Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic
| Pages | 393-393 |
| Date | 03 April 2017 |
| Published date | 03 April 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-02-2016-0039 |
| Author | Alireza Isfandyari-Moghaddam |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
admirable book narrating Google’s boom can benet librarians, library managers,
Web researchers, digital scholars, educators, professors and end-users. Shall we
stand on the shoulders of Google?
Soodabeh Omidkhah
Islamic Azad University, Hamedan Branch, Islamic Republic of Iran
Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic
Edited by Seb Franklin
The MIT Press
Cambridge, MA
2015
240 pp.
US$35.00 hard cover
ISBN: 978-0-262-02953-7
Review DOI 10.1108/EL-02-2016-0039
It is generally accepted that the emergence, present ubiquity and normalisation of the
electronic digital computer and its following conditions and implications are socially,
culturally and technically constructed. Posing some questions including “What kinds of
assumptions are required to understand people and their multiple, heterogeneous social
interactions in terms of digital information and its processing and transmission?”,
“What historical process would be necessary to operationalise these assumptions at the
level of social and political orthodoxy?” and “What would be the socioeconomic and
cultural implications of such a version of the world functioning as an unmarked norm?”,
this books takes an epistemological approach theorising control as a set of technical
principles having to do with self-regulation, distribution and statistical forecasting that
is extended to the conceptualisation of sociality through a series of subtle historical
transformations. It consists of ve chapters distributed under two foundational parts.
Taking an analogical approach to digitality and outlining a genealogy of so-called
digital culture, Part 1, Digitality without computers (two chapters), rst untangles the
dense web of relations between control, digitality and capital, analyses related concepts
with an emphasis on the emergence and implications of the control episteme, and then
revolves conceptually around cybernetics as an interdisciplinary eld and as a logical
framework for understanding self-regulation (control and management) in biological
life and machines. Building on theoretical and historical foundations concerning specic
epoch-making events, socioeconomic implications of control and material technologies,
Part 2, Digitality as cultural logic (three chapters), examines the penetration and power of
the control paradigm that originated in the logical and technical principles of computing
machines. In a nutshell, reading this book is like a several-century journey of discovery.
Showing a part of scientists’ thoughts and investigations about the relationship between
information, labour and social management; the development and diffusion of human–
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