Cultural Technologies: The Shaping of Culture in Media and Society

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1 Introduction
Cultural Technologies in Cultures of
Technology
Göran Bolin
In late modern society, we are constantly surrounded by technologies of
various sorts and of an increasingly complex nature. This fact is hardly
surprising to anyone. Although the specifi c quality of the technological
penetration might di er depending on where you live, and the sophistica-
tion of the gadgets you have access to might vary depending on the living
standards of your specifi c region, our working and private lives are perme-
ated by technologies. The most obvious of these are naturally the mate-
rial technologies. These are manifest, tangible tools or machines that we
surround ourselves with—cars, airplanes, nuclear power plants, washing
machines—and when it comes to media and communication technologies,
there are computers, screens, mobile phones, television sets and advanced
machines for measurements, calculations, estimations, and so on. Although
material technologies, or technological hardware if you will, are the most
obvious of technologies, there are also other ways we can think of technol-
ogy. In addition to the technological hardware we have the technologi-
cal software: the technologies of doing things. These are the practices, the
experience-based ways of doing, and the methods used for achieving ends
in our professional and amateur worlds. Accordingly, both the technologi-
cal hardware and software are inscribed in the concept of technology.
The concept of technology has its origin in the Greek combination of
technē (τέχνη), which stands for art or craft, and -logía (-λογία), which
refers to the study of something. German philosopher Martin Heidegger
(1954/1977) famously wrote on the essence of technology, pointing to
technē as that which ‘reveals’, a ‘bringing-forth’—and thus also something
related to knowledge and ‘truth’: ‘Technology is a mode of revealing. Tech-
nology comes to presence [West] in the realm where revealing and uncon-
cealment take place, where alētheia, truth, happens’ (Heidegger 1954/1977:
13; square parenthesis in original).
As pointed out by Swedish philosopher Hans Ruin (2010), this refers back
to Aristotle (n.d.), who, in his Nicomachean Ethics (Book VI), regarded
technē as one of the fi ve intellectual virtues besides ‘scientifi c knowledge,
prudence, wisdom, and intelligence’ through which man can get in touch
with that which is true (as quoted from Ruin 2010: 184). Technē, in Latin
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translated as ars, referred