Overview
- Re-animates the philosophy of hospitality to contend with the challenges and opportunities of digital life
- Offers an intersectional and interdisciplinary study of hospitality that appeals to both academic and public audiences
- Considers the digital life of hospitality through engaging, relevant, and accessible culture texts and phenomena
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book asks how an unconditional welcome to strangers is both challenged and made possible by new digital technologies, machine learning, and human-computer interaction (HCI). It argues that the digital – the advancement of data, the proliferation of machines (embodied or not) in our homes and on our screens, and the millions of lines of code that organize and predict our lives – is not the absence of hospitality but rather the beginning, though not without its challenges. While such an ethic remains more important than ever, The Digital Future of Hospitality updates this enduring philosophical imperative for digital times. Through the lens of cultural studies, intersectional feminism, and posthumanism, this book reanimates hospitality in relation to a series of digital texts that are relevant to the twenty-first century and beyond – android figures on television, virtual domestic assistants, home- and ride-sharing apps, wearable devices, and a renewed cultural obsession with viruses and immunity.
Reviews
“Lindsay Balfour engages one of the most pressing challenges of our age - how to understand the digital paradox of experiencing strangers as present in their absence. This new phenomenon of uncanny spectrality will be the doing or undoing of our contemporary world. An important and timely book, lucidly written and passionately argued.” (Professor Richard Kearney, Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College, USA)
“Whether as fact or fantasy, the rhetoric of the digital world is riddled with invocations of hospitality, but to what ends and with what effects? What happens when a traditionally humanist concept incorporates or adapts itself to what some call the posthuman? What kind of home is the homepage, what shelter is provided by airbnb? Is the hacker friend or enemy? How much of FemTech is still just Tech, producing old gender stereotypes packaged into a brave new world? What is truly strange and what familiar in the digital domestic? Balfour casts a welcome critical eye upon the world coming and still to come, and on the language we have to describe it.” (Professor David Simpson, Distinguished Professor and G.B. Needham Chair Emeritus at the University of California Davis, USA)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Dr. Lindsay Anne Balfour is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, where she works in the Postdigital Intimacies research cluster. She is the author of Hospitality in a Time of Terror: Strangers at the Gate (2017) and the forthcoming collection Femtech: Intersectional Interventions in Women’s Digital Health (Palgrave, 2023).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Digital Future of Hospitality
Authors: Lindsay Anne Balfour
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24563-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-24562-6Published: 01 April 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-24565-7Published: 02 April 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-24563-3Published: 31 March 2023
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 141
Topics: Cultural Studies, Digital/New Media, Digital Humanities