Chapter 1

Making Digital Cultures:

An Introduction

Introduction

This book examines how digital technologies and techniques are being enfolded into
the fabric of specific institutional and broader cultural environments. It is about the
cultural significance of shifts from analogue to digital but it is not about the triumph
of digitization in any homogenous sense. It is often about the rather uneasy alliances
between analogue and digital objects, practices and processes, and how we might
understand this from both the lofty heights of theory and the grounded practices
of those directly engaged with taking the digital turn. There is no definitive model
of ‘digital culture’ and as such the book tries to explore and illuminate emerging
tendencies at different moments and in different places, and from different theoretical
angles. Instead of ‘reading backwards’ and finding the ends of such efforts, it looks
at the digital turn inside three sites – the public library, the business organization, and
the national archive – asking what is being made, how this is or is not achieved, and
who or what we might consider to be the architects. For some of the advocates and
detractors involved, shifting toward digital culture is primarily about the provision
of ‘access’; in other environments it involves engagements with novel business
practices in relation to that ‘interactive’ digital culture ‘out there’; for others it is
wrapped in unresolved issues of memory making, authenticity and the possibility of
managing histories. In examining the often diverse range of efforts to bring digital
cultures into being, to reorganize existing institutional and other environments around
sets of digital ideals, this book presents a different take on some of the dynamics of
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the seemingly inevitable ‘convergence culture’ in the twenty first century (Jenkins
2006).
To question ubiquity and inevitability might appear a strange way of proceeding in
that anecdotally at least those in the west or global north appear to be fully immersed
in all things digital. Many people now live in a culture of 24/7 instant messaging,
iPods and mp3’s, streamed content, blogs, ubiquitous digital images, and Facebook.
It is noticeable that many more environments involve digital media of some sort,
from the routine gathering of data, the ubiquity of software, to the presence of
wireless technologies. It is also the case that increasingly, cultural, social, economic
and political issues and concerns involve digital media, where digital media is both
the channel and forms the central topic of discussion. This is most acute when an
‘event’ in news journalism becomes both dispersed through digital media (blogs,
cameraphone images, web based commentary) and in turn invites reflection upon
those media and their role in shaping the event, its reception and its ongoing re-

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 2 Making Digital Cultures
interpretation. In other words, the popular notion that digitization is having a major
impact in almost all areas of everyday life is writ large and needs taking seriously.
But we are also surrounded by even more paper, books, telephone calls, and material
objects of one kind or another.1 The juxtaposition of older and newer technological
objects and practices is striking and it is this that provides the backdrop to this book.
In the book, I bring together recent theorizing of the novelty of the ‘digital age’ with
empirical studies of how different institutions are adopting these technologies in
relation to older established technological processes and practices.
There is a plurality of possible understandings of ‘digital culture’. But despite
such a conventional observation, debates about digital culture do tend to have
cohered rather firmly around three central and interrelated issues which form the
narrative structure of the book: access, interactivity, and authenticity. I will simply
introduce these key ‘motifs’ here.
Firstly, it has become clear that there are hugely significant social, political and
economic resources in digital form but they are differentially located, managed
and accessed. Within public policy and among those concerned with developing
inclusive social policy it is thought that as many people as possible need access to
these benefits in order to fully participate in digital culture. Such benefits might be
educational and other governmental services, commodities, knowledge resources,
popular culture, and so on. Obviously, as I will discuss, there are serious debates
about quite what the benefits of digital information are, and how access might be
organized, and so on. But there are few in social theory or in public policy who do not
advocate universal public access to digital culture. Alongside the simple provision
of information there are implications for what kinds of skills and competence are
required, on the part of institutions and citizens, and what implications that has for
modes of organization and identity.
Secondly, it is commonly argued that what is being accessed and how it is being
accessed is qualitatively different from pre-digital resources and media in that it
involves a high degree of interactivity. Such digitally enabled interactivity is thought
to produce different relations between state and citizen, producer and consumer,
culture and technology. It arguably transforms the roles of institutions, and is
enabling a very different kind of culture to emerge, for good or ill. While there are
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many models or diagrams of interactivity, as we shall see, its pervasiveness as an

idea is remarkable. The relationship between rhetorics, techniques and practices of
interactivity are complicated and highly contested.
Thirdly, there seems to be a large question mark over the authenticity of digital
culture in comparison to pre-digital or non-digital culture. There are complex
questions about recognition, originality, truth, history, and knowledge, in relation
to the character of digital information culture, when positioned against a model of
non-digital culture. This is partly a cyclical argument about ‘dumbing down’, of

1 To take one example, a recent report by Statistics Canada entitled ‘Our Lives in Digital
Times’ (2007) observes the dramatic rise in paper, telephone, mail, business travel, and
physical retail space over the last twenty years, alongside equally dramatic rises in ICT use.
This simple observation raises important questions regarding the relations between analogue
and digital objects, practices and processes on the ground.

