The financial crisis of 2007-08 shook the idea that advanced information and communications technologies (ICTs) as solely a source of economic rejuvenation and uplift, instead introducing the world to the once-unthinkable idea of a technological revolution wrapped inside an economic collapse. In Digital Depression, Dan Schiller delves into the ways networked systems and ICTs have transformed global capitalism during the so-called Great Recession. He focuses on capitalism's crisis tendencies to confront the contradictory matrix of a technological revolution and economic stagnation making up the current political economy and demonstrates digital technology's central role in the global political economy. As he shows, the forces at the core of capitalism—exploitation, commodification, and inequality—are ongoing and accelerating within the networked political economy.| Cover Title Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: A Contradictory Moment Part I: Digital Capitalism's Ascent to Crisis 1. Network Connectivity and Labor Systems 2. Networked Production and Reconstructed Commodity Chains 3. Networked Financialization 4. Networked Militarization Part II: The Recomposition of Communications 5. The Historical Run-Up 6. Web Communications Commodity Chains 7. Services and Applications 8. The Sponsor System Resurgent 9. Growth amid Depression Part III: Geopolitics and Social Purpose 10. A Struggle for Growth 11. A "New Foreign Policy Imperative" 12. Taking Care of Business: The Internet at the U.S. Commerce Department 13. Beyond a U.S.-centric Internet? 14. Accumulation and Repression 15. From Geopolitics to Social and Political Struggle Notes Index | "Provides a virtual fire hydrant stream of episodes and details. . . . Informed and informative. Recommended."—Choice

"Schiller has outdone himself this time . . . . Schiller puts on an amazing performance juggling his well-placed emphasis on the role of the U.S. policy system, with the need to take note of changes taking place within the European community, and the rapidly rising power and influence being exercised on a global scale by government and corporate actors in China and India."—Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly
"Drawing on excellent research across a range of fields, it provides the best book-length treatment of digital capitalism in the wake of the worldwide economic crisis that erupted in 2008 and offers the best map of the digital communications industry in current scholarship."
—Vincent Mosco, author of To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World
|Dan Schiller is a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of How to Think About Information and Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System.