Jaime Harrison, Digital Culture in Contemporary Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), 208 pp. £80 Hb. ISBN:9781802074710
The texts that Jaime Harrison considers in Digital Culture in Contemporary Fiction are part of a broader discussion of contemporary concerns about the way that digital culture, particularly issues of privacy and digital surveillance, can be witnessed in wider culture. The texts examined are identified as works that ‘explore and contest the ways in which digital culture is reshaping the subject and subjective experience’ (p. 2). The term ‘digital culture’ is defined early in the monograph ‘to refer to the multivariate ways that contemporary technology is reshaping society and culture’ (p. 2). As Harrison points out, we are now in a world where engagement with digital technology is ‘unconditional’; it would be impossible to return to a ‘pre-digital self’ and thus the texts explored in the book interrogate ‘what it means to be human in the digital age’ (p. 2). Digital Culture in Contemporary Fiction is – impressively – the first full-length book to analyse ‘the representation of computational algorithms and their cultural consequences in twenty-first century fiction’ (p. 3).
The book is refreshingly current, referring to two relatively recent critical moments in history when the extent of digital surveillance of our lives was revealed: first, after Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 concerning the collection of telephone records of millions of Americans by the National Security Agency, and second, the revelation that Cambridge Analytica had been involved in manipulating the vote for Brexit and the US Presidential election in 2016. These episodes are seen as crucial moments where distinction can be drawn to a time newly characterised ‘by an unprecedented scale of data accumulation and analysis’ (p. 5). While a number of novels and short stories are mentioned in the introduction and throughout the book, Harrison focuses on three novels and one ‘visual novel’: Joshua Cohen’s The Book of Numbers (2015), Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY (2017), Neal Stephenson’s Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (2019), and Grasshopper Manufacture’s The 25th Ward: The Silver Case (2018). The visual novel is a kind of video game which originated in Japan and is a welcome addition to a discussion of what are otherwise Anglophone texts. The book’s chapters work together to ‘develop an aesthetic theory which explores how these texts have the potential to reveal and interrogate the structures underpinning digital culture’ (p. 5).
Harrison is keen to explore how the novels he considers work for both a tech-literate and a non-tech-literate reader. Due to the subject matter, the author considers their ‘corpus’ a ‘bridge between the “two cultures” C. P. Snow identified’ (p. 18). For this and other reasons, BSLS readers will find this book a fascinating read. Harrison argues that ‘fiction is the most natural literary landscape for [the] encounter between the humanities and information technology to take place’ (p. 19). If software engineers read the texts that are discussed in Digital Culture in Contemporary Fiction, Harrison thinks they will motivated to behave in a more ethical manner.
The first chapter is a methodological chapter, which draws on science and technology studies ‘to define the subject’s relationship to and embedment within a culture characterized by pervasive algorithmic processes’ (p. 26). Michel Foucault’s biopolitics also features in this chapter. At times the book is quite abstract, the terms ‘systems’ and ‘structures’ and the phrase ‘gesture towards’ occur repeatedly. I may be declaring my personal non-tech-literateness in finding it occasionally difficult to know precisely what is being described at times. But I really like the idea that algorithms organise information in the same way that narrative does: ‘In its broadest sense, narrative is the construction of connections between events, people, places, or any other object or piece of data’ (p. 32). Harrison’s book explores the ‘tension between two distinct forms of narrative: literary and algorithmic’ (p. 32). The first chapter teases out ‘how the technical function of algorithms contributes to digital culture’s ability to reshape subjects and subjective experience’ (p. 32).
Further chapters focus on texts and Harrison reads these well, with often fascinating insight. Chapter two discusses Cohen’s Book of Numbers in relation to two ways that algorithms operate to order information: 1) by means of democratization, an order based on the most popular information, and 2) personalization, where information is hierarchised with specific, individual subjects in mind. Harrison is excellent when analysing literary (and visual) texts in the monograph: for example, ‘one brief but pivotal episode’ of Cohen’s novel, is seen to demonstrate how digital culture limits ‘the subject’s ability to articulate their identity’ (p. 48). Harrison reveals that there is not much other critical commentary on Cohen’s novel and that Cohen himself helped Snowden write (or at least ‘shape’ in Cohen’s words, (p. 50)) his autobiography Permanent Record (2019).
Chapter three concerns Barker’s novel H(A)PPY, a ‘dystopian satire’ (p. 79), where ‘The System’ comes to stand in for social media’s efforts to encourage conformity: ‘Barker suggests that algorithms, particularly those which underpin social media platforms, can function as normative devices that herd subjects towards specific goals’ (p. 27). The novel focuses on graph technology and Harrison writes ‘with H(A)PPY taking social media platforms as the target of its critique to highlight how aggregation within these platforms can contribute to a digital culture that strives towards a bland conformity’ (p. 81). Crucially, ‘Individual expression, in particular artistic creativity, is the critical stake’ in this debate (p. 86). Ultimately Harrison finds that H(A)PPY ‘effectively enacts the tensions between artistic creativity and conformity, gesturing towards how individualistic expression can resist algorithmic aggregation’ (p. 103).
The fourth chapter analyses Stephenson’s Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, described by Cohen as a ‘systems novel’ (p. 77). Harrison explores ‘the extent to which algorithms shape what we are conscious of’ (p. 28). The final chapter, focusing on The 25th Ward finds that even while the narrative of the piece ‘depicts a dystopian slant’ on digital culture it suggests a collective response and a possible way to push back against certain aspects of it. Harrison often finds that the authors he explores appear ‘ambivalent’ in their response to digital culture, ‘vacillating between the enmeshment of subjects within algorithmic systems and the optimism that they can resist or escape it’ (p. 76).
Digital Culture in Contemporary Fiction is a hugely topical book which finds that fiction has a crucial role in offering both positive and negative responses to the surveillance digital culture in which we find ourselves. The admirable sentiment proposed by the author is that we might be able to formulate a new culture: ‘one in which technology is transformative rather than repressive, and in which subjects can be fully alive and human’ (p. 29).
Sharon Ruston, Lancaster University
