The Machine in the Ghost: Digitality and its Consequences

Boast, Robin

ISBN 10: 1780237391 / ISBN 13: 9781780237398

Published by Reaktion Books, 2017

About this Item

, . Author: Robin BoastFormat: HardbackNumber of Pages: We live in a digital age, within a digital economy, continuously engaged with digital media. Digital encoding lies at the heart of our contemporary mobile-obsessed, information-heavy, media-saturated world, but it is usually regarded - if it is thought of at all - as something inaccessible, virtual or ephemeral, hidden deep within the workings of our computers, tablets and smartphones. It is surprising that, despite the profusion of books on the history of computers and computing, little has been written about what makes them possible. So what exactly is 'the digital'? Where did it come from? What do we actually know about it? Robin Boast tackles these fundamental questions in The Machine in the Ghost - and uncovers some very surprising answers.

Seller Inventory # 9781780237398

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Machine in the Ghost: Digitality and its Consequences
• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1780237391
• ISBN 13: 9781780237398
• Binding: Hardback
• Book Type: Hardback

About this title

Synopsis

We live in a digital age, buy and sell in a digital economy, and consume—oh do we consume—digital media. The digital lies at the heart of our contemporary, information-heavy, media-saturated lives, and although we may talk about the digital as a cultural phenomenon, the thing itself—digitality—is often hidden to us, a technology that someone else has invented and that lives buried inside our computers, tablets, and smartphones. In this book, Robin Boast follows the video streams and social media posts to their headwaters in order to ask: What, exactly, is the digital?
           
Boast tackles this fundamental question by exploring the origins of the digital and showing how digital technology works. He goes back to 1874, when a French telegraph engineer, Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot, invented the first means of digital communication, the Baudot code. From this simple 5-bit code, Boast takes us to the first electronic computers, to the earliest uses of graphics and information systems in the 1950s, our interactions with computers through punch cards and programming languages, and the rise of digital media in the 1970s.Via various and sometimes unanticipated historical routes, he reveals the foundations of digitality and how it has flourished in today’s explosion of technologies and the forms of communication and media they enable, making real the often intangible force that guides so much of our lives.
 

About the Author

Robin Boast is professor of cultural information science at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has published widely in the field of information and the culture of the digital.