Consumption in an Age of Information

Description

Today, we live in an age where consumption and consuming have become dominant practices - so dominant they allow little room for alternatives. Consumption has become a global phenomenon. This expansion of consumption has occurred at the same time as notions of information and digitization have become all-pervasive in our media culture . As ever greater aspects of the world have come to be seen as "data", information has increasingly become the very currency of consumption. Consumption in an Age of Information analyses this new relationship between information and consumption. Leading theorists and critics map this new terrain, ranging across high theory and popular culture - from E-Bay auctions to capitalism as religion, from the everyday consumption of MP3 files and DVDs to the rituals of media violence, from internet-surfing to the role of "speed" in contemporary culture.

R. L. Rutsky teaches at San Francisco State University and is the author of High Techne: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman and co-editor of Strategies for Theory: From Marx to Madonna and Film Analysis: A Norton Reader. Sande Cohen teaches at the California Institute for the Arts and is the author of Historical Culture, Academia and the Luster of Capital, Passive Nihilism, History Out of Joint and co-editor of French Theory in America.