Name: Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy
Price: 13.23 GBP
Availability: InStock
Author: Byung-Chul Han
ISBN: 9781509552986

portada Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy

Type

Physical Book

Author

Byung-Chul Han

Translated by

Daniel Steuer

Publisher

Polity Press

Language

English

Pages

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

21.1 x 14.2 x 0.7 cm

Weight

0.12 kg.

ISBN13

9781509552986

Edition No.

Synopsis "Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy"

The tsunami of information unleashed by digitization is threatening to overwhelm us, drowning us in a sea of frenzied communication and disrupting many spheres of social life, including politics. Election campaigns are now being waged as information wars with bots and troll armies, and democracy is degenerating into infocracy. In this new book, Byung-Chul Han argues that infocracy is the new form of rule characteristic of contemporary information capitalism. Whereas the disciplinary regime of industrial capitalism worked with compulsion and repression, this new information regime exploits freedom instead of repressing it. Surveillance and punishment give way to motivation and optimization: we imagine that we are free, but in reality our entire lives are recorded so that our behaviour might be psychopolitically controlled. Under the neoliberal information regime, mechanisms of power function not because people are aware of the fact of constant surveillance but because they perceive themselves to be free. This trenchant critique of politics in the information age will be of great interest to students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences and to anyone concerned about the fate of politics in our time.

Byung-Chul Han

(Author)

View Author's Page

Byung-Chul Han (Seúl, Corea del Sur, 1959) estudió Filosofía en la Universidad de Friburgo y Literatura alemana y Teología en la Universidad de Múnich. En 1994 se doctoró por la primera de dichas universidades con una tesis sobre Martin Heidegger. Tras su habilitación dio clases de filosofía en la universidad de Basilea, desde 2010 fue profesor de filosofía y teoría de los medios en la Escuela Superior de Diseño de Karlsruhe y desde 2012 es profesor de Filosofía y Estudios culturales en la Universidad de las Artes de Berlín. Es autor de más de una decena de títulos, la mayoría de los cuales se han traducido al castellano en Herder Editorial.

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