Understanding Digital Events: Bergson, Whitehead, and the Experience of the Digital

This book introduces an events-based approach to understanding digital experience. Focusing on the event-ontologies of Bergson and Whitehead’s process metaphysics, it explores subjective experience and objective reality as unified ‘events’ in the form of concrete slabs of existence. Such slabs are temporally defined by a term or period, in which all physical-chemical processes and personal subjective experience are included. Bringing together insights from a range of different specialisms, it urges us to consider a science of nature that includes both physical and non-physical realities and, from this ontological position, draws on philosophy, media, and user experience practice to provide a new account of the technological or virtual world of today. An examination of the manner in which process philosophy may be applied to contemporary digital experience, this volume will appeal to scholars of philosophy, science and technology studies and information systems.

David Kreps is Lecturer in the J.E. Cairnes School of Business and Economics at NUI Galway, Ireland. His books include This Changes Everything: ICT and Climate Change – What Can We Do?; Against Nature: The Metaphysics of Information Systems; Technology and Intimacy: Choice or Coercion; Bergson, Complexity and Creative Emergence; and Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment. He is an active member of the UNESCO affiliated International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and current Chair of IFIP Technical Committee 9 on ICT and Society.