Abstract
Digitized Lives is an indispensable contribution from a distinguished professor of English and American studies at Washington State University that can moderate impacts of the vast and often contradictory literature on digital technologies and cultures. It provides contexts on how new technologies fit into the bigger picture of society and culture in the 21st century in 10 chapters that discuss the digital world and how to make sense of digitized cultures from identities, equality, sexual desires, politics and democracy, games, e-learning and edutainment, inclusion and exclusion as well as excitement and expectations from the digitized world.
The author clarifies the interwoven nature of the fast-evolving digitized world in the age of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The book argues that digital cultures are affecting spheres of individual and collective lives. This position can allay the fears of people who think the Internet and swiftly changing information and communication technologies (ICTs) are changing, or will change their world unfavorably. Similarly, key digital cultural analysis terminologies introduced in the book and attached as a glossary communicate concepts to widen readers’ horizons easily and immensely.
Interestingly too, this book argues that the World Wide Web and its digital aspects are not worldwide as the author stresses that “statistics make clear that the spread of the Internet around the globe has been deeply uneven, with vast differences across continents, between countries and along class, gender and ethnic lines within regions and nations.” It is imperative to reinforce that uneven access may deny collective participation, but does not necessarily deny digitized experiences because accessibility to technologies, literacy, and infrastructures does not always guarantee active collective involvement in digitized experiences.
The discourse on digital divides in this book also delves into the old existing debate about economic and social inequalities to argue that the divides are furthered by technological imperialism, cultural stereotypes, and digital capitalism. Intriguingly, the political-economic perspective of digital capitalism supports some of the arguments in which new media are seen to deepen and extend tendencies within earlier forms of capitalism by opening new possibilities to turn media and audiences into commodities. Thus, though the author may have discussed some aspects of digital capitalism, it could also focus on its interconnectivity with the realities of today’s capitalist world order. Furthermore, digital capitalism brings social and technological change, and as attested to in some aspects of the book, it can also expand new technological and democratic possibilities amid global market and governance to challenge traditional ideas of production and consumption in the use and exchange of digitized resources.
The preceding discourse on economic and social inequalities is one of many practical testimonies of the multi-disciplinary approach of Digitized Lives in examining contemporary cultures, rhetoric, and communication from ICTs. This deliberate attempt draws attention to the entrenchment of such values, even in this era of globalization. Thus, the author insists that the digital “have-nots,” described as people who are not part of the ubiquitous digital cultures, are a creation and no accident. “It is no accident that the opportunity and ability to take part in the benefits of digitized life vary immensely, both between countries and within countries around the globe. And those differences are sometimes matters of life or death,” he notes.
However, considering the globalized nature of the subject, the book’s restriction to American and British visual examples is a deficient impression of digitized experiences and suggests that other continental and global audiences are immune from digitized experiences. Arguably, there are shared evidences of digitized experiences globally on technology and agriculture, health, literacy, entertainment, entrepreneurship, terrorism, and so forth in and across other continents. These digitized experiences ignored in this book repeatedly go viral in multimedia contents on social network sites (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). Examples that easily come to mind are news videos from Islamic extremists, political groups, and social and environmental activists. Regardless of their sources, these value-laden contents document digitized experiences of diverse audiences to verify that in today’s digital landscapes, for example, visual content like “online news video is a phenomenon and a growing part of news” as found in a 2013 Pew Research Center survey. The popularity of news videos may have been triggered by a ubiquitous shift in trends by mobile device manufacturers who produce optionally cheap wide-screened smart mobile devices that allow convenient on-the-go viewing. Remarkably, such mobile devices are now fashionable across divides and enhanced by increased but sometimes unequal Internet access and penetration across countries.
Presumably too, this book may have been written for American and British audiences given the author’s bias as an English and American Studies Professor and based on the author’s acknowledgment that he does not believe in presenting and analyzing information without “personal, cultural or political bias” or that he does not “pretend to be neutral on all issues raised,” but trusts that readers will factor his position into their responses. Overall, Digitized Lives could be a more impactful addition to the literature on digital literacy, cultures, and power dynamics if revised for global audiences. Alternatively, it intuitively challenges scholars across geographic divides to an academic activism—to produce geographically contextual literature on digitized experiences.