Document details

Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture

Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press (2016), xlv, 303 pp.

Contains illustr,, index

ISBN 978-0-691-16734-3

Signature commbox: 70-General-E 2016

"Inspired by Raymond Williams's 1976 classic 'Keywords', the timely collection Digital Keywords gathers pointed, provocative short essays on more than two dozen keywords by leading and rising digital media scholars from the areas of anthropology, digital humanities, history, political science, philosophy, religious studies, rhetoric, science and technology studies, and sociology. Digital Keywords examines and critiques the rich lexicon animating the emerging field of digital studies. This collection broadens our understanding of how we talk about the modern world, particularly of the vocabulary at work in information technologies. Contributors scrutinize each keyword independently: for example, the recent pairing of digital and analog is separated, while classic terms such as community, culture, event, memory, and democracy are treated in light of their historical and intellectual importance. Metaphors of the cloud in cloud computing and the mirror in data mirroring combine with recent and radical uses of terms such as information, sharing, gaming, algorithm, and internet to reveal previously hidden insights into contemporary life. Bookended by a critical introduction and a list of over two hundred other digital keywords, these essays provide concise, compelling arguments about our current mediated condition." (Publisher description)
1 Activism / Guobin Yang, 1
2 Algorithm / Tarleton Gillespie, 18
3 Analog / Jonathan Sterne, 31
4 Archive / Katherine D. Harris, 45
5 Cloud / John Durham Peters, 54
6 Community / Rosemary Avance, 63
7 Culture / Ted Striphas, 70
8 Democracy / Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, 81
9 Digital / Benjamin Peters, 93
10 Event / Julia Sonnevend, 109
11 Flow / Sandra Braman, 118
12 Forum / Hope Forsyth, 132
13 Gaming / Saugata Bhaduri, 140
14 Geek / Christina Dunbar-Hester, 149
15 Hacker / Gabriella Coleman, 158
16 Information / Bernard Geoghegan, 173
17 Internet / Thomas Streeter, 184
18 Meme / Limor Shifman, 197
19 Memory / Steven Schrag, 206
20 Mirror / Adam Fish, 217
21 Participation / Christopher Kelty, 227
22 Personalization / Stephanie Ricker Schulte, 242
23 Prototype / Fred Turner, 256
24 Sharing / Nicholas A. John, 269
25 Surrogate / Jeffrey Drouin, 278