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 Making Digital Cultures: An Introduction 3
‘banalization’ and so on, but there is more to it than that. While the general metaphor
of ‘information overload’ is less common today, the idea that the increasing quantity
of information in whatever form has a detrimental effect on the quality of cultural
content is a continual theme whether in entertainment, education, politics or
contemporary art. Moreover, the idea of originality is thought anachronistic in an
age of ubiquitous manipulation.
Of course, while these motifs have a contemporary resonance they also have
longer histories partly related to disciplinary orientations and agendas in the social
sciences and humanities. The theme of access is firmly tied to ongoing debates about
the relationships between technology and democracy, both in the realm of political
empowerment and cultural production. The notion of interactivity – especially
between human and machine – can be located within computer and information
science but also has a longer history within museology and literary criticism.
Authenticity, and the more general concern about the fate of meaning under
technology, has been an ongoing preoccupation, particularly within critical theories
of modernity, technology and culture. So, there’s nothing new about these concerns
when considered in a rather general sense, but they do take new forms, in relation
to novel and not so novel circumstances. It is the specific ways in which these are
assembled, disassembled, and re-assembled – ‘reshuffled’ to borrow from Latour
(2005) – that is of interest here. In other words, how digital cultures are being ‘made’
in this sense is the primary occupation.

What Does Digital Mean?

Digital information exists as binary digits of information, either 0s or 1s, sequences

of which are usually called binary code or bytes. Digitization, then, refers to the
process of converting different forms of information – and this might include
sounds, images, texts, and so on – into this code. This information can then be stored,
delivered, and received in digital form. Staying with this ‘technical’ definition there
are some immediate implications. One is that the information has, apparently, no
particular relationship to the system within which it is stored or through which it
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moves. The same sound recording can be stored via compact disc or mp3 file, played
through streaming media player, iPod, and so on. A second implication is that in
theory all information becomes ‘the same’ and can be produced and distributed on a
scale and with a rapidity that is unprecedented. A third implication is the high level
of rewriting or manipulation that can occur when there is an underlying code. The
concepts of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ in cultural studies take on a radically different
hue in this regard. But even these claims to technical novelty are hotly disputed
from the outset in media theory. Where some argue that the discrete nature of digital
media is novel, others suggest that this is no different from cinema. Some claim the
convergence of multiple media to be novel; others cite the medieval manuscript as not
so far removed. What is also immediately apparent is how such claims are wrapped
in broader cultural promises and threats which relate to the histories of computing
and media and to the imaginary futures of digital culture promoted by various actors.
In this sense, I take digital culture to be far more than the switch from analogue

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 4 Making Digital Cultures
formats to digital ones. Digitization is a cultural problematic in the broadest sense:
it concerns the technicality of contemporary politics, society and culture. There is
scarcely an aspect of contemporary culture that has not been discussed in terms of
digitization.
Stating that there is no definitive model of digital culture but that we need to
nonetheless explore it requires further explanation. We can begin with the general idea
that ‘culture’ in a number of senses is increasingly digitally mediated, and that many
digital technologies are increasingly ‘cultural’ in their form and effects – processes so
central to much institutional discourse and practice that the moniker ‘digital cultures’
is thought to be justified as a description. Indeed, some have argued that new digital
media have, in part, redefined what culture is:

Digitality can be thought of as a marker of culture because it encompasses both the

artefacts and the systems of signification and communication that most clearly demarcate
our contemporary way of life from others (Gere 2002: 12).

