Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines

In this book, Mark Poster attempts to provide a philosophical framework for understanding the significance of the rise of computers, the Internet, and the other digital technologies. His argument is that the diffusion of these new technologies results in " complex couplings of humans and machines… " (p. 9) that calls into question some of the central ideas of our time. The discussion starts with postcolonial theory and then moves on to recent theories of empire, citizenship, identity, ethics, psychoanalysis, intellectual property rights, everyday life, and consumer culture. It is an ambitous work and difficult to read in passages, but the effort is worth it. What, according to Poster, is wrong with postcolonial theory? It " presumes a proximate relation of colonizer and colonized that obscures the transculture of new media… " (p. 31). This " transculture " produces " cultural objects (words, texts, sounds, and images) [that] are progressively removed from territorial space into physical realms of electrons, sound waves, and light pulses that are less palpable to the human senses and less subject to control by established institutions, especially the nation-state and the corporation " (p. 35). As a result, " Individuals no longer form identities exclusively through local practices " (p. 36). Poster provides examples of this in India and the Indian diaspora, where Indian employees of call centers have adopted American accents and names and the Internet is used by diasporic Indians to maintain their Indian identities and ties with one another across great distances.