Benjamin Peters

In the age of search, keywords increasingly organize research, teaching, and even thought itself. Inspired by Raymond Williams's 1976 classic Keywords, the timely collection Digital Keywords gathers pointed, provocative short essays on more than two dozen keywords by leading and rising digital media scholars from the areas of anthropology, digital humanities, history, political science, philosophy, religious studies, rhetoric, science and technology studies, and sociology. Digital Keywords examines and critiques the rich lexicon animating the emerging field of digital studies. This collection broadens our understanding of how we talk about the modern world, particularly of the vocabulary at work in information technologies. Contributors scrutinize each keyword independently: for example, the recent pairing of digital and analog is separated, while classic terms such as community, culture, event, memory, and democracy are treated in light of their historical and intellectual importance. Metaphors of the cloud in cloud computing and the mirror in data mirroring combine with recent and radical uses of terms such as information, sharing, gaming, algorithm, and internet to reveal previously hidden insights into contemporary life. Bookended by a critical introduction and a list of over two hundred other digital keywords, these essays provide concise, compelling arguments about our current mediated condition. Digital Keywords delves into what language does in today's information revolution and why it matters.

John Durham Peters, professor of English and of Film and Media Studies at Yale University, is known for his work on the history of media and communication. His first book, Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication, gained worldwide fame thanks to its transdisciplinary outlook on humanity’s thirst for communion, which it finds not in cables and signals, but in its very human condition. In The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, he invites readers to expand their understanding of media beyond mass media. Francois Cooren, professor at Universite de Montreal’s Department of communication, invited John Durham Peters to give a presentation for the department’s 40th anniversary and took the occasion to discuss with him about his conception of communication. The two men exchange their views, among others, on the need to get past the separation between an apparently immaterial realm of communication and the material world it would merely represent. B...