Digital culture
How we respond to and change with our digital world.
Digital communications systems span the globe, digital devices shrink into our pockets, children are ‘born digital’, and the rest of us race to catch up. Increasingly, we are ‘always on’ – but this doesn’t mean we disappear from society. Instead, we connect; with people and places, at home, at work, on the street and in war zones. New generations of digital media are part of the texture of our everyday life, woven into the fabric of culture, playing an increasingly important role in personal lives, influencing how societies experience and recall collective events, and how urban spaces are organised.
The Centre for Material Digital Culture was established to co-ordinate research into the cultural impacts of new media systems. Our aim is to investigate how new media technologies affect our everyday lives; how we respond to, and change with, the introduction of new media forms. We work under three key headings: innovation, cultural transformation, and history.
When investigating innovation, we set out to understand the tensions between historical contexts, together with processes of social shaping and the specific qualities of the digital medium: three factors that are crucial to the success or failure of particular media forms or technologies. We aim to understand how media systems develop, and why particular groups tend to be excluded from the forms of democratic design that social shaping creates. What kind of a voice, for instance, do older people have in the development of the web-based services that are replacing traditional ways of doing things?
When investigating innovation, we set out to understand the tensions between historical contexts, together with processes of social shaping and the specific qualities of the digital medium: three factors that are crucial to the success or failure of particular media forms or technologies. We aim to understand how media systems develop, and why particular groups tend to be excluded from the forms of democratic design that social shaping creates. What kind of a voice, for instance, do older people have in the development of the web-based services that are replacing traditional ways of doing things?
Sensory re-organisation thus engages with social questions as new kinds of freedom meet with intensified control.
We are also exploring forms of identity emerging as digital technologies are integrated into everyday life; for example by researching the quality of friendship in social networks, and the reconstruction of family histories in digital archives. A different aspect of our work looks at cultural forms: research on narrative, for instance, has asked how story telling might change in the non-linear worlds of interactive media.
The third stream of work concerns the cultural histories of digitalisation. We are investigating the history of new media forms, paying attention to the role of the technological imagination in the construction of today’s digital media systems, and uncovering old histories that challenge our assumptions about future media.
The Centre provides an organising context within which detailed studies can be conducted, acting as a framework for collaboration around the study of new media forms within and beyond the boundaries of media and cultural studies.
