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"Contemporary culture is haunted by its media. In its ubiquity digital media have become increasingly banal and in the process its meaning and influence have become less visibly apparent. Contemporary novelists and filmmakers have narrated and depicted everyday life in a way- that represents the emotional, intellectual, and political nature of living in our present-day media environment. The works of these writers and directors, Dinnen argues, also offer ways of resisting the more troubling aspects of the effects of new technologies. Dinnen considers the work of a range of prominent contemporary writers, filmmakers, and artists, including Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Sheila Heti, Jonathan Lethem, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead, David Fincher, Mark Amerika, and Cory Arcangel. Their works critique and reveal the ways in which digital labor isolates the individual; how the work of programming has become an operation of power; how creative remixing allows the writer or filmmaker the opportunity to expose what often becomes shrouded in the digital banal; self-representation through avatars; and the development of the "California ideology," which has folded the radical into the rote and the imaginary into the mundane"-- Introduction: thinking with the digital banal -- David Fincher's grammar of code -- Jonathan Lethem and Mark Amerika's common writing -- Being social in a post-digital world in Catfish and How should a person be? The signs of a social network -- Twenty years of Californian ideology in The Bug and The Circle -- Refresh, update, wait-or living with the digital banal in Chronic city and Refresh refresh -- Speculating on the real estate of the digital banal -- Conclusion: after the digital banal.
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