media and new capitalism in the digital age: the spirit of networks (Eran Fisher)

Vincent Mosco The Digital Sublime p15 I understand the discourse on technology as a cognitive map, a structure of feelings, and an episteme; that is, a body of knowledge that is inextricably intertwined with technological reality, social structures, and everyday practices. The digital discourse is a public discourse that situates network technology at the center of an emancipatory social transformation. This thesis has been crystallized within a few theoretical frameworks, most notably postindustrialism, postmodernism, and posthumanism, and is the bedrock of media studies, and, more recently, cyberstudies. For the postindustrialists, the determining role of knowledge, information, and technology in the productive process and the corollary decline of the working class and rise of a professional-technocractic elite-- bent on rational planning and affiliated with neither capitalists nor workers-- also implies the substitution of a rational, technocratic political sphere for the ideological politics of class struggle and the strengthening of civil society. Webster, Frank 2005 Making sense of the information age: sociology and cultural studies. Information, Communication & Society 8 (4);439-58. Touraine, Alain. 1971 The post-industrial society: Tomorrow's social history: classes, conflict and culture in the programmed society. p17 (l)ate Marxist analysis has been particularly fruitful in uncovering the extent to which technologies of production have been meas in the arsenal of class struggle, rather than the mere implementation of universal instrumental rationality. (Braverman, Harry. 1974 Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century Noble, David.1984 Forces of production: a social history of industrial automation Aronowitz and Difazio 1994 The jobless future: Sci-tech and the dogma of work Huws,Ursula 2003 The making of a cybertariat: virtual work in real world) technology as discourse popular science fiction of late 20th century has articulated the new, Post-Fordist relatioship of production between capital and labor. Heffernan, Nick. 2000 Capital, class and technology in contemporary American Culture: projecting post-Fordism Rabinbach 1992 The human motor: energy, fatigue, and the origins of modernity (scientific discovery of the laws of energy was central to a revolution in the perception of humans as containers of energy, leading to new practices, such as Taylorism) Herf 1984 Reactionary modernism: technology, culture and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (technological rationality was co-opted by irraltional politics to create a political culture of "reactionary modernism")