Consumption in an Age of Information [Hardcover]

We live in an age when consumption and consuming have come to define us. Consumption, now a global phenomenon, is so dominant it allows little room for alternatives. At the same time, 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 maps this new terrain. Bringing together some of the world's leading theorists and critics, the essays range across high theory and popular culture - from informational flows to science fiction simulations, from pop-cultural consumption to capitalism as religion, from the consumption of time to the role of 'speed' in contemporary culture.

Introduction: Rethinking Consumption--Sande Cohen and R. L. Rutsky * Section 1: Redefining Consumption in an Age of Information * Artifice and Resistance in an Information Society--Mark Poster * Rituals of Consumption--Samuel Weber * Information Wants to be Consumed--R. L. Rutsky * Interview with Jean Baudrillard--Sylvere Lotringer * Section 2: Consuming Subjects * The Sentient Home and Social Consumption--Lynn Spigel * Customizing Subjectivity--Marilyn Manners * Commodity Audiences, Consumer Discipline and Glocal Flows--Sean Cubitt * Section 3: Consumption and Representation * The Speed of the Subject--Tom Lutz * Ratios of Matter and Information Spaces--James Wiltgen * Historical Knowledge as Mis-Information--Sande Cohen * The Consumption of Terror--Kriss Ravetto

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-l¦