A new political economy of digital capitalism
For decades society venerated advanced information and communications technologies (ICTs) as a source of economic rejuvenation and uplift. The financial crisis of 2007-08 shook such ideas. Originating in the United States, the driver of digital systems and services, the prolonged economic slump precipitated a perplexing historical outcome: a technological revolution wrapped inside an economic collapse.
Dan Schiller analyzes the crisis tendencies of capitalism to root out the sources of this digital depression. From there he traces the economic re-composition wrought by ICTs, seeing them as a leading economic growth pole akin to the 1930s consumer industries that came out of the Great Depression. Finally, he lays out the present-day battles to capture and control digital technology and its growth. Demonstrating digital technology's central role in the global political economy and connecting it to the rise of worldwide financial, production and military networks, Schiller sets the digital communication industry in the context of intensifying geopolitical conflicts over the Internet. As he shows, the forces at the core of capitalism--exploitation, commodification, and inequality--are ongoing and accelerating within the networked political economy.
Timely and wide ranging, Digital Depression blazes new ground in illuminating the role of information and communications within the political economy's developmental processes.

Is human vision universal and largely unchanging, or historically conditioned? What happened to the Western understanding of vision when the camera obscuraAa simple pinhole camera popular in the 17th and 18th centuriesAgave way to the Kodak? Columbia University art historian Crary brings a multidisciplinary approach to such questions, and though his work is densely written for an academic audience, it can be fun to read if only for the illustrations of such wacky 19th-century optical toys and devices as the phenakistiscope and the Kaiserpanorama. The book's focus is the cultural function and meaning of an ideal of "attentiveness," which reveals that the contemporary prognosis of "attention deficit disorder" has roots in much earlier anxieties about the failure of concentrated perception. Examining a vast range of scientific writings, works of art and objects from the world of early mass entertainment, Crary argues that 19th-century European culture became obsessed with a perceived breakdown in attentionAas focus and concentration seemed to give way to trance, reverie, monomania and hypnosis. At well over twice the length of Crary's earlier book (1990's elegant Techniques of the Observer), this volume is comparatively unfocused and loosely organized. Extended analysis of three central oil paintings by Manet, Seurat and C?zanne promisesAbut never quite managesAto unify all the heterogeneous material into a coherent whole.