Section I. 1. The American Dilemma 2. The Promise and Peril 3. Challenges of a Digital Culture Section II. 4. Self versus Society: Inherent Tensions 5. The Evolution of the First Amendment 6. Inner and Outer Experience Section III. 7. New Forms of Conversations and Communities 8. The Challenge of Interdependence 9. Beyond the Dichotomy of Self and Society
Biography
C. Waite is professor and chair of the department of Communication at Hamilton College. Her work is interdisciplinary, drawing on the traditions of the social sciences and humanities. Her research focuses on the ways in which the human and technological interface alters the social domain. An earlier book, Mediation and the Communication Matrix was published in 2003 by Peter Lang.
"This intelligent book gives us the sophisticated account of today's digital revolution that needed to be written. Gracious in tone and elegant in literary style, the author shows us how the cyberspace of everywhere and nowhere alters our experience of self and community. Digital Evolution of an American Identity will become a classic of social philosophy in the tradition of Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart and Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy."
—Clifford Christians, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Waite explores the digital revolution’s challenges to American individualism. As the Enlightenment’s easy binaries of self vs. society, speech rights vs. privacy rights, and interior vs. exterior experience are assaulted by infomatics and social media, the digital domain envisions an emergent American collectivity that remakes the individual’s place in the world. Waite effectively uses the West’s transition from print to electronic culture to reconceive of individual autonomy in our time."
—Bruce Gronbeck, The University of Iowa
