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Cultural Studies 3 : Cultural Studies 3
Digital culture and life in the 21st Century
Introduction & Overview
Liam Greenslade
http://ncad.culturalstudies.googlepages.com
http://ncadculturalstudies3.blogspot.com
Housekeeping : Housekeeping Course Website http://ncad.culturalstudies.googlepages.com
Course email address ncad.culturalstudies@gmail.com
Course Blog http://ncadculturalstudies3.blogspot.com
Assessment
Course Overview : Course Overview What is Digital Culture?
To speak of the digital is to call up, metonymically, the whole panoply of virtual simulacra, instantaneous communication, ubiquitous media and global connectivity that constitutes much of our contemporary experience.
Charlie Gere Digital Culture (2002)
The context of digital culture : The context of digital culture Convergence of 3 processes:
IT revolution 1970s
Restructuring of Capitalism and Statism 1980s
Cultural and Social Movements of the 1960s and 1970s
Castells (1997)
The IT ‘revolution’ : The IT ‘revolution’ Knowledge technology from Gutenberg to Bill Gates
Move from the amplification and emancipation of the power of muscles to the amplification and emancipation of the power of the brain.
..as with the Industrial Revolution it will have an overwhelming and comprehensive impact, affecting every human being on earth in every aspect of his or her life. Again, paralleling its predecessor, it will run at a gallop, spent not in 150 years, but in twenty-five. ... once it is under way it will be unstoppable ...
Christopher Evans "The Mighty Micro" (1979).
IT ‘Revolution’ technological aspects : IT ‘Revolution’ technological aspects Advances in:
Semiconductor technology
computers (size, price, availability)
convergence of computers and communications
The Internet
Satellite communications
Mobile personal communications
Capitalism restructured : Capitalism restructured Shift from ‘production’ to ‘consumption’ in developed economies
Rise of the ‘knowledge economy’
Globalization
The decline of the nation-state
Neo-liberalism and the market economy
Social & Cultural Movements : Social & Cultural Movements Feminism
Ecology
‘No logo’ anti-consumerism and citizenship concerns
Global resistance movements
The analog & the digital : The analog & the digital Continuous
Both/and
Right brain
More or less
Quantities
Relationship & Context
Connotation
Semantics
Discrete
Either/or
Left Brain
On or off
Numbers
Content
Denotation
Syntax
The analog & the digital : The analog & the digital Digital coding has at its command a precise and powerful syntax well suited for computation and the operations of analytical logic, but this is achieved only at the cost of an impoverished capacity to express meanings. Analog coding, in contrast, displays…a rich and plentiful, if ambiguous semantics.
Wilden The rules are no game (1987)
Further Reading : Further Reading Castells (M) (1997) The rise of the network society: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I. Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Gere C (2002) Digital Culture London: Reaktion
Wilden A (1987) The rules are no game: the strategy of communication London: Routledge
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