Felix Stalder

Referentialität, Gemeinschaftlichkeit und Algorithmizität sind die charakteristischen Formen der Kultur der Digitalität, in der sich immer mehr Menschen, auf immer mehr Feldern und mithilfe immer komplexerer Technologien an der Verhandlung von sozialer Bedeutung beteiligen (müssen). Sie reagieren so auf die Herausforderungen einer chaotischen, überbordenden Informationssphäre und tragen zu deren weiterer Ausbreitung bei. Dies bringt alte kulturelle Ordnungen zum Einsturz und Neue sind bereits deutlich auszumachen. Felix Stalder beleuchtet die historischen Wurzeln wie auch die politischen Konsequenzen dieser Entwicklung. Die Zukunft, so sein Fazit, ist offen. Unser Handeln bestimmt, ob wir in einer postdemokratischen Welt der Überwachung und der Wissensmonopole oder in einer Kultur der Commons und der Partizipation leben werden.

Kultur der Digitalität

Our daily lives, our culture and our politics are now shaped by the digital condition as large numbers of people involve themselves in contentious negotiations of meaning in ever more dimensions of life, from the trivial to the profound. They are making use of the capacities of complex communication infrastructures, currently dominated by social mass media such as Twitter and Facebook, on which they have come to depend. Amidst a confusing plurality, Felix Stalder argues that are three key constituents of this condition: the use of existing cultural materials for one's own production, the way in which new meaning is established as a collective endeavour, and the underlying role of algorithms and automated decision-making processes that reduce and give shape to massive volumes of data. These three characteristics define what Stalder calls 'the digital condition'. Stalder also examines the profound political implications of this new culture. We stand at a crossroads between post-democracy and the commons, a concentration of power among the few or a genuine widening of participation, with the digital condition offering the potential for starkly different outcomes. This ambitious and wide-ranging theory of our contemporary digital condition will be of great interest to students and scholars in media and communications, cultural studies, and social, political and cultural theory, as well as to a wider readership interested in the ways in which culture and politics are changing today.

The Digital Condition

Konrad Becker

Deep Search collects 13 texts which investigate the social and political dimensions of how we navigate the deep seas of knowledge. What do we win, and what do we lose when we move from an analogue to a digital information order? How is computer readable significance produced, how is meaning involved in machine communication? Where is the potential of having access to such vast amounts of information? What are the dangers of our reliance on search engines and are there any approaches that do not follow the currently dominating paradigm of Google? This volume answers these questions of culture, context and classification regarding information systems that should not be ignored.

The Politics of Search Beyond Google

Deep Search

Cornelia Sollfrank

Shusha Niederberger

What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a so-called pirate library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art plays an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic, and that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially. Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects--drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital--that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a double character. They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are operational in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the commons. In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a thinking tool--in other words, the book's interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.

Aesthetics of the Commons

Clemens Apprich

Mitte der 1990er Jahre ist in Europa eine vielfältige Netzkultur entstanden. Während die US-amerikanische Szene den Cyberspace als Raum jenseits der Politik imaginierte, waren die europäischen Netzpioniere darauf bedacht, die Möglichkeiten des Internet für neue politische und kulturelle Initiativen in der realen Gesellschaft zu nutzen. Anhand von Zeitdokumenten, aktuellen Textbeiträgen und Interviews geht dieser Band erstmals auf die kritische Haltung europäischer Netzkulturen ein. Die Beiträge liefern so wichtige Referenzpunkte zur Gestaltung unserer techno-kulturellen Gegenwart jenseits von Facebook und Google.

Felix Stalder

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