Reading Digital Culture

Citation

Duff, A.S. (2001), "Reading Digital Culture", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 9, pp. 468-476. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.9.468.7

The anthology market for information society studies must be buoyant, because this is merely the latest in a long‐running stream. From Computers in the Human Context (Tom Forester, ed., Blackwell, 1989) and Information Technology: Social Issues (Ruth Finnegan, Graeme Salaman, and Kenneth Thompson, eds, Hodder & Stoughton, 1987) to Information and Communication Technologies: Visions and Realities (William Dutton, ed., Oxford University Press, 1996) and Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Era (William Dutton, ed., Oxford University Press, 1999) readers with an interest in the social/economic/cultural impact of information age media have been spoiled for a choice. But that just raises the question: is there anything special about David Trend’s selection?

The answer, I think, is that it embraces a wider range of authors than usual. There is no great surprise in many of the entries, such as Vannevar Bush’s essay “As we may think”, Shoshana Zuboff’s “Dilemmas of transformation in the age of the smart machine”, Sherry Turkle’s “Who am we?”, and Manuel Castells’ “The informational economy”. These are benchmark pieces (or spin‐offs of benchmark works) by authors who are well established in the Anglo‐American literature; much the same can be said of the contributions by Mark Poster, Herbert Schiller, and others. But other names will be less familiar to many. Paul Virilio’s reflections on “Speed and information”, “The coming of age of the flesh machine” by the Critical Art Ensemble, and Vivian Sobchack’s essay on “New age mutant ninja hackers” are among the more exotic entries in this volume, not to mention the excerpt from William Gibson’s novel Burning Chrome. There are in fact 35 pieces in all; I must confess that, despite having reviewed dozens of books on the information age, I had not previously encountered more than about half of the authors represented here. This means either that the reviewer is woefully ignorant or that the book is eclectic or innovative (or perhaps innovatively eclectic).

Seriously, given the vast range, questions must be asked about thematic integrity. The book’s title says “digital culture”, but the contents cover much more than culture. Accepting for the sake of argument Daniel Bell’s division of society into culture, socio‐economic system, and polity, it is clear that some of the articles in Trend’s volume fall into the last two categories. For example, Schiller’s piece on “The global information highway: project for an ungovernable world” is about the socio‐economic structure, while Poster’s “Cyberdemocracy: the Internet and the public sphere” is obviously germane to the polity. These are excellent essays, but they are not really about digital culture. Thus one fears that the editor of Reading Digital Culture has been insufficiently ruthless in his selection policy. This is not to imply that there is not much which is highly relevant to the cultural realm, examples being Margaret Morse’s “Virtually female: body and code”, Julian Dibbell’s “A rape in cyberspace”, and Timothy Jackson’s “Towards a new media aesthetic”. These certainly explore the fundamental questions of personal identity and cultural meaning which lie at the heart of any society.

Everything in this volume is interesting, thought‐provoking, and well‐written. The editorial work is also impeccable, barring the overly liberal selection policy. But I must question the inclusion of essays which have already been anthologised elsewhere in collections which are still in print or at least still easily accessible. One can understand Bush’s piece going in again, given its classic status, but too many of the other essays have been taken straight out of other compilations. For example, Felix Guattari’s “Machinic heterogenesis” was first printed in a 1993 edited volume, Hakim Bey’s “The information war” is from a 1996 collection, and “Will the real body please stand up’ has also already seen the light of day in a relatively recent publication. There is something slightly suspect about re‐anthologising extant materials in this way. Certainly, doing so must diminish somewhat the overall use‐value of Reading Digital Culture. Nevertheless, Trend has produced a fascinating assemblage of heterogeneous contributions to the normative and empirical theory of the information society. In its paperback version, at least, this volume offers good value for money.