Digital Information Culture is the third book written by Luke Treddinnick on the internet and digital information dissemination since 2004. The book is intended as a companion to his second book, Digital Information Contexts, which was published in 2006. In that book he sought to critique the existing theoretical assumptions of the information profession and their appropriateness in the digital age. This critique provides most of the methodological and theoretical foundation for his latest book, Digital Information Culture.
The focus in Digital Information Culture is the process of change in the digital age. Treddinnick investigates how people cope with the constantly shifting terrain of culture and how they manage the new challenges posed by the emerging cultural forms and social spaces of the digital age. He argues that the way in which people explain and contain the experience of change within their cultural sphere influences both the way they experience that change as well as the way in which they confront the digital world.
The book is divided into two parts. The focus in part 1 is on culture and technology in general. Chapter 3 explores the role of narratives in the discourse of culture and technology. It suggests that all accounts of change resolve to narrative formations because they “project a synchronic account of development structured out of linear sequential events”. To Tredinnick, Digital Information Culture is a kind of narrative in the sense that it tells a series of stories about the relationship between culture and technology. Furthermore, the stories are reflections on cultural experiences in the digital age.
Part 2 focuses on digital information culture. This part addresses issues such as textuality, authenticity, knowledge, power, identity and memory (a new kind of historicity). Chapter 5 explores the authenticity of cultural artefacts under the conditions of digital production, reproduction, transmission and dissemination. This implies that tradition remains alive through the way in which it is re‐incorporated into the lived culture and matures. Emerging cultural forms and practices therefore appear to be unrefined until they have realised their potential. The way in which people currently experience digital culture is therefore not representative of its future potential.
Cultural memory is actively created in the present. Chapter 9 argues that people's relationship with their past is reflected in their anxiety about losing their cultural memory. A loss of cultural memory is therefore also a reflection on tensions about the present and future role of digital information technologies in peoples' lives. This leaves the last chapter of socio‐cultural change unwritten.
Digital Information Culture is, like its companion Digital Information Contexts, a thought‐provoking book. It can be broadly be placed within an interpretivist paradigm in that it gives value and meaning to digital culture through an interpretation of this phenomenon within the social context in which it manifests itself.
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.
