Digital technologies have been engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textual and audio-visual media. This volume explores how these new capacities transform our shared cultures, our understanding of them, and our capacities to act within them.

Digital technologies have been engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textural and audio-visual media. User-centered content production, from Wikipedia to YouTube to Open Source, has become the emblem of this transformation, but the changes run deeper and wider than these novel organizational forms.

Digital culture is also about the transformation of what it means to be a creator within a vast and growing reservoir of media, data, computational power, and communicative possibilities.

We have few tools and models for understanding the power of databases, network representations, filtering techniques, digital rights management, and the other new architectures of agency and control.

We have fewer accounts of how these new capacities transform our shared cultures, our understanding of them, and our capacities to act within them. Advancing that account is the goal of this volume.

The social science research council is an independent, not-for-profit organization founded in 1923. It brings together partners from around the world in the belief that a just and prosperous global society requires better understanding of complex processes of social, cultural, economic and political change. The SSRC mobilizes knowledge on important public issues, fosters innovation, links research to practice and policy, strengthens individual and institutional capacities for learning, and enhances public access to information and analysis.

Joe Karaganis is a program director at the Social Science Research Council, where he directs projects on media and digital culture.

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Edited by Joe Karaganis
Social Science Research Council, 2007

Distributed by Columbia University Press
Designed by Julie Fry
Cover photograph by Chad Baker (Getty Images)

Presentation
Joe Karaganis

Digital technologies are powerful catalysts of cultural change—this is a trivial observation in our present circumstances. The past decade has seen cultural innovation on a massive scale, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of text and audiovisual media.

Although it is tempting to see technological change as an independent driver of this process, there is powerful reciprocity at work: New technologies take hold only in the context of accompanying cultural innovation as their latent possibilities are explored. This interdependence means that technologies are not merely received but, through processes of adoption, socially defined and, eventually, socially embedded in new collective and institutional practices.

Social construction, in turn, feeds back into processes of technical innovation, shaping research priorities and design. In the end there is no simple causality: no chickens, no eggs.

Although this observation has deep roots in technology and media scholarship, the creative dimension of these sociotechnical encounters has not always been readily visible. A post-WWII generation of media scholarship, especially, consolidated around the idea that sociotechnical encounters ran one way: that the culture that mattered was mass culture, and that the media technologies that defined it were tools for controlling information and opinion.1 Such perspectives were grounded in early experiences with the broadcast media, which privileged—even if they never fully realized—a model of centralized production and “passive” consumption that cast individuals as consumers, rather than as participants in culture or as citizens.

By the 1980s and 1990s, a newer generation of scholarship had rehabilitated these sociotechnical encounters on a number of fronts, finding creative dimensions in reader and audience experience, in unpredictable user and consumer appropriation, and ultimately in challenges to the broader instrumental terms in which we think about the boundaries between persons and technological artifacts. ...

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