Structures of Participation in Digital CultureJoe Karaganis Digital technologies are 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 and 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 other new architectures of agency and control. We have even fewer accounts of how these new capacities have transformed our shared cultures and our understanding of and capacities to act within them. This volume addresses these issues and supplies the demand for a comprehensive critical framework that places these developments in context. |
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... 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 ...
... technologies- including , especially , information technologies . It is false nostalgia to reject this process . To claim that the will or opinion of the public can be felt in an unmediated , direct fashion is a rhetorical trick ...
... technologies do not alter these fundamentals , but they do offer new ways of scaling up cultural agency from interpersonal and local rela- tions toward the larger , dispersed forms of association characteristic of modern society . They ...