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Digital Information Culture by Luke Tredinnick

Digital Information Culture: The Individual and Society in the Digital Age, by Luke Tredinnick, Chandos Publishing, 2008.

In March 2008, Digital Information Culture was published by Chandos Publishing (Oxford). The book is an introduction to the cultural, social and political impact of digital information technologies. It aims to explore how digital information technologies have changed our lives in the early twenty-first century.

Digital Information Culture is organised into two sections. The first part of the book, "culture and technology", explores the representation of technology in the discourse of culture, and the kinds of narratives that emerge in response to the anxiety of socio-cultural change. The second part, "digital information culture", examines key themes in the developing socio-cultural landscape of the digital age: textuality; authenticity; knowledge; power; identity, and memory. The book develops a central argument about how the impact of technology is experienced through its destabilising effects on the artefacts of culture and knowledge, and the conflict it introduces between our narratives of our social world, and the changing reality with which we are faced day by day.

Part one: culture and technology
  • Ch. 1 The meaning of culture: traces the discourse of culture and describes its mythopoeic function;
  • Ch. 2 Representations of technology: how technology is represented in film, fiction, television, and the popular press;
  • Ch 3. Narratives of technology and culture: argues that representations can be seen as narratives that mediate our apprehension of cultural change.
Part two: digital information culture
  • Ch. 4 Textuality: how technology changes our understanding of text, its uses, and its qualities;
  • Ch. 5 Authenticity: how digital technologies undermine the authenticity associated with an original creative act;
  • Ch. 6 Knowledge: traces anxieties about the decline in knowledge in the digital age;
  • Ch. 7 Power: how digital technologies challenge the perpetuation of power in the social context;
  • Ch. 8 Identity: traces the sedimentation, virtualisation, and fragmentation of identity in the digital age;
  • Ch. 9 Memory: explores the threat to cultural memory posed by digital technologies.

For more information, download the publisher's flyer.

Extracts from blogs:

"Ich selbst lese gerade mit Lust und Gewinn die Bücher des Briten Luke Tredinnick mit den Titeln "Digital Information Contexts: Theoretical Approaches to Understanding Digital Information" (2006, Review) und "Digital Information Culture: The Individual and Society in the Digital Age" (2008, Review). Es ist darin faszinierend zu sehen, wie moderne Felder der Philosophie - wie z.B. Poststrukturalismus und Postmodernismus - das Verstehen von Phänomenen im Informationswesen, besonders auch im Hinblick auf das Web 2.0, erleichtern und verändern! Die Probleme des modernen Informationswesen, die sich ändernde Rolle des Autors, die Themen Authentizität, Identität, Privatsphäre, Sprache und Information usw., werden in beiden Büchern auf prinzipieller Ebene diskutiert." Thomas Hapke Blog (http://blog.hapke.de/?p=208)

"Digital Information Culture: The Individual and Society in the Digital Age was well worth a read [...] I enjoyed the interesting juxtapositions, such as the way the concept of text as artefact has changed since medieval times and how the idea of text as a performance is returning in the online arena. With chapters looking at the effect of the cyber revolution on notions of knowledge, authority, power, memory, and identity, it posed lots of challenging questions and highlighted some new ways of examining the cultural, political and psychological effects of the digital age." VocabControl Blog (http://www.vocabcontrol.com/?p=57)

"Det skrivna ordets come back" (Essetter blog, http://essetter.blogspot.com/2009/04/det-skrivna-ordets-come-back.html)

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Extracts from reviews:

"This is an impressive and very useful book. It is impressive in drawing on a wide range of relevant ideas (on history, society, culture, technology) to tease out the ways in which we can validly speak about the cultural aspects of digital information. It is very useful because it will almost instantly join lists of recommended reading wherever information, knowledge and library studies are formally taught […] The most impressive chapter by a long stretch is his discussion of authenticity, which in a very real sense lies at the centre of the book. […] Authenticity lies at the heart of things - not only because digital culture appears to reconfigure (and some say undermine) traditional understandings and arrangements for authority and ownership (many of these underpinned in their turn by intellectual property rights), but also because digital culture throws up a set of problems that we cannot evade. […] Chandos have published one of their best recent books with this one. […] Certainly a winner here and, unusually for such a book, one that admirably stays this side of cliché and pomposity." Stuart Hannibus (2008), Ariadne, 55 (April). Full review available at:
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/hannabuss-rvw/

"Digital Information Culture is, like its companion Digital Information Contexts, a thought-provoking book. [...] The book contributes much to the literature on digital culture as an emerging social phenomenon. It reads easily and is a must-read for all interested in digital culture and socio-cultural changes," Library Hi Tech, 26 (4): 688-689.

"Tredinnick's book is a fascinating read that explores the real impact of digital technology on our approach to print and on our traditional ways of working and thinking. It highlights many issues related to narrative and social discourse that capture the reality of the social system, and how this discourse reflects the experience of culture in the digital age," Online Information Review, 33 (1): 208-209.

"This is a book about the influence of information technology on our lives [...] What follows is a fascinating , erudite investigation into the impact of the digital technologies we use daily [...] I know no other book discussing these fields in such a coherent, logical, readible manner [...] Enjoy the book, argue with it - then buy another copy for your library!", Library and Information Update, March, 2006, p. 24.

"The book [...] will be of interest to those who do not search for immediate answers but turn to analysing how the questions are constructed. The main value of the book is in uncovering complex contexts in which our expectations to digital technology are situated and in responding the need for reflection on such approaches. Discussion is enriched by the multiple examples of approaches and fears emerging in fiction and films." Journal of Documentation, 65 (2): 205.

"This book contains a thoughtful examination of the complexities in relationships between the concepts of culture and the digital environment as it has developed and currently exists. [...] This is a most useful title and one that should be recommended as a text for units that cover the intersection of culture and technology." Library Management, 30 (4/5): 342-343.

"It is a long time since I read a book as engaging as this one. Tredinnick offers a dynamic and fascinating discussion of the changing culture of information. He touches on many familiar themes – the origins of the digital world, information history, the change to material culture as a result of industrialization in the nineteenth century – but they are connected and discussed with such fluid and engaging prose it becomes a pleasure to rediscover them. [...] makes for fascinating reading and one that will certainly become an invaluable text on my bookshelf." Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 41 (Dec 2009): 249-51.

"For this reviewer Tredinnick's text is the first to cover all the bases in exploring the pervasive cultural change that we have experienced through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Tredinnick contextualises cultural change and digital technologies in a way that many authors writing on the same subject do not. His knowledge of transdisciplinary theory (across literary criticism, cultural studies, media and communications, information science) provides a holistic perspective on digital culture which offers real insight. Drawing on the legacy of literary criticism and cultural theory embeds Tredinnick's analysis in a broad historical context, which avoids the techno-euphoria of many authors on digital technology. Read it." Library Revierw, 59 (3): 236.

About the author

Luke Tredinnick is a Senior Lecturer in Information Management at London Metropolitan University. He teaches around media theory, the social and political impact of digital informaton technologies, and digital informaton applications including intranets. He has published three books: Why Intranets Fail (and How to Fix Them) (2004), Digital Information Contexts, (2006) and Digital Information Culture (2008). He has also written various papers relating to the Web, Web 2.0, and hypertext. For more information, see Luke's staff profile.

 


 
 
  Page last updated : : 06 Apr 2010