In a more sociological vein, there has been an explosion of interest in the ‘digital
age’, ‘information age’, ‘technoculture’, and so on in recent years. Information and
communication technologies, the internet in particular, are commonly associated
with a variety of dramatic social and cultural changes. This is often most acute in
discussions about the impact of digital technologies upon traditional institutional
identities and practices, and the consequences for citizenship and selfhood more
generally. We hear of the irrevocable disembedding and deterritorialization of
existing social relations within the generalized ‘flows’ of global information culture
(Castells 1996; Lash 2002; Poster 2006).
One of the key problematics of emerging digital cultures is that they are mostly
concerned with establishing the relations between analogue and digital materials,
ideals and practices. The precise ways in which these relations are being organized
and managed forms the core of this book. This is at odds with both ‘revolutionary’
accounts of celebration or lament, and the ‘continuity’ accounts of conservation
or degradation. So, why call them ‘digital cultures’? Well, the emphasis is upon
‘making digital cultures’, and in a way this is what is being attempted, experiments in
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becoming more digital less analogue. It is argued that sets of ideals that have become
attached to digital technology are informing institutional change. But, it does not
suggest that this is being achieved in any simple manner or at all necessarily, and
certainly not that there is any clear consensus as to what is being achieved and what
the effects might be. This leads to the question of what ‘culture’ is taken to be in this
book.

What is Culture?

Most academic texts about ‘culture’ begin with the observation that it is an especially
difficult concept to define, going on to cite Williams (1983: 87) famous observation
in Keywords that ‘culture’ is thought to be ‘one of the two or three most complicated
words in the English language’. Without simply repeating etymological senses or
well-worn debates here it is necessary to offer an initial clarification of the senses in

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 Making Digital Cultures: An Introduction 5
which the term is to be used in this book, although these will be fully articulated in
Chapters 2 and 3. I use the term in its more anthropological sense of ‘forms of life’,
encompassing all aspects of our lived experience whether they be deemed ‘ordinary’
or ‘sublime’. This is in contrast to definitions that refer to ‘the arts’ or to the aesthetic
components of symbolic exchange and would encompass all institutional and
ordinary conduct, structures and modes of organization. In particular, I see ordinary
and often invisible conventions and routines as equally constitutive and meaningful
as the more conspicuous aspects of cultural display, identity, and so on. I want to
stress and elaborate two further orientations here. First, such forms of life are more
or less ‘produced’ and ‘organized’ in a Foucauldian sense; our lived experiences are
technically shaped and ordered through historically specific machineries. Second,
such forms of production and ordering are uneven and have a specificity that needs
to be empirically grounded, where as Latour has argued ‘Culture does not act
surreptitiously behind the actor’s back. The most sublime production is manufactured
at specific places and institutions’ (2005: 175). I will elaborate briefly on these issues
here, and how they relate to questions of digitization.

Culture is Technology Made Durable

Throughout the book I draw upon literature that theorizes culture as always a
question of technology. Culture is a contingent arrangement of artefacts, knowledge,
discourses, and practices within a given site. Sandywell (1996) emphasizes the point
here in historical terms:

In short, knowledge systems and technologies must be approached as reflexive media of

human evolution…At all costs we must avoid technologism or the romanticism which
rejects artefacts and instruments as alienating the human spirit. In historical fact we both
act and think only by means of implicit or explicit technical logics – understanding that the
vast sphere indexed by the Greek word ‘techne’ represents a complex history of reflexive
self-definition (Sandywell 1996: 33).

In Sandywell’s account, then, culture is the available descriptive repertoires and

everyday competencies of actors made possible, in part, through existing technical
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arrangements (institutional and organizational forms of life). That is, we should think
of social and cultural life as the available apparatuses of definition, exploration and
experience as ‘every aspect of human reality…are historical events mediated by
cultural systems embodied in the stock of available technologies and corresponding
interpretation systems (Sandywell 1996: 33). Or as Don Idhe states ‘the technological
form of life is part and parcel of culture, just as culture in the human sense inevitably
implies technologies’ (1990: 20). In its post-Foucauldian variant, there are only
‘cultural technologies’ which are governmental in that they actively shape or
guide the possibilities of everyday conduct. Nikolas Rose (1995: 300) has argued
convincingly that the history of who we think we are is not so much a matter of ideas
but of technologies. By this he means technologies as ‘instruments’, which may be
intellectual discourses as much as practical devices which shape the ways in which
we can be human. When we isolate an aspect of technology, such as digital code
for example, we ignore the other elements which constitute it; the ways of doing

