Contemporary culture is haunted by its media. Yet in their ubiquity, digital media have become increasingly banal, making it harder for us to register their novelty or the scope of the social changes they have wrought. What do we learn about our media environment when we look closely at the ways novelists and filmmakers narrate and depict banal use of everyday technologies? How do we encounter our own media use in scenes of waiting for e-mail, watching eBay bids, programming as work, and worrying about numbers of social media likes, friends, and followers? Zara Dinnen analyzes a range of prominent contemporary novels, films, and artworks to contend that we live in the condition of the "digital banal," not noticing the affective novelty of our relationship to digital media. Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Sheila Heti, Jonathan Lethem, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead, Mark Amerika, and Danica Novgorodoff and films such as The Social Network and Catfish critique and reveal the ways in which digital labor isolates the individual; how the work of programming has become an operation of power; and the continuation of the "California ideology," which has folded the radical into the rote and the imaginary into the mundane. The works of these writers and artists, Dinnen argues, also offer ways of resisting the more troubling aspects of the effects of new technologies, as well as timely methods for seeing the digital banal as a politics of suppression. Bridging the gap between literary studies and media studies, The Digital Banal recovers the shrouded disturbances that can help us recognize and antagonize our media environment.

About the Author
Zara Dinnen is a lecturer in modern and contemporary literature at the University of Birmingham. She is coeditor of The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories (2018).

Reviews
Zara Dinnen clearly and forcefully articulates the importance of her new concept, the "digital banal," as well as the way it plays out across multiple social and aesthetic practices. Nothing could be more fundamentally important than the everyday, now utterly embedded in the digital. The Digital Banal empowers us not just to see ourselves as we now are but to become active participants in everyday digital life. -- Lori Emerson, University of Colorado, Boulder


Awards
Winner of BACLS Monograph Prize, British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies 2018.



Book Information
ISBN 9780231184281
Author Zara Dinnen
Format Hardback
Page Count 240
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press