Aden Evens's Books

The Digital and Its Discontents

By: Aden Evens,Alexander R. Galloway

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The Digital and Its Discontents

By: Aden Evens,Alexander R. Galloway

A groundbreaking critique of the digital world that analyzes its universal technological foundations Whence that nagging sense that something in the digital is amiss—that, as wonderful as our devices are, time spent on smartphones and computers leaves us sour, enervated, alienated? The Digital and Its Discontents uniquely explains that worry and points us toward a more satisfying relationship between our digital lives and our nondigital selves, one that requires a radical change in the way we incorporate technology into our lives. Aden Evens analyzes universal technological principles—in particular, the binary logic—to show that they encourage certain ways of thinking while making others more challenging or impossible. What is out of reach for any digital machine is contingency, the ontological principle that refuses every rule. As humans engage ourselves and our world ever more through digital machines, we are losing touch with contingency and so banishing from our lives the accidental and unexpected that fuel our most creative and novel possibilities for living. Taking cues from philosophy rather than cultural or media theory, Evens argues that the consequences of this erosion of contingency are significant yet often overlooked because the same values that make the digital seem so desirable also make contingency seem unimportant—without contingency the digital is confined to what has already been thought, and yet the digital’s ubiquity has allowed it to disguise this inherent sterility. Responsive only to desires that meet the demands of its narrow logic, the digital requires its users to practice those same ideological dictates, instituting a hegemony of thought and value sustained by the pervasive presence of digital mechanisms. Interweaving technical and philosophical concepts, The Digital and Its Discontents advances a powerful and urgent argument about the digital and its impact on our lives. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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Page Count

300

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1452970645

ISBN 13

9781452970646

Logic of the Digital

By: Aden Evens

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Logic of the Digital

By: Aden Evens

Building a foundational understanding of the digital, Logic of the Digital reveals a unique digital ontology. Beginning from formal and technical characteristics, especially the binary code at the core of all digital technologies, Aden Evens traces the pathways along which the digital domain of abstract logic encounters the material, human world. How does a code using only 0s and 1s give rise to the vast range of applications and information that constitutes a great and growing portion of our world? Evens' analysis shows how any encounter between the actual and the digital must cross an ontological divide, a gap between the productive materiality of the human world and the reductive abstraction of the binary code. Logic of the Digital examines the distortions of this ontological crossing, considering the formal abstraction that persists in exemplary digital technologies and techniques such as the mouse, the Web, the graphical user interface, and the development of software. One crucial motive for this research lies in the paradoxical issue of creativity in relation to digital technologies: the ontology of abstraction leaves little room for the unpredictable or accidental that is essential to creativity, but digital technologies are nevertheless patently creative. Evens inquires into the mechanisms by which the ostensibly sterile binary code can lend itself to such fecund cultural production. Through clarification of the digital's ontological foundation, Evens points to a significant threat to creativity lurking in the nature of the digital and so generates a basis for an ethics of digital practice. Examining the bits that give the digital its ontology, exploring the potentials and limitations of programming, and using gaming as an ideal test of digital possibility, Logic of the Digital guides future practices and shapes academic research in the digital.

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Page Count

204

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472566750

ISBN 13

9781472566751

Learn Angular: The Collection

By: Ilya Bodrov-Krukowski,Manjunath M,Byron Houwens,Jason Aden,David Aden,Claudio Ribeiro,Jeremy Wilken,Michael Wanyoike,Ahmed Bouchefra,Vildan Softic,Pavels Jelisejevs,Simon Holmes,Todd Motto

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Learn Angular: The Collection

By: Ilya Bodrov-Krukowski,Manjunath M,Byron Houwens,Jason Aden,David Aden,Claudio Ribeiro,Jeremy Wilken,Michael Wanyoike,Ahmed Bouchefra,Vildan Softic,Pavels Jelisejevs,Simon Holmes,Todd Motto

Angular is not just a framework, but rather a platform that empowers developers to build applications for the web, mobile, and the desktop. This collection is a set of books aimed at getting you up to speed with Angular. It contains: Learn Angular: Your First Week, a collection of articles introducing Angular Learn Angular: Build a Todo App, an in-depth project tutorial that builds a complete Angular application from start to finish Learn Angular: 4 Angular Projects presents four practical Angular projects Learn Angular: Related Tools & Skills contains a collection of articles outlining essential tools and skills that every modern JavaScript developer should know. This book is for all front-end developers who want to become proficient with Angular and its related tools. You'll need to be familiar with HTML and CSS and have a reasonable level of understanding of JavaScript in order to follow the discussion.

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