Digital Culture Society Dcs

This double issue of Digital Culture & Society addresses the dialectics of play and labour, taking a closer look at the problem of play and work from two overlapping, albeit not mutually exclusive, perspectives. After the first issue explored the notion of laborious play, this second one studies the concept of playful work. The contributions feature critical inquiries into various phenomena of playful work - ranging from interfaces of play and work in the BDSM subculture over labour in digital gaming to high frequency trading. Alongside the articles, the issue features an interview with Fred Turner, Chair of the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He talks about the Bauhaus in the US, countercultural cybernetics, technology and consciousness, and work in the Silicon Valley.

The design and use of metadata is always culturally, socially, and ideologically inflected. The actors, whether these are institutions (museums, archives, libraries, corporate image suppliers) or individuals (image producers, social media agents, researchers), as well as their agendas and interests, affect the character of metadata. There is a politics of metadata. This issue of Digital Culture & Society addresses the ideological and political aspects of metadata practices within image collections from an interdisciplinary perspective. The overall aim is to consider the implications, tensions, and challenges involved in the creation of metadata in terms of content, structure, searchability, and diversity.

»Digital Culture & Society« is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiry into digital media theory. The journal provides a venue for publication for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation in digital media studies. It invites reflection on how culture unfolds through the use of digital technology, and how it conversely influences the development of digital technology itself. The inaugural issue »Digital Material/ism« presents methodological and theoretical insights into digital materiality and materialism.

Technocultural histories of digital making are often oversimplified.This issue brings together contributions from cultural-historical perspectives as well as technology and design histories and historiographies and alternative histories related to postcolonial resistance.

»Digital Culture & Society« is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiries into digital media theory and provides a publication environment for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation. This special issue discusses theoretical and artistic investigations on citizen engagement, digital citizenship and grassroots information politics. The articles reflect on the role of the digital citizen from the perspectives of (digital) sociology, science, technology and society (STS), (digital) media studies, cultural studies, political sciences, and philosophy.

As DIY digital maker culture proliferates globally, research on these practices is also maturing. Still, particular terminologies dominate beyond their Western contexts, and technocultural histories of making are often rendered as over-simplified technomyths that render invisible diverse local practices. This special issue brings together contributions that highlight how historicising plays a role in mythmaking and the creation of social imaginaries. The peer-reviewed articles present cultural-historical perspectives, technology and design histories and historiographies, and alternative histories related to postcolonial resistance. The contributions illustrate the relevance of craft to making as a reparative practice after the Salvadoran Civil War and as a leisure activity to spark »innovation« in mid-century corporate culture; the political-economic background to the diffusion and differentiation of community workshops in contemporary Spain and post-war Germany; and the various aesthetics and politics of technology culture manifestos over the years. The issue features an interview with Peter Harper of the Alternative Technology movement by Simon Sadler, as well as an interview with Felix Holm and Suné Stassen on the antecedents of making and design in South Africa. The special issue is rounded off with six short alternative (hi)stories of DIY making including multiple practices, geographies and temporalities.

Code is intended both as a computer-based language to program software and as a functional and visual language for organizing administrative processes, visualizing information, performing behaviour control, and reinforcing shared imaginaries based on surveillance and dread. This special issue of Digital Culture & Society deals with the concept of code in relation to the Covid-19 crisis. The contributions depart from the idea that both forms of coding have become dramatically intertwined during the pandemic and are structuring a new way of being in and seeing reality. They explore the new forms of data-driven surveillance and representation of the pandemic evolution at the level of real-time epidemiology, sensor technologies, science policies, push media, and the heterogeneous counter-discourses that try to subvert them.

Modern mundane life is brimming with a variety of data-driven technologies that are supposed to augment the practices they are involved in. As humans bring these technologies into their lives in a process of domestication, they tame them and are simultaneously influenced by their presence. In combining domestication research and an empirical analysis of current, digital, and interconnected media, this issue examines the process of taming with an emphasis on practices. The contributions in this issue explore the use of digitally connected media such as vacuum robots, smart speakers, drones, and kitchen appliances with reference to the domestication paradigm from interdisciplinary perspectives including media studies, sociology, anthropology, and human-computer interaction.