Table Of ContentTheorizing Digital Cultures
Theorizing Digital Cultures
Grant Bollmer
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© Grant Bollmer 2018
First published 2018
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ISBN 978-1-4739-6692-5
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Contents
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Why Theorize Digital Cultures?
Part I Defining Digital Cultures
1. What are Digital Cultures?
2. Culture and Technique
3. Digital and Analogue
Part II Histories, Concepts, and Debates
4. Cybernetics and Posthumanism
5. Identities and Performances
6. Bodies and Extensions
7. Aesthetics and Affects
8. Forms and Judgements
9. Infrastructures and Ecologies
Afterword: What Comes after Digital Cultures?
Glossary
References
About the Author
Grant Bollmer’s
research examines the history and theory of digital media. He is the author
of the book Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of
Connection (2016) and has published numerous articles and essays about
digital culture. He has taught in the United States, Australia, and New
Zealand, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Communication at North
Carolina State University and an Honorary Associate of the Department of
Media and Communications at the University of Sydney.
Acknowledgements
There are a number of people without whom this book would not exist. The
initial idea came from conversations with Chris Rojek. Michael Ainsley and
John Nightingale have helped shepherd it through to its completion. I thank them
all, along with everyone else at SAGE for the work they have done. I began this
book while a lecturer in the University of Sydney’s Digital Cultures programme,
and many of the themes and topics it covers came from discussions with other
lecturers, professors, and graduate students in Digital Cultures and in the Media
and Communications department, particularly Chris Chesher, Kathy Cleland,
Gerard Goggin, Jonathon Hutchinson, César Albarrán Torres, Chris Rodley, and
Kyle Moore. My colleagues at North Carolina State University also deserve
mention, especially Steve Wiley, Nick Taylor, and JeongHyun Lee, along with
my undergraduate students, both at Sydney and at NC State. Katherine Guinness
has read through this manuscript time and again, and, above all, remains an
endless source of new ideas, repeatedly expanding my intellectual world. I’d
also like to acknowledge the undergraduates at NC State and the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill who tried out drafts of some of these chapters in
their classes.
Introduction Why Theorize Digital Cultures?
Theorizing Digital Cultures begins by making a case for the
importance of theory for the study of digital culture. This chapter
claims that theories should be linked to material infrastructures and
physical practices, and also suggests that a major focus of any
analysis of media and technology should be to historicize the present
in order to figure out what is, in fact, new or specific about the
contemporary moment.
TERMS: culture; digital; dominant; emergent; Global South;
infrastructures; materiality; residual
THEORISTS: Marcel Mauss, Raymond Williams
EXAMPLES: Corning’s ‘A Day Made of Glass’; lighting in
photography and biometrics; read receipts; virtual reality
Our daily practices have been remade and reimagined by a wide range of digital
technologies. This refers to the many computational devices that exist around us
– devices that operate through calculation and mathematical processing, be they
smartphones, laptops, or even cars and refrigerators. When we talk of digital
media, we often discuss how computers have transformed the ways we
communicate, create, and relate to one another. Yet, not all computers are digital,
and digital does not only refer to computers. At the same time, the effects of
digital media are not just about human practices and human relations. Digital
media shape a much wider ecology, one in which human beings are only one
part. What does it mean to claim that digital media have transformed our world?
What are these changes? How can we understand their significance? And what
can we do about them?
Theorizing Digital Cultures introduces many key claims about how digital media
relate to the thing we call culture. It explains how digital media – in providing a
material, infrastructural basis for practices and interactions – affect identities,
bodies, social relations, the arts, and the environment. These effects are neither
neutral, nor are they inevitable. Rather, the relationship between digital media
and culture is political. Digital media create differences and oppositions that
must be negotiated. They involve power relations that shape what human bodies
are and do and legitimate these relations as neutral or natural. This book is
designed to provoke questions about our current technological reality, not merely
to understand, but to think about how best to change ourselves and our
technologies – hopefully for the better, in ways that encourage a more
egalitarian, democratic, and just world.
