This is the first seminar in our Culture & Polity series, interrogating urgent questions of cultural change in the context of new forms of community, contemporary commodity forms and government policy.
This session will bring together a range of perspectives on the question of digitization and value, from the spheres of media and cultural studies, digital arts practice, and open source enterprise. To what extent do networked digital technologies enable new forms of human subjectivity, social organization and expressive new forms of culture? Do digital production tools and networked communications provide new modalities of intensity and sensation? Or do the materialities of digitization merely extend the field of neoliberal authority? Can technology offer new tools for building communities and potentially emancipate impoverished groups and environments? How do we conceive of value in a digital world?