This is a book of our time – culture in the twenty‐first century – that looks at the development and changes brought on by the influences of digital information technology. Tredinnick traces the development of the meaning of culture from UNESCO's definition, limited to art and literature, to modern thinkers, beginning with Raymond Williams and his use of critical analysis. Other thinkers introduced new areas of cultural critique, such as queer, complexity and meme theory.
In Part 1 the author describes the emergence of different ideas of culture through the industrial and post‐industrial periods. He shows how the idea of culture has become more abstract, overlaps with other theoretical concepts and gives mythical meaning to our social experiences. Thus, its relationship with technology raises new problems, such as the dilemma of determinism, that emerge not from objective relationships between technology and culture but from the ways that we frame that relationship.
Technology is represented within different kinds of discourse – from academic works to fiction, film, TV and the popular press, and they produce certain dominant themes, such as – authenticity, alienation, decline, transgression, emancipation and spatial temporal drift. The next chapter investigates how these representations of technology shape and condition our experience of change.
Part 2 covers digital information culture. The chapter on “textuality” draws our attention to the way that writing has re‐emerged as an important aspect of media and communications technology, and compares the values of printed text with that of digital text, which is under constant production and interpretation. Similarly, works of art challenge our values of “authenticity and trust” since they are no longer rooted in the cultural artefacts of digital production, reproduction, transmission and dissemination, but are part of the lived culture of our whole way of life.
What is the place of “truth and knowledge” in the digital age? The author argues that our understanding of knowledge, although less secure, is more fluid and leads to a better understanding of knowledge creation, transmission and use. What is not demonstrated is its effect on information literacy or knowledge sharing The centralising role of the printed page compared with the decentralising effect of digital technologies is used to illustrate the place of power in modern terms. Technology also changes the way we understand identity; it also creates anxiety at our loss of cultural memory about past relationships, and the role of digital information technologies in our lives now and in the future.
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. The book has an extensive bibliography and a helpful index.
