Digital Cultures (review)

Milad Doueihi’s Digital Cultures deals with digital literacy and so-called anthological practices—processes through which individuals or groups with common interest assemble, use, and cite various pieces of digital material. Doueihi, who holds the Chaire de recherche sur les cultures numériques at Université Laval, Canada, discusses the changes that have occurred in digitalized culture. He argues that there has been an anthological turn, where selection and dissemination of originally unrelated snippets are given new meanings—for example, by using tagging. This can mean the minimizing of the differences between authors and readers, and it leads to or nourishes turbulence or change in content production and (digital) rights management as well as in the archiving of information.

These themes seem to be quite obvious for people who have been using computers, the Internet, and other digital gadgetry for a long time, whether at work or at home. But they can become too obvious and therefore unnoticeable. Due to this sort of amnesia about digital technological and cultural changes, we need studies such as this to remind us about those major cultural, economic, and political questions related to digital technological power and knowledge which constantly affect our everyday lives.

The book, written originally in late 2006 and published first in French in early 2008, is still topical, even though its themes are deeply connected to matters being debated in 2006 rather than current concerns. Therefore, a historian of technology can read the book not only as a thought-provoking philosophical essay of current digital culture, but also as an interesting contemporary source which reflects public and intellectual discourses and digital cultural practices some five years ago.

Digital Cultures has four main chapters: “Digital Divides and the Emerging Digital Literacy,” “Blogging the City,” “Software Tolerance in the Land of Dissidence,” and “Archiving the Future.” Doueihi depicts the big picture well, starting with main concepts such as digital literacy. He then focuses on the first cases about digital content production, blogging, web environments, and wikis. After that, he deals with phenomena related to openness of software development and use of information: free and open-source software (FOSS), creative commons licensing and open-access publishing. Some of the issues, including careful description of blogging as a practice, seem to be too tied with a particular writing period, 2006, and not so fresh anymore. For instance, in Finland, 2006 was the year when blogs were finally popularized and used regularly by media as sources of news, even though blog pioneers claimed a few years earlier that blogs already were out of interest due to their increasing mass use. An evidence of the institutionalization of blogs was that the statistics bureau of Finland included them in its 2006 yearly survey of Internet use.

Doueihi applies older academic discussions about differences between ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of citizens to “blogosphere,” bloggers, blogs, and their connections. He also utilizes metaphors of religion, orthodoxy, and heresy when comparing centralized software production to free software and open source. I found these metaphorical ponderings promising but a little confusing. They seemed to be experimental only, without any abiding value. The last chapter, “Archiving the Future,” serves as an excellent conclusion. Doueihi illustrates well problems related to digital archiving of digitalized—as well as “digitally born”—material. He describes the history of digital archiving from search engines and indexing and archiving by using case examples such as the Internet Archive and Google Web History services. He argues that the fragility of information is one of the most neglected or forgotten aspects of digital culture. The lack of good archiving systems and standards—“accidents of history”—is caused by cultural, economic, and political blindness and by the early success and rapid adoption of regenerating digital practices that render obsolete not only devices but also incomplete and fragmentary collections of bits of information—a problem that the anthological turn in digital practice seeks to address.