Culture Industry 2.0, or the End of Digital Utopias in the Era of Participation Culture

“With the next distraction only a click away, patience for things that require effort evaporates. Anyone who doesn’t have quick responses to complex questions is promptly and publicly punished by a withdrawal of Likes. But is the medium responsible? Is it the human condition as such? Is the anthropological and technological constellation an overlay over background political and economic interests?” — Roberto Simanowski

This week, our featured book is Sociophobia: Political Change in the Digital Utopia, by César Rendueles, translated by Heather Cleary, with a foreword by Roberto Simanowski. Today, we are happy to present Simanowski’s foreword, in which he discusses the radio and Bertolt Brecht’s reaction to it, the timing of the coming of the internet, and Rendueles’s criticism of “Internet-centrists” and “cyberutopians.”

Don’t forget to enter our book giveaway for a chance to win a free copy of Sociophobia!