Digital Bodies

​This book explores technologies related to bodily interaction and creativity from a multi-disciplinary perspective. By taking such an approach, the collection offers a comprehensive view of digital technology research that both extends our notions of the body and creativity through a digital lens, and informs of the role of technology in practices central to the arts and humanities. Crucially, Digital Bodies foregrounds creativity, the interrogation of technologies and the notion of embodiment within the various disciplines of art, design, performance and social science. In doing so, it explores a potential or virtual new sense of the embodied self. This book will appeal to academics, practitioners and those with an interest in not only how digital technologies affect the body, but also how they can enhance human creativity.

In the early days of the internet, we assumed that digital technologies would allow us to escape embodiment and its accompanying entanglements. Yet now our embodied selves are often targeted for abuse and harassment online. As we move into the Internet of Things, the digital is increasingly on and in our bodies. The pieces in this Byte raise important questions about what it means to bring our embodied selves into contact with digital media technologies. Read alongside one another, the selections here expand our understanding of what it means to live in and through bodies augmented by digital technologies within a deeply unequal social world.

Bodies in Code explores how our bodies experience and adapt to digital environments. Cyberculture theorists have tended to overlook biological reality when talking about virtual reality, and Mark B. N. Hansen's book shows what they've been missing. Cyberspace is anchored in the body, he argues, and it's the body--not high-tech computer graphics--that allows a person to feel like they are really "moving" through virtual reality. Of course these virtual experiences are also profoundly affecting our very understanding of what it means to live as embodied beings. Hansen draws upon recent work in visual culture, cognitive science, and new media studies, as well as examples of computer graphics, websites, and new media art, to show how our bodies are in some ways already becoming virtual.

Virtual Identities and Digital Culture investigates how our online identities and cultures are embedded within the digital practices of our lives, exploring how we form community, how we play, and how we re-imagine traditional media in a digital world. The collection explores a wide range of digital topics – from dating apps, microcelebrity, and hackers to auditory experiences, Netflix algorithms, and live theatre online – and builds on existing work in digital culture and identity by bringing new voices, contemporary examples, and highlighting platforms that are emerging in the field. The book speaks to the modern reality of how our digital lives have been forever altered by our transnational experiences – one of those key experiences is the pandemic, but so too is systemic inequality, questions of digital privacy, and the role of joy in our online lives. A vital contribution at a time of significant social and cultural flux, this book will be highly relevant to those studying digital culture within media, communication, cultural studies, digital humanities, and sociology departments.

This collection examines the peculiarly modern phenomenon of voyeurism as it is experienced through the digital screen. Violence, voyeurism, and power populate film more than ever, and the centrality of the terrified body to many digital narratives suggests new forms of terror and angst, where bodies are subjected to an endless knowing look. The particular perils of the digital age can be seen on, by, and through screen bodies as they are made, remade, represented, and used. The essays in this book examine the machinations of voyeurism in the digital age and the realization of power through digital visual forms. They look at the uses of power over the female body, at the domination and repression of women through symbolic violence, at discourses of power as they are played out onscreen, and at how the digital realm might engage the active/passive dichotomy in new ways.

Digitalism is a philosophical strategy that uses new computational ways of thinking to develop naturalistic but meaningful ways of thinking about bodies, souls, universes, gods, and life after death. Your Digital Afterlives examines four recently developed and digitally inspired theories of life after death.

What are we to make of our digital social lives and the forces that shape it? Should we feel fortunate to experience such networked connectivity? Are we privileged to have access to unimaginable amounts of information? Is it easier to work in a digital global economy? Or is our privacy and freedom under threat from digital surveillance? Our security and welfare being put at risk? Our politics undermined by hidden algorithms and misinformation? Written by a distinguished group of leading scholars from around the world, the Routledge Handbook of Digital Media and Communication provides a comprehensive, unique, and multidisciplinary exploration of this rapidly growing and vibrant field of study. The Handbook adopts a three-part structural framework for understanding the sociocultural impact of digital media: the artifacts or physical devices and systems that people use to communicate; the communicative practices in which they engage to use those devices, express themselves, and share meaning; and the organizational and institutional arrangements, structures, or formations that develop around those practices and artifacts. Comprising a series of essay-chapters on a wide range of topics, this volume crystallizes current knowledge, provides historical context, and critically articulates the challenges and implications of the emerging dominance of the network and normalization of digitally mediated relations. Issues explored include the power of algorithms, digital currency, gaming culture, surveillance, social networking, and connective mobilization. More than a reference work, this Handbook delivers a comprehensive, authoritative overview of the state of new media scholarship and its most important future directions that will shape and animate current debates.

"FMRI tesearchers do not sit passively staring at computer screens but actively involve their bodies in laboratory practice. Discussing fMRI visuals with colleagues, scientists animate the scans with gestures and talk as they work with computers. Alač argues that to understand how digital scientific visuals take on meaning, we must consider their dynamic coordination with gestures, speech, and working hands. These multimodal interactions, she suggests, are an essential component of digital scientific works ... Scientific practices in the fMRI lab demonstrate thinking that engages the whole lived body and the world in which the body is situated. The turn toward the digital does not bring with it abstraction but a manual and embodied engagement. The practical and multimodal engagement with digital brains in the laboratory challenges certain assumptions behind fMRI technology; it suggests our hands are essential to learning and the making of meaning."--Jacket description.