm for technology, mathematics, psychoanalysis, and rock music and his delight in the eclectic speculation were suspect to many of us. But not to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: For him Kittler’s work is “idea and promise of a truth” to our technological world. As a history of technology, Kittler’s narrative of cultural history forms, perhaps, a figure of thought, which contributes to the “understanding of the digital present and future”. Gumbrecht, who is interested in the cultural consequences of digitization, therefore wants to expose the potential that lies in this work.