Title: The Digital Cult
Subtitle: A New Theocracy Between Media and Memory
Subject Classification:  Society and Culture, Technology, Artificial Intelligence  
BIC Classification: TB, JH, HP
BISAC Classification: PHI034000, SOC052000, TEC052000
Binding: Hardback, eBook
Planned publication date: Dec 2024
ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-80441-800-0
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-80441-801-7

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Description

Media and memory are linked by an intimate relationship. Every act aimed at fixing, memorizing, or commemorating, requires the mediation of some form of material or immaterial support: walls, objects, languages, technologies, media.

This important new book reconstructs the evolution of this inseparable relationship, from cave art to modern digital devices, also investigating its various social implications.

The author highlights the possible cognitive, ethical, educational and political risks linked to the onset of a new "religious" cult of digital media. In a society in which the task of processing, accumulating and retrieving information increasingly takes place within the Internet, digital devices, and Artificial Intelligence, the stakes are very high. It is not just a matter of understanding what the risks are of a possible weakening of our ability to remember, and therefore also to know the world, but to understand who or what owns and controls our individual and collective memory.

Ultimately, it is about understanding what is happening to our identity. Faced with the disturbing advent of an inexorable "technological theocracy", the author calls for principles and practices of a new "digital secularism".

The book was translated from the original Italian by Dr. Emanuele Liotta.

Biography

Author(s):  Guido Nicolosi is Associate Professor in the Sociology of Culture and Communication, Disfor, University of Catania, Italy. He is an associate member abroad of the Groupe Sociétés Religion Laïcités EPHE/CNRS in Paris, France; and a member of the scientific board of the RN 07 Sociology of Culture of the European Sociological Association (ESA).

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