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 6 Making Digital Cultures
things that are coupled with it, the roles humans are expected to play in relation to
it, the practices of the self which orientate around it, and so on. For Rose (1999) and
others such as Dean (1999) and Barry (2001) technologies conceived in this way are
inextricably cultural and governmental. They do nothing less than enable ‘things to
be thought’ and skills to be learned. As Foucault observed, a range of technologies
work together in producing culture as increasingly governmentalized forms of life
(Foucault 1988: 18). This emphasis on the technicality of culture has also found its
home within Cultural Studies. I draw upon this conception of culture in terms of the
detailed routines and operating practices of cultural institutions as used by Bennett
(1998):

…since cultural resources are always caught up in, and function as parts of, cultural
technologies which, through the ordering and shaping of human relations they effect, play
an important role in organizing different fields of human conduct (82).

I will argue that many institutions are currently preoccupied with the promises and
threats of digitization. If, as suggested above, technologies are inseparable from
institutional and organizational cultures then we would expect digitization to bring
alternative cultural conventions and practices into being. This is be explored though
two related dimensions in Chapters 2 and 3. The first is the narrative positioning of
digitization within intellectual discourse. This has a number of significant elements
to it. One is theoretical, concerned with how digital culture has been positioned in
contrast to analogue culture, in terms of the dominant metaphors and tropes used to
signify such differences. Another is historical; to do with how academic thinking
about digital culture has itself shifted in relation to the pace and proliferation of
digital machines. Indeed, for some, Foucauldian analyses of this kind are outmoded
as more cultural objects and practices become informationalized (see Lash 2002).
The issue of narrative is significant throughout as I go on to argue that dominant
tropes do not simply live in the academy: they ‘script’ digitization in particular ways,
and operate as rhetorical vehicles for institutional actors seeking to embrace and
implement digitization for locally specific ends. In that sense, these ‘narratives of
promise and threat’ tells us something about digital culture at a general level and are
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also performative in the sense of providing some of the conceptual resources through
which people make sense of what is going on ‘out there’. As has been recently argued
by Gere:

But technology is only one of a number of sources that have contributed to the development
of our current digital culture. Others include techno-scientific discourses about information
and systems, avant-garde art practice, counter-cultural utopianism, critical theory and
philosophy (Gere 2002: 14).

The second dimension is the character of digital experimentation and invention

occurring within relatively bounded institutional cultures. In post-Foucauldian
analyses there is a contingency but often a stasis and solidity implied in both
the arrangements which constitute cultural technologies but also in the forms of
engagement that might take place. We rarely learn, for example, about the ways
in which practitioners of various kinds go about assembling and maintaining such

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 Making Digital Cultures: An Introduction 7
arrangements or how subject positions may or may not be taken up. I will argue
that digital cultures have to be ‘made’, and this involves ongoing efforts to force
together disparate elements into a coherent scheme within a given set of historically
constituted boundaries. In the cases highlighted here, institutional cultures are being
reorganized around contested notions of the digital. These are moments where some
of the elements making up these sites are temporarily ‘reshuffled’ (Latour 2005),
where specific innovations make visible the often invisible role of technologies and
objects in the constitution of social order (Shove et al 2007). The important point is
that ideals, technologies and practices have to be configured to make them durable,
and that this takes work.

