Making Digital Cultures: Access, Interactivity and Authenticity. Martin Hand. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2008. 198 pp.
In Making Digital Cultures, Canadian Martin Hand examines the shifts from analog to digital cultures by engaging with the messiness of everyday practice in the organizational context instead of simply highlighting the positive and negative impacts of digitization on people’s lives. Tellingly, he draws attention to the dramatic rise in the use of paper, books, telephone, and other material despite the impact of digitization in most areas of everyday life.
The first two chapters build the theoretical foundation for the empirical analysis of institutional practices that follows, exploring and evaluating the dominant narratives of digital cultures. The theoretical analysis intends to update the reader on developments and debates in the field, although the conceptual framework needs further explication.
Hand, who teaches at Queens University in Ontario, finds inadequacies in using either modern or post-modern approaches alone to understanding digital cultures. After discarding what he believes is the essentialism of a modernist approach and the abstractionism of a postmodern one, he espouses “relational materiality,” which takes the “narrative ideals, objects, and users involved equally seriously and for an explicitly local focus upon whether and how these materials become arranged, enfolded and stabilized.” The author’s discussion of digital cultures centers on three key motifs representing common concerns among diverse theoretical perspectives: access, interactivity, and authenticity.
Using these motifs, Hand interrogates major assumptions associated with digitization in three institutional settings: the public library, a business organization, and an archive. To explore the motif of digital access, Hand studies the functioning and positioning of The People’s Network, which refers to the chain of information and communication technology (ICT) learning centers in public libraries in the United Kingdom. Labeling “cybrarians” as both “custodians” and “navigators,” the author draws attention to the ways in which both modern and postmodern discourses influence perceptions of library cultures: “This situation pulls the librarian in several directions, producing antinomies toward the role of the library in enacting digitization in relation to culture,” he observes. Interviews with library users indicate that while the government promotes the idea that Internet use in the library promotes active citizenship, most users actually access the Internet to search for jobs or e-mail family and friends. The library users are not really interested in accessing citizenship-related information on the Internet. The author thus emphasizes the need to define digital not simply in terms of who has access but also in terms of the “ongoing dynamics of use.”
The author then explores the motif of interactivity in the context of a business organization—in this case the largest insurance group in the United Kingdom. Hand dissects the belief that digitization creates a direct and transparent relationship between the organization and the consumer, categorizing this as economic hyperbole. Stressing that digitization in a business organization has contested outcomes, the author points out that while online transactions promise more interactivity with the consumer, they also pose a threat to organizational security. While organizational security is indeed an important aspect, Hand does not explore the potential public relations nightmares that real-time online interaction and viral communication can cause. However, Hand does succeed in demonstrating that the “contradictions and constraints” faced at the ground level as a result of digitization may actually serve to solidify already established non-digital practices in a business organization.
Finally, Hand uses the example of the archive to explore efforts to “resist immaterialization in the name of authenticity and memory,” aptly highlighting the tensions between the two goals of making things easily accessible to largest number of people, and the archival practice of preserving the authenticity of digital and non-digital objects. He describes the new hurdles that archivists face in the context of digitization: “They are ethically committed to account for the ‘memory of the nation,’ they are held accountable for the ‘memory of the government,’ and are at the same time attempting to come to terms with the novel memory practices occurring ‘out there’ in everyday life.”
While the author does a remarkable job showcasing how analog and digital technologies impact and redefine each other, the book’s prose misses a sense of fluidity and may not be an easy read for those without in-depth academic knowledge of diverse theoretical positions on digital cultures. Further, the first two chapters, which comprise the theoretical framework, do not weave well with the last three chapters, which focus on institutional practices and are better explained. In fact, the first two and the last three chapters read like two different books. However, academics engaging in information studies may find the arguments presented in the book extremely pertinent to further theoretical exploration. For the practitioners of digitization, the book may not have concrete advice on how to make the current state of affairs any better. That said, Making Digital Cultures makes an important case for focusing on ground realities of digitization. In Hand’s words, “It is only through empirical detail that we can appreciate the uneven grain and contingency of the digitization of culture.”
SMEETA MISHRA
Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad