The Digital Dialectic

New Essays on New Media

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Edited by Peter Lunenfeld

MIT Press

Due/Published March 2000, 320 pages, paper

ISBN 0262621371

New in paper (S00)

Computers linked to networks have created the first broadly usedsystems that allow individuals to create, distribute, and receiveaudiovisual content with the same box. They challenge theorists ofdigital culture to develop interaction-based models to replace themore primitive models that allow only passive use.

The Digital Dialectic is what MIT is calling an "interdisciplinary jamsession" about our visual and intellectual cultures as the computerrecodes technologies, media, and art forms. Unlike purely academictexts on new media, the book includes contributions by scholars,artists, and entrepreneurs, who combine theoretical investigationswith hands-on analysis of the possibilities (and limitations) of newtechnology. The key concept is the digital dialectic: a method toground the insights of theory in the constraints of practice. Theessays move beyond journalistic reportage and hype into serious butaccessible discussion of new technologies, new media, and new culturalforms. 

Contributors: Florian Brody, Carol Gigliotti,N. Katherine Hayles, Michael Heim, Erkki Huhtamo, George P. Landow,Brenda Laurel, Peter Lunenfeld, Lev Manovich, William J. Mitchell, BobStein.

Review

The hyperbole and talk about the computer and the new media it has spawned has led to a constant stream of information and predictions, but sometimes lacking in real analysis. As Lunenfeld argues in his introduction to this excellent collection, many commentators fixate more on the future and fantasies of cyborg life and other possible implications than in real world implications. However, The Digital Dialectic brings together an impressive group of artists, scholars, and computer scientists to examine the theoretical and practical issues concerning new computer technology. Recognizing that computers have made it possible for information to be received, created, and distributed from the same box, the contributors provide new ways of understanding digital media, going beyond conventional media theory that focuses on spectatorship and consumption. The contributors examine changing social, intellectual, and cultural modes brought on by the computer while making sure (thankfully) to ground their ideas in the nuts and bolts (or bits and bytes) of how computers are actually used today.

Articles include:

• “Unfinished Business,” Peter Lunenfeld
• “The Cyberspace Dialectic,” Michael Heim
• “The Ethical Life of the Digital Aesthetic,” Carol Gigliotti
• “The Condition of Virtuality,” N. Katherine Hayles
• “From Cybernation to Interaction: A Contribution to an Archaeology of Interactivity,” Erkki Huhtamo
• “Replacing Place,” William J. Mitchell
• “The Medium is the Memory,” Florian Brody
• “Hypertext as Collage-Writing,” George Landow
• “What Is Digital Cinema,” Lev Manovich
• “We Could Be Better Ancestors than this”: Ethics and First Principles for the Art of the Digital Age,” Bob Stein
• “Musings on Amusements in America, or What I Did on my Summer Vacation," Brenda Laurel