Culture is Local and Contingent

In this book I pay a lot of attention to accounts of culture as they are used by
institutional actors of one kind and another. There are some important aspects to this.
Firstly, the forms of positioning and guiding emphasized within post-Foucauldian
analyses need to be supplemented with actual forms of engagement. The assertion of
digital culture as a distinctive formation, whether in theory or empirically, involves
the constitution of a prior culture taken to be real. Its disappearance is often then
‘regretted’. This is what critical theory is about. But the same is often true of cultural
practitioners where there are significant points of agreement and disagreement about
what ‘culture’ is (especially in its ‘high’ and ‘low’ variants), what its relation to
technology is, could or should be, and what kinds of strategies should be employed
as a result. In this sense, I want to remain open to what institutional actors define
as cultural and as technical, and so on. In institutional sites we have to be sensitive
to (often contradictory or contested) definitions and accounts of ‘culture’; these
are often positioned distinctively against ‘the digital’. The organization as a set
of internally differentiated cultures is important here, particularly in terms of how
actors within that site whether they be human or nonhuman are assigned roles and
functions which are subject to reconfiguration and redefinition in terms of digital
cultural ideals and expectations. The senses of new-ness or novelty in digital culture
are not to be decided by theory or historiography alone – the ways in which the
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new and old are designated by practitioners, the forms of enabling and constraint
rendered by these, the forms of closure and normalization at work, are all significant
aspects of cultural production here.
Secondly, in drawing upon work in both new media theory and science and
technology studies the intention is to question ideas about agency in relation to
culture and technology. In new media theory, culture is most often seen as the
outcome of media technology. Print media produce national culture, the modern
state and citizen, and reflective subject of modernity, and so on (see Poster 1990).
Broadcasting extends these capacities, and digitization radically unsettles and
reconfigures institutions and the subject. Postmodern culture is thought to be largely
an outcome of shifts in technical apparatuses. In science and technology studies there
is also a strong account of technical agency and the production of culture, but these
are cast in terms of ‘relational materialism’ and are local empirical questions. In
pulling aspects of new media theory into STS inspired research there are three sets of

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 8 Making Digital Cultures
broad relationships which are explored throughout the book. The relations between
accounts of digital technologies (their form, content and ‘effects’) and current ideals
of institutional reorganization (becoming ‘interactive’, empowering users, becoming
‘direct’, and so on). How modern social and cultural institutions (libraries, financial
organizations, and archives) are appropriating digital technologies such as Web
pages, HTML text, databases, record keeping and imaging techniques, and the
reciprocal transformations involved in such processes. The relationships between
digital technologies and other artefacts, such as paper, forms of writing, telephones,
and so on, as elements within the material culture of institutions. Taken together, the
studies here take the technologies themselves seriously and look at them in some
detail, but they are always technologies in local use, hence the focus then upon the
institutional locations of the ‘same’ technologies and techniques.
Each of the institutional sites explored in the book provides a range of angles
from which to look at digital culture in-the-making in the above senses. The library,
financial services, and the archive can all be considered cultural technologies in
the Foucauldian sense. They are contingent arrangements of ideals, artefacts and
practices which order forms of knowledge and seek to guide practices of learning,
securitization, and knowledge acquisition. There are some other important
dimensions to these particular sites. First, there is a temporal distance between the
analyses offered in the book, and I am suggesting that these speak to three significant
moments: in the first case where access is all, and where there is little mobility
of devices; in the second where commerce appears boundless and immateriality
rampant; and in the third where Web 2.0 is ascendant and materiality seems to
become more important again. These are not technologically determinist in nature;
they are matters of taking both the objects and the accounts of practitioners seriously.
Second, there are also public and private sector differences in each case, especially
in light of the notion that such a boundary is collapsing in relation to digitization and
convergence. Third, there are differences in the cultural sector between libraries and
archives which are significant in relation to the idea that digitization is ‘the great
leveller’. Fourth, there are important differences in focus and concern within each
site which provide some insight into the contested nature of digital ideals or myths
on the ground, and also raise questions as to how specific concerns ‘trump’ others
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in these locations. These differences do not ‘cover’ digital culture as such, but are
three different angles on important local differences and tell us something about
continuities and discontinuities within and across institutionally defined digital
cultures.

The Chapters

The book takes as it starting point the dominant narratives of the ‘digital age’ and
the concomitant implications for the transformation or reinforcement of existing
political, social and cultural arrangements. Chapter 2 provides a detailed discussion
of key ideas and concepts drawn from social and cultural theory concerning what the
‘digital turn’ might involve and is organized around what I have called ‘narratives
of promise and threat’. In historical terms, new technologies (especially those
considered to be technologies of mediation) have generally been articulated within

