Digital Shock: Confronting the New Reality

Katrine Mallan is a health instructional librarian in the Health
Sciences Library at the University of Calgary.

In Digital Shock, Hervé Fischer delivers a biting critical analysis of
the cultural, social, economic, philosophical, and political impacts of
the digital age. According to Fischer, humanity has embarked on a
potentially devastating new age in human history. As the digital
revolution takes hold of our collective consciousness, we experience an
ever-deepening crises in all aspects of our intellectual and
philosophical values and traditions. From beginning to end, Fischer
wrenches “the digital” from behind its logical, rational facade:
“a new paradox needs to be highlighted here: digital technology, born
from techno-science an tied to the facilitation of communication,
management, commerce, and the economy through its simplistic binary
code, has given flight to a transcendental imagination that suggests a
new avatar of magic, religion, and transcendental idealism.”

Throughout the work, Fischer identifies and offers a nuanced
interpretation of the “thirty paradoxical laws of the digital.” For
Fischer, the paradoxical laws that govern and structure the digital
simulacrum reveal the depths of the imaginative domain from which it
emerges. Fischer challenges the cause of digital prophets and exposes
the myths and fantasies of the digital realm that influence the
relationship between human beings and digital technologies. Fischer is
interested primarily in our individual and collective response to the
new interpretation of the world and encourages a healthy dose of
skepticism and critical engagement with new technologies: “although
the digital fascinates us, we must preserve our instinct for the real,
which we still have and which secretly tells us what to trust. We have
to cultivate our critical freedom, because it tells us what to
mistrust.” Calling on artists, researchers, and philosophers, Fischer
proposes the development of a new philosophy in response to challenges
of the digital revolution.

Digital Shock’s wholly unique analysis of the digital age sends a
bleak warning that will resonate with even the most technologically
devoted reader.