THE DATA-HUMAN:

WHO ARE WE?: EXPLORING THE QUESTIONS OF OUR IDENTITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE

By Mark Jarzombek

No one disputes that we live in a Digital Age. But unlike the transition into the Modern Age and the advent of various types of machines and technologies – transition that we could see and experience as different and alienating – entering into the Digital Age has been more insidious. This book by MIT Professor Mark Jarzombek – historian and philosopher - opens a visual history that asks: How did we get where we are? A simple question, but not easy to answer since the world of algorithms is almost completely invisible to the common person, and yet is already everywhere, and as a result, we are no longer simple ‘humans.’ The book, - a companion to Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press) – looks at a wide range of advertisements, scientific papers, journals, political events and ransomware histories to produce a visual panorama interspersed with graphs and questions that allows for a more robust conversation about the digitally-modified, digitally-enhanced, digitally-polluted human.