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 Making Digital Cultures: An Introduction 9
a wholly positive framework initially, followed by more negative discourses as
initial promises fail to materialize. Indeed, this does seem to be an institutionalized
form of sociotechnical discourse; a broadly utopian/dystopian framework operating
chronologically (Heim 1999; Winston 1998). The articulation of the Web and
associated digital technologies within such a dialogue seems remarkable in a sense;
one would have at least anticipated a decline in the utopian predictions surrounding
new technologies over the course of the 20th century (Woolgar 2002). But, the
Internet and the Web has been discursively constructed within a benign framework,
as a technology of ‘world transformation’ and democratization, if regulated and
governed in the appropriate manner (or not at all). Accordingly, we have also seen
the emergence of its antagonist, a dystopian discourse of total technologization,
articulated in wholly negative terms. This has, in part, been an historical event or a
‘realist’ reaction to diverse forms of ‘network idealism’ (Heim 1999). While engaging
in this debate and situating it in relation to the changing status of ‘culture’ over the
last ten years, the discussions are organized around three interrelated themes.
Firstly, the idea that the circulation or movement of digital information around
the globe constitutes a radical shift in social and cultural organization. This invokes
concepts of networking, flattening, and the de-differentiation of institutional
structures through the primacy of the network and of information flows. There are
new forms of circulation emerging which override or replace older modern structures,
where culture has in a sense replaced the social, or where networks are thought
to be the dominant mode of organization. Secondly, the notion that new kinds of
territory have emerged is discussed. This includes processes of ‘extra’, ‘de’ and ‘re’
territorialization, in terms of ‘lifted out’ cyberspaces and new modes of inclusion and
exclusion. There are new relations between persons and environments in terms of
data, which may be increasingly local and regional as well as global. Thirdly, issues
of what it means to participate in digital culture are raised in two senses. One has to
do with new kinds of persona imagined in relation to the rise of the Web, especially
in relation to citizenship. The second thread concerns debates around the meaning
of interactive digital cultural objects and practices, often understood in terms of the
march of the brand, commodification and the simulation of culture.
A second intellectual debate is traced in Chapter 3. The implicit theories
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of technology in the dominant narratives of digitalization discussed above are

explored. If digital culture is primarily framed through a pervasive dualism of
revolutionary change versus continuity then, I argue, subtle forms of determinism
underlie both types of accounts. Indeed, ongoing work in science and technology
studies or the ‘anthropology of technology’ suggests that much social science has
failed to understand the complexity and reflexivity immanent to sociotechnical
processes. Rather than provide an overview of this work (see Sismondo 2004),
the aim is to show how such theories of technology have shifted from varieties of
essentialism to models of performativity and how this changes our understanding
of digital technology in practice. In doing this, the chapter identifies three kinds
of ontological commitment in relation to digital technology found in the above
accounts: essentialism, abstraction, relational materiality. It is argued that these arise
through broader commitments to modes of theorizing, namely modern, post-modern
and non-modern (or ‘post-human’) orientations to theorizing culture. It is the latter

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 10 Making Digital Cultures
set of accounts which is taken as the most productive in its ability to both avoid an
ontological commitment to either side of the dualism apparent in Chapter 2, and to
treat this dualism as a key constituent in the ‘materials of digital culture’.
The second part of the book looks at three quintessentially modern institutions:
the public library, the business organization, and the national archive. Chapter 4
explores key debates and practices around what has been called ‘digital citizenship’,
in relation to public access to digital culture in the form of knowledge. The ubiquitous
narrative of public information access associated with digital technologies acts as
the central motif here, in terms of how this has been constituted within government
policies regarding models of e-citizenship (in the UK and North America) and within
specific cultural institutions charged with delivering these promises. With some
similarity to the ongoing anticipation of a ‘paperless office’, the end of the ‘paper
library’ has been continually predicted since at least 1964 (Lesk 1999; Samuel 1964).
The emergence of the so-called ‘digital library’ represents the latest future imaginary
within this institution. In a progressive narrative, the digital library will replace the
need for print-based information resources, translated into digital formats to be
accessed via the screen. Information will be set free of its restrictive print format
and a truly democratized public information service will emerge.2 The narratives
of digitization in the library shifts learning from ‘instruction’ to ‘empowerment’,
entailing an institutional move from custodialism to interfacing, and a promotion of
citizen engaged in indefinite learning. In this sense, the Web (as the latest information
machine) has become a powerful set of cultural discourses about the traditional
purposes, functions, and effects of public libraries in contemporary information
cultures.3 After providing a concise review of the major governmental rationale of
public information access, the chapter focuses upon how public libraries have been
responding to both the generic narrative of becoming ‘information interfaces’, specific
government policies, and the perceived ‘needs’ of their users. A documentary and
interview based case study of the development of The People’s Network in the UK is
the primary empirical research used here. I critically engage with both the discursive
and material processes involved in attempts to shift the image, function and use of
public libraries in relation to digitalization. Digitalization has become the rhetorical
and material ‘vehicle’ of earlier ideas associated with library postmodernization
Copyright © 2008. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

