Progressive Geographies

David Beer, The Quirks of Digital Culture – Emerald, 2019

The culture we consume is increasingly delivered to us via various digital on-demand platforms. The last decade has seen platforms like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Google and the like become massive players in shaping cultural consumption. But how can we understand culture once it moves on to big tech platforms? How can we make sense of the changes this brings to our lives? These platforms have the power to shape our cultural landscape and to use data, algorithms and other technological means to shape our experiences, from what we remember through to what we know and even the speed and accessibility of culture.
This book asks how can we understand the chaos and messiness of on-demand culture? Beer suggests that we focus on the quirks and use these as openings to see inside patterns and dynamics of these new cultural formations. By exploring the strange quirks that typify our new on-demand culture, this book seeks to answer these questions. The Quirks of Digital Culture is a guide to understanding the complex and unsettling cultural present, whilst also casting an eye on how our consumption and cultural experiences may unfold in what seems like an unpredictable future.

Sample chapter here

David’s newsletter here and davidbeer.net

From the newsletter:

If you want to read more about it, there is a piece describing the approach taken in the book here.

I’ve also created a Spotfiy music playlist to accompany the book. You can listen to that here.

Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast and Sound Collective from Antipode

Many will know (and love) it already, but for those that don’t we’re pleased to share here Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast and Sound Collective.

Launched earlier this year by the Antipod Sound Collective – KT Bender (UCLA), Allison Guess (CUNY Graduate Center), Alex Moulton (Clark University/Middle Tennessee State University), Darren Patrick/dp (York University), Akira Drake Rodriguez (University of Pennsylvania) and Brian Williams (Dartmouth/Mississippi State University), who first met at our sixth Institute for the Geographies of Justice in 2017 – the podcast currently consists of a pilot and Episode 1, “Clyde Woods, Dispossession, and Resistance in New Orleans”. With the support of the Antipode Foundation, five more episodes are planned for the first season.

You can read more about Antipod here and below, access Episodes 0 and 1 at https://thisisantipod.org/category/episodes/, and subscribe to future releases at https://thisisantipod.org/subscribe/ Follow on Twitter @ThisIsAntipod