New Book: Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age: The Spirit of Networks

Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age: The Spirit of Networks

by Eran Fisher (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

This book explores the new terrain of network capitalism through the transformations of
the discourse on technology. Rather than viewing such discourse as either a true or
false reflection of reality, Fisher evaluates the ideological role that technology
discourse plays in the legitimation of a new form of capitalism. Based on an extensive
empirical analysis, the book argues that contemporary technology discourse at one and
the same time promises more personal empowerment through network technology and
legitimates a more privatized, flexible, and precarious economic constellations.
Contrary to the prevailing assumption that sees network technology as liberating from
the rigidity and pitfalls of a stifling, Fordist capitalism, the book offers a
theoretical framework which sees contemporary technology discourse as an ideology that
legitimates the economic, social, and political arrangements of the new capitalism.

Praise
“Fisher’s brilliant book provides cogent reasons why we should be skeptical about laptop
capitalism and its fluidity and instantaneity of communication…Fisher helps us
understand the age of digitality as, above all, capitalist.”
--Ben Agger, Professor of Sociology and Humanities, University of Texas at Arlington

“This carefully researched and skillfully written guide to the networked world doesn’t
just demolish the dreamy visions of Utopia 2.0. It provides precisely the comprehensive
analysis we need to understand their power and persistence.”
--Vincent Mosco, Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society, Queen’s University,
Canada

“This is an audacious systematic ideology-critique of digital capitalism…It should be
placed on your shelf with Castells's book on informational capitalism, with
Dyer-Witheford's on cyber-Marxism or with Mosco's on the digital sublime.”
--Uri Ram, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben Gurion University, Israel

Table of contents
Introduction     Technology discourse and capitalist legitimation
PART I
       Ch. 1       Capitalism, technology, and the digital discourse
       Ch. 2       Contemporary technology discourse
PART II
       Ch. 3       Network market
       Ch. 4       Network work
       Ch. 5       Network production
       Ch. 6       Network human
PART III
       Ch. 7       Network cosmology and the exhaustion of critique
       Ch. 8       Networks as the techno-political culture of post-Fordism

About the author
Eran Fisher is Lecturer at the College of Management – Academic Studies, and at the
Interdisciplinary Center in Israel. He completed his PhD in the Department of Sociology
at the New School for Social Research in New York in 2008. He writes on Critical Social
Theory, technology, and capitalism, and the intersection of capitalism and network
technology in such publications as the European Journal of Social Theory, Fast
Capitalism, and Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society.

http://www.amazon.com/Media-New-Capitalism-Digital-Age/dp/0230616070>Media and New
Capitalism in the Digital Age: The Spirit of Networks