(access, empowerment, and participation), but is subject to ongoing contestation in

unusual ways and in relation to the cultural-ethical specificities of the institution.
Of course, the technologization of the public library is not an unprecedented
phenomenon; in fact, the public library has continually been at the forefront of
information technology implementation. This has most often been associated with
improvements in service and efficiency. However, the relationships between public
libraries and new technologies have always produced more dystopian speculations

2 This image bears a striking similarity to Vannevar Bush’s imaginary ‘memex’ system,
which also envisaged a democratized repository of information/knowledge.
3 We can find similar discourses of empowerment and self-directed learning and
‘improvement’ within, for example, contemporary museums. See for example: Bennett
(1998); Boswell and Evans (1999); MacDonald and Fyfe (1996); Hooper-Greenhill (1994).

Hand, Martin. Making Digital Cultures : Access, Interactivity, and Authenticity, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008. ProQuest
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 Making Digital Cultures: An Introduction 11
concerning the inevitable obsolescence of the traditional library as a public space,
and most importantly, the demise of specific practices of learning ‘about culture’:

Book learning is almost entirely superseded by radio, the cinema and television, and all
public libraries report a steady falling-off both in the number of borrowers and in the
average number of books borrowed by each.4

The second motif of ‘interactivity’ is explored in relation to ecommerce. In Chapter

5 I go inside a major financial services company to track an attempt to produce
digital interactivity between company and consumer. Why might we look at financial
services in a book about digital culture? A simple reason might be that business
organizations do not only ‘have a culture’ but as suggested above are cultural
entities in their own right as configurations of meaningful ideals, technologies and
practices (Morgan 1993; Thrift 2005). Further to that, many such organizations are
increasingly involved in the production of explicitly cultural goods and services in
the form of software based objects and services, especially in relation to their own
branding processes. As Lash and Lury contend:

…cultural objects are everywhere as information, as communications, as branded

products, as financial services, cultural entities are no longer the exception: they are the
rule (2007: 4; see also Lury 2004).

In terms of the broader cultural environment and its relation to governmentality,

over the last 20 years or so deregulated financial services have become increasingly
significant as cultural technologies as they construct ever more risk activities and
provide the ‘solutions’ to them through their provision of products which seek to
order the life course (Beck 1999; Lash 2002; Lyon 2001).5 In this latter respect,
insurance industries, along with pension funds and other related financial techniques
and instruments are at the forefront of the ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992, 1999).
Substantively, the chapter looks at the creation of ‘digital products’. Where Chapter
4 focused upon external public access to digital services, this chapter explores
attempts to integrate different software (integrating a variety of databases, HTML
documents, and external ‘links’) ‘inside’ the business organization with a view to
Copyright © 2008. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

delivering ‘interactive’ and immaterialized digital products and services. The specific
focus is the financial services industry in the UK, and their attempts to digitize their
organizational form, delivery and product. The chapter provides a concise account

4 ‘The Library Service’, Local Government Journal, 23 January, 1932, cited in Black
(2000) p. 157.
5 UK Financial Service industries underwent economic deregulation during the 1980s,
producing a highly competitive environment for insurance provision. The sector is now self-
regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA). There are many other agencies providing
‘personal finance’ and ‘personal finance education’. For example, the Personal Finance
Education Group, DSS Pensions education working group, Money Management Council, and
a plethora of consumer interest groups and ‘watchdogs’. There are now many companies
offering financial services (in the form of assurance, insurance, loans, mortgages, credit cards,
and so forth) not previously associated with this sector. Moreover, insurance has become
associated with a range of previously unrelated services.

