The Quirks of Digital Culture

David Beer

Emerald

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Paperback / softback

9781787699168

11 October 2019

£28.99

eBook (PDF)

9781787699137

11 October 2019

£28.99

eBook (ePub)

9781787699151

11 October 2019

£28.99

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Description
Contents
Reviews
About

The culture we consume is increasingly delivered to us via various digital on-demand platforms. The last decade has seen platforms like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Google and the like become massive players in shaping cultural consumption. But how can we understand culture once it moves on to big tech platforms? How can we make sense of the changes this brings to our lives? These platforms have the power to shape our cultural landscape and to use data, algorithms and other technological means to shape our experiences, from what we remember through to what we know and even the speed and accessibility of culture.

This book asks how can we understand the chaos and messiness of on-demand culture? Beer suggests that we focus on the quirks and use these as openings to see inside patterns and dynamics of these new cultural formations. By exploring the strange quirks that typify our new on-demand culture, this book seeks to answer these questions. The Quirks of Digital Culture is a guide to understanding the complex and unsettling cultural present, whilst also casting an eye on how our consumption and cultural experiences may unfold in what seems like an unpredictable future.

Chapter 1. On-demand Culture and its Quirks Chapter 2. The Order of Things Chapter 3. Total Recall: The Past, Present and Future Chapter 4. The Comforts and Discomforts of Connection Chapter 5. The Demands of On-demand Culture

'One of Britain's sharpest observers of the internet'
- Peter Pomerantsev, Senior Fellow, LSE and the Author of 'Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Adventures in Modern Russia'

As digital culture has been lifted on to media platforms, everyday experiences are full of quirks, says Beer, and often unnoticed, these quirks accumulate and occupy daily experiences. He suggests that it is possible that they can be the means by which people come, in aggregate, to know the world and to have sense of their place in it. He deals with just a few of those quirks, only scratching the surface, he says, only touching upon the underpinning patterns and dynamics. Distributed in North America by Turpin Distribution.
- Annotation ©2019

"By revealing the intricacies and complexities of contemporary culture, this book opens up new ways to understand and interpret everyday experiences and does so in a way that is accessible even in today’s attention-poor environment. In a nutshell, this is a highly recommended book."
- LSE Review of Books

David Beer is Professor of Sociology at the University of York, UK. He is the author of Georg Simmel’s Concluding Thoughts (2019), The Data Gaze (2018), Metric Power (2016), Punk Sociology (2014), Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation (2013) and New Media: The Key Concepts (2008, with Nicholas Gane) and is the editor of The Social Power of Algorithms (2018).