Community without Community in Digital Culture by Charlie Gere, Palgrave Macmillan:

The word ‘digital’ refers to both digital data, as used in computers, and also the digits, fingers, of the hand, and thus by extension touch, which has long been a trope for connectivity, community, and participation. Thus, in its drive towards greater connectivity, our culture is digital in more than one sense, in that it increasingly encourages such contact (from the Latin, ‘com’, together, and ‘tangere’, to touch). But at the same time such technologies always involve separation, gap and distance.

Community Without Community in Digital Culture suggests that networks always involve this other aspect of touch, separation, distance and gap, as a necessary concomitant of our fundamental technicity. Thus, against the prevailing presumptions that new technologies involve greater contact, relationality and community, this book proposes that they exemplify the gap inherent in touch, the ‘inconceivable, small, ‘infinitesimal difference” that separates us from each other in time and space. In this such technologies are part of the history of the death of God, the loss of an overarching metaphysical framework which would bind us together in some form of relation or communion. This can be understood in terms of contingency, which has the same root as contact.

Contents

Acknowledgements
Digitality
The Theological Origins of the Digital
Deconstruction, Technics and the Death of God
Derrida, Nancy and the Digital
Darwin after Dawkins after Derrida
Slitting Open the Kantian Eye
The Work of Art in the Post Age
Non-Relational Aesthetics
Luther Blissett
Bartleby Off-line
Exploding Plastic Universe
Conclusion
Notes and References
Index

CHARLIE GERE is Professor of Media Theory and History at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Digital Culture and Art, Time and Technology, and with Michael Corris, Non-Relational Aesthetics, as well as being co-editor of White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960-1980, and many papers on questions of technology, media and art.