Just what is the “participatory condition”? It is the situation in which taking part in something with others has become both environmental and normative. The fact that we have always participated does not mean we have always lived under the participatory condition. What is distinctive about the present is the extent to which the everyday social, economic, cultural, and political activities that comprise simply being in the world have been thematized and organized around the priority of participation. Structured along four axes investigating the relations between participation and politics, surveillance, openness, and aesthetics, The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age comprises fifteen essays that explore the promises, possibilities, and failures of contemporary participatory media practices as related to power, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring uprisings, worker-owned cooperatives for the post-Internet age; paradoxes of participation, media activism, open source projects; participatory civic life; commercial surveillance; contemporary art and design; and education. This book represents the most comprehensive and transdisciplinary endeavor to date to examine the nature, place, and value of participation in the digital age. Just as in 1979, when Jean-François Lyotard proposed that “the postmodern condition” was characterized by the questioning of historical grand narratives, The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age investigates how participation has become a central preoccupation of our time. Contributors: Mark Andrejevic, Pomona College; Bart Cammaerts, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE); Nico Carpentier, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB – Free University of Brussels) and Charles University in Prague; Julie E. Cohen, Georgetown University; Kate Crawford, MIT; Alessandro Delfanti, University of Toronto; Christina Dunbar-Hester, University of Southern California; Rudolf Frieling, California College of Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute; Salvatore Iaconesi, La Sapienza University of Rome and ISIA Design Florence; Jason Edward Lewis, Concordia University; Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; Graham Pullin, University of Dundee; Trebor Scholz, The New School in New York City; Cayley Sorochan, McGill University; Bernard Stiegler, Institute for Research and Innovation in Paris; Krzysztof Wodiczko, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Jillian C. York.

Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object lessons contained in digital form and asks what they can tell us about both the past and the future. Drawing on the author’s extensive experience working with collections across the world, Geismar argues for an understanding of digital media as material, rather than immaterial, and advocates for a more nuanced, ethnographic and historicised view of museum digitisation projects than those usually adopted in the celebratory accounts of new media in museums. By locating the digital as part of a longer history of material engagements, transformations and processes of translation, this book broadens our understanding of the reality effects that digital technologies create, and of how digital media can be mobilised in different parts of the world to very different effects.

This handbook provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in digital public history. Individual studies by internationally renowned public historians, digital humanists, and digital historians elucidate central issues in the field and present a critical account of the major public history accomplishments, research activities, and practices with the public and of their digital context. The handbook applies an international and comparative approach, looks at the historical development of the field, focuses on technical background and the use of specific digital media and tools. Furthermore, the handbook analyzes connections with local communities and different publics worldwide when engaging in digital activities with the past, indicating directions for future research, and teaching activities.

This book answers how openness became the defining principle of the information age, examining the history of information networks.

This book explores the diverse range of practical and theoretical challenges and possibilities that digital technologies and platforms pose for Holocaust memory, education and research. From social media to virtual reality, 360-degree imaging to machine learning, there can be no doubt that digital media penetrate practice in these fields. As the Holocaust moves beyond living memory towards solely mediated memory, it is imperative that we pay critical attention to the way digital technologies are shaping public memory and education and research. Bringing together the voices of heritage and educational professionals, and academics from the arts and humanities and the social sciences, this interdisciplinary collection explores the practicalities of creating digital Holocaust projects, the educational value of such initiatives, and considers the extent to which digital technologies change the way we remember, learn about and research the Holocaust, thinking through issues such as ethics, embodiment, agency, community, and immersion. At its core, this volume interrogates the extent to which digital interventions in these fields mark an epochal shift in Holocaust memory, education and research, or whether they continue to be shaped by long-standing debates and guidelines developed in the broadcast era.

The Oxford Handbook of Political Participation provides the first comprehensive, up-to-date treatment of political participation in all its varied forms, investigates a wide range of topics in the field from both a theoretical and methodological perspective, and covers the most recent developments in the area. It brings together research traditions from political science and sociology, bridging the gap in particular between political sociology and social movement studies; contributions also draw on crucial work in psychology, economics, anthropology, and geography. Following a detailed introduction from the editors, the volume is divided into nine parts that explore political participation across disciplines; core theoretical perspectives; methodological approaches; modes of participation; contexts; determinants; processes; outcomes; and current trends and future directions. The book will be a valuable reference work for anyone interested in understanding political participation and related themes.

Our daily lives, our culture and our politics are now shaped by the digital condition as large numbers of people involve themselves in contentious negotiations of meaning in ever more dimensions of life, from the trivial to the profound. They are making use of the capacities of complex communication infrastructures, currently dominated by social mass media such as Twitter and Facebook, on which they have come to depend. Amidst a confusing plurality, Felix Stalder argues that are three key constituents of this condition: the use of existing cultural materials for one's own production, the way in which new meaning is established as a collective endeavour, and the underlying role of algorithms and automated decision-making processes that reduce and give shape to massive volumes of data. These three characteristics define what Stalder calls 'the digital condition'. Stalder also examines the profound political implications of this new culture. We stand at a crossroads between post-democracy and the commons, a concentration of power among the few or a genuine widening of participation, with the digital condition offering the potential for starkly different outcomes. This ambitious and wide-ranging theory of our contemporary digital condition will be of great interest to students and scholars in media and communications, cultural studies, and social, political and cultural theory, as well as to a wider readership interested in the ways in which culture and politics are changing today.