Description

Book Synopsis
Participation is everywhere today. It has been formalized, measured, standardized, scaled up, network-enabled, and sent around the world. Platforms, algorithms, and software offer to make participation easier, but new technologies have had the opposite effect. We find ourselves suspicious of how participation extracts our data or monetizes our emotions, and the more procedural participation becomes, the more it seems to recede from our grasp. In this book, Christopher M. Kelty traces four stories of participation across the twentieth century, showing how they are part of a much longer-term problem in relation to the individual and collective experience of representative democracy. Kelty argues that in the last century or so, the power of participation has dwindled; over time, it has been formatted in ways that cramp and dwarf it, even as drive to participate has spread to nearly every kind of human endeavor, all around the world. The Participant is a historical ethnography of the c

The Participant

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    A Paperback / softback by Christopher M Kelty

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      Book details

      Publisher The University of Chicago Press
      Published 22 November 2019
      ISBN-13 9780226666761
      978-0226666761
      ISBN-10 022666676X
      Also in:
      History Politics, Philosophy & Society Sociology

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      Participation is everywhere today. It has been formalized, measured, standardized, scaled up, network-enabled, and sent around the world. Platforms, algorithms, and software offer to make participation easier, but new technologies have had the opposite effect. We find ourselves suspicious of how participation extracts our data or monetizes our emotions, and the more procedural participation becomes, the more it seems to recede from our grasp. In this book, Christopher M. Kelty traces four stories of participation across the twentieth century, showing how they are part of a much longer-term problem in relation to the individual and collective experience of representative democracy. Kelty argues that in the last century or so, the power of participation has dwindled; over time, it has been formatted in ways that cramp and dwarf it, even as drive to participate has spread to nearly every kind of human endeavor, all around the world. The Participant is a historical ethnography of the c

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