Culture In Bits

Cultural Studies seems to have lost its way somewhere between today's preoccupation with the empirical and the theory revolutions of the 1980s and 90s. Assessing the work of key theorists across the history of cultural studies--Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris and Angela McRobbie--Culture In Bits argues that the trend towards a more politicized practice is in fact not political enough; theory, and deconstruction in particular, can offer a more radical and a more political engagement.Pinpointing the ambiguities that both constitute and disturb cultural studies and outlining a radical agenda for its future, Culture in Bits is vital reading for all interested in cultural practice and theory.

In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public”—a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place. Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.

Cultural Studies seems to have lost its way somewhere between today's preoccupation with the empirical and the theory revolutions of the 1980s and 90s. Assessing the work of key theorists across the history of cultural studies--Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris and Angela McRobbie--Culture In Bits argues that the trend towards a more politicized practice is in fact not political enough; theory, and deconstruction in particular, can offer a more radical and a more political engagement. Pinpointing the ambiguities that both constitute and disturb cultural studies and outlining a radic.

"Condensed outlines of articles published in Reports 1-19, Bulletins 1-133, 1887-1907, [by Joseph L. Hills], "in no. 20 p. 387-505.