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2 results

  • 4 - Realities of Our Own Contrivance

  • Antón Barba-Kay, Deep Springs College, California
  • Book:
    A Web of Our Own Making
    Published online:
    04 May 2023
    Print publication:
    11 May 2023, pp 162-247

  • Summary

    I conclude by discussing the more metaphysical and existential implications of digital media, arguing that it is changing our notions of what is real, of what human connection is, and of what our highest purposes are. I present this in terms of three kinds of “ideals” that I think underlie our uses of digital technology and continue to shape our goals inasmuch as we pursue them online: the ideal of frictionlessness, the ideal of obedience, and the ideal of perfection.

A Web of Our Own Making
  • The Nature of Digital Formation
  • Antón Barba-Kay
  • Published online:
    04 May 2023
    Print publication:
    11 May 2023
  • There no longer seems any point to criticizing the internet. We indulge in the latest doom-mongering about the evils of social media-on social media. We scroll through routine complaints about the deterioration of our attention spans. We resign ourselves to hating the internet even as we spend much of our waking lives with it. Yet our unthinking surrender to its effects-to the ways it recasts our aims and desires-is itself digital technology's most powerful achievement. A Web of Our Own Making examines how online practices are reshaping our lives outside our notice. Barba-Kay argues that digital technology is a 'natural technology'-a technology so intuitive as to conceal the extent to which it transforms our attention. He shows how and why this technology is reconfiguring knowledge, culture, politics, aesthetics, and theology. The digital revolution is primarily taking place not in Silicon Valley but within each of us.