Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age

Song, Felicia Wu

ISBN 10: 0830851135 / ISBN 13: 9780830851133

Published by IVP Academic, 2021

USED book in ACCEPTABLE condition. Cover and pages are in tact but may show creases, tears, water damage, handwriting, underlining, or highlighting. May be missing dust jacket. Supplemental items such as access codes and CDs not guaranteed. Seller Inventory # GCM.2V6G

Synopsis:

We're being formed by our devices. Today's digital technologies are designed to captivate our attention and encroach on our boundaries, shaping how we relate to time and space, to ourselves and others, even to God. Our natural longing for relationship makes us vulnerable to the "industrializing" effects of social media. While we enjoy the benefits of digital tech, many of us feel troubled with its power and exhausted by its demands for permanent connectivity. Yet even as we grow disenchanted, attempting to resist the digital "powers that be" might seem like a losing battle. Sociologist Felicia Wu Song has spent years considering the personal and collective dynamics of digital ecosystems. She combines psychological, neurological, and sociological insights with theological reflection to explore two major questions:

• What kind of people are we becoming with personal technologies in hand?
• And who do we really want to be?

Song unpacks the soft tyranny of the digital age, including the values embedded in our apps and the economic systems that drive our habits. She then explores pathways of meaningful resistance that can be found in Christian tradition―especially counter-narratives about human worth, embodiment, relationality, and time―and offers practical experiments for individual and communal change. In our current digital ecologies, small behavioral shifts are not enough to give us freedom. We need a sober and motivating vision of our prospects to help us imagine what kind of life we hope to live―and how we can get there.

About the Author: Felicia Wu Song (PhD, University of Virginia) is a cultural sociologist of media and digital technologies, currently serving as professor of sociology at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. Her publications include Virtual Communities: Bowling Alone, Online Together and articles in such scholarly journals as Gender and Society and Information, Communication and Society.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, ...
Publisher: IVP Academic
Publication Date: 2021
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: acceptable