NEW BOOK from Palgrave: Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age: The Spirit of Networks<http://www.amazon.com/Media-New-Capitalism-Digital-Age/dp/0230616070> / Eran Fisher (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) This book explores the new terrain of network capitalism through the transformations of the discourse on technology. Rather than viewing such discourse as either a true or false reflection of reality, Fisher evaluates the ideological role that technology discourse plays in the legitimation of a new form of capitalism. Based on an extensive empirical analysis, the book argues that contemporary technology discourse at one and the same time promises more personal empowerment through network technology and legitimates a more privatized, flexible, and precarious economic constellations. Contrary to the prevailing assumption that sees network technology as liberating from the rigidity and pitfalls of a stifling, Fordist capitalism, the book offers a theoretical framework which sees contemporary technology discourse as an ideology that legitimates the economic, social, and political arrangements of the new capitalism. *Praise* “Fisher’s brilliant book provides cogent reasons why we should be skeptical about laptop capitalism and its fluidity and instantaneity of communication…Fisher helps us understand the age of digitality as, above all, capitalist.” --Ben Agger, Professor of Sociology and Humanities, University of Texas at Arlington “This carefully researched and skillfully written guide to the networked world doesn’t just demolish the dreamy visions of Utopia 2.0. It provides precisely the comprehensive analysis we need to understand their power and persistence.” --Vincent Mosco, Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society, Queen’s University, Canada “This is an audacious systematic ideology-critique of digital capitalism…It should be placed on your shelf with Castells's book on informational capitalism, with Dyer-Witheford's on cyber-Marxism or with Mosco's on the digital sublime.” --Uri Ram, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben Gurion University, Israel *Table of contents* Introduction Technology discourse and capitalist legitimation PART I Ch. 1 Capitalism, technology, and the digital discourse Ch. 2 Contemporary technology discourse PART II Ch. 3 Network market Ch. 4 Network work Ch. 5 Network production Ch. 6 Network human PART III Ch. 7 Network cosmology and the exhaustion of critique Ch. 8 Networks as the techno-political culture of post-Fordism *About the author* Eran Fisher is Lecturer at the College of Management – Academic Studies, and at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel. He completed his PhD in the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York in 2008. He writes on Critical Social Theory, technology, and capitalism, and the intersection of capitalism and network technology in such publications as the *European Journal of Social Theory*, *Fast Capitalism*, and *Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society*. Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age: The Spirit of Networks<http://www.amazon.com/Media-New-Capitalism-Digital-Age/dp/0230616070>(Palgrave, 2010)