Hand, Martin. Making Digital Cultures : Access, Interactivity, and Authenticity, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=438696.
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 12 Making Digital Cultures
of the notion that digital technologies enable corporations to simply dispense with
intermediaries between producer and consumer – becoming more ‘direct’. On the
inside, this is further articulated in terms of the shift from web marketing to an
‘imperative to connect’ (cf. Green et al 2005) and further toward an imperative to
produce seamless producer/consumer interactivity. This is given substance here
in terms of how different teams within a specific organization attempt to ‘force’
digital software into their own frames of reference and vision of the economic future.
Attempts to integrate digital and non-digital techniques ultimately fail in this case,
where the removal of human intermediaries both creates a chronic awareness of the
web as medium and reveals how older media such as writing embody and ‘perform’
cultural values of trust and recognition. Organizations such as this are forced to
multiply non-digital elements rather than erase them.
In Chapter 6 I consider the significance of authenticity in relation to modern
memory in the digitization of national archives at the present time. The modern
archive can be viewed as a cultural technology in a number of ways. Firstly, much
like the museum, acquisition involves the selection of material culture deemed
significant for the construction of national memory. This has occurred in the context
of governmentality and the requirement of more detailed information on populations,
territories and the categories of knowledge themselves (Foucault 2000). The relation
between the regulated housing of documents in the archive site and the possible forms
of political power has been theorized in terms of how what is contained in the archive
delimits what it is possible to know and say (Foucault 1972; cf. Featherstone 2000).
Secondly, the archive has sought to establish culturally specific epistemological
credibility through the employment of classification systems (diplomatics) which
conceptualize the precise components of a record in order to judge its reliability and
authenticity. Thirdly, accounts of national culture and memory are made available
through the development of storage systems and retrieval techniques which can
locate records and their relation to other records, maintaining the integrity of their
content (reliability) and their unaltered meaning (authenticity). In these ways, the
culture in the archive is a set of organized and organizing technologies and practices
which ‘produce’ memory through both classification and the practices of historical
research as much as ‘preserve’ it. Changes in the nature of such technologies and
Copyright © 2008. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

associated practices produce different forms of memory, in that different ‘things’ are
remembered and they may be remembered differently.6
In this light, it has recently been suggested that the archive, as a largely private
storehouse of public documents, is becoming ‘unbound’. The digitization of culture
reverses modern archival practice by publicizing private life through the participatory
technologies of Web 2.0 (Beer and Burrows 2007; Gane and Beer 2008). The archive

6 In this vein much has been said in recent years about history coming to an end. This
narrative has taken a variety of forms: the end of economic history after the post-industrial
revolution (Fukuyama 1999); the end of human history after recognition of the non-
human and the biosciences (Hayles 1999); and the end of historicism itself as an effect of
postmodern theorizing and the transformation of knowledge (Lyotard 1984); among others.
The latter account has been relatively influential among some archivists keen to jettison their
Enlightenment doctrines.

Hand, Martin. Making Digital Cultures : Access, Interactivity, and Authenticity, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008. ProQuest
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 Making Digital Cultures: An Introduction 13
theory and politics of Michel Foucault (1972) and Jacques Derrida (1995) is thought
outmoded by the shift from texts to digital collages, ‘mash-ups’ and mobile multi-
mediated cultural forms. Where the archive existed as a technology of written
memory, it is outmaneuvered by networked memory traces readily accessible
to anyone, anytime and anywhere (Poster 2006).7 For some, this means a loss of
the previous ‘texture’ and granularity of cultural forms, where memory-objects
become data and that data is simply a surface. Where there has been an explosion of
alternative memory practices, the authenticity of the archived cultural form appears
problematized. I take a different route by examining what is actually happening in
this context inside the archive site, in this case the ‘total archive’ of Library and
Archives Canada in Ottawa. Foucault and Derrida may appear outpaced, if indeed
their abstractions ever really got to the heart of archiving as an art or practice, but
what of the archivist and the infrastructure of the archive? What happens when the
national archives are expected to become digital cultures?
In the final chapter I signal some broad connecting arguments around information
and materiality, forms of subject positioning across these sites, and finally the issues
of loss and recovery in digital culture.
Copyright © 2008. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

7 Moreover, from this point of view sociology itself, as an institution and an innovative
method, is thought to be outmanoeuvred by the speed of cultural digitization and the rise
of ‘commercial sociology’ (Gane 2006; Beer and Burrows 2007; Lash 2002; Savage and
Burrows 2006).

Hand, Martin. Making Digital Cultures : Access, Interactivity, and Authenticity, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008. ProQuest
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Hand, Martin. Making Digital Cultures : Access, Interactivity, and Authenticity, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=438696.
Created from apus on 2025-01-31 17:25:34.