Making Digital Cultures

In the new millennium many in the west or global north now live in a culture of 24/7 instant messaging, iPods and mp3s, streamed content, blogs, ubiquitous digital images, and Facebook. But they are also surrounded by even more paper, books, telephone calls, and material objects of one kind or another. The juxtaposition and proliferation of older and newer technological objects and practices is striking and provides the backdrop to this book. Making Digital Cultures brings together recent theorizing of the novelty of the 'digital age' with empirical studies of how institutions embrace these technologies in relation to older established technological objects, processes and practices. It asks how relations between 'analogue' and 'digital' are conceptualized and configured both in theory and inside the public library, the business organization, and the archive. Making Digital Cultures tracks intellectual debates about the digitization of culture from the cyberspace of the 1990s to the new technologies known as Web 2.0 arguing that they have cohered around three central motifs - access, interactivity and authenticity. There are hugely significant social, political and economic resources in digital form but they are differentially located, managed and accessed. What is being accessed and how is qualitatively different from pre-digital resources and media in that it involves a high degree of interactivity. There is a large question mark over the authenticity of digital culture in comparison to pre-digital or non-digital culture. How do those charged with taking the digital turn - with making digital cultures - understand and negotiate these issues? How is the apparent immateriality of digital information managed within these institutions? What are the implications for knowledge and learning, products and services, memory and identity? What endures and what is lost in relation to digitization? With its direct engagement with new media theory, science and technology studies, and cultural sociology, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students in the areas of media and communication and science and technology studies. Book jacket.

• | Author: Martin Hand
• | Publisher: Routledge
• | Publication Date: Jun 30, 2020
• | Number of Pages: 200 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 036760339X
• | ISBN-13: 9780367603397