David Löw Beer Book order

In this pioneering book, David Beer redefines emergent algorithmic technologies as the new systems of knowing. He examines the acute tensions they create and how they are changing what is known and what is knowable.

This book draws upon the work of Georg Simmel to explore the limits, tensions and dynamism of social life through a close analysis of the works produced in the final years of his life and reveals what they might still offer some 100 years later. Focusing on the relationships between worlds, lives and fragments in these works, David Beer opens up a conceptual toolkit for understanding life as both an individual experience and as a deeply social phenomenon. Taking the reader through artistic and musical forms of inspiration, to the problems of culture and on to the conceptual understanding of lived experience, the book illuminates the richness of Simmel’s ideas and thinking. This sophisticated dialogue with Simmel’s lesser known later works will provide fresh insights for students and scholars of cultural and social theory and pave the way for a reinvigorated engagement with his ideas.

This book explores the quirks of digital culture. Through a series of short punchy chapters, it uses these quirks as momentary glimpses into the hidden dynamics of our swirling, highly mediated and often unfathomable cultural experiences.

This book explores the material and everyday intersections between popular culture and new media. Using a range of interdisciplinary resources the chapters open up various hidden dimensions, including objects and infrastructures, archives, algorithms, data play and the body that force us to rethink our understanding of culture as it is today.

Written for engineers, this book provides more than technical know-how and focuses on how to be an effective communicator. This new edition helps to eliminate the glitches that trip up the busy reader or listener, causing annoyance, confusion, or misunderstanding so that their writing and speech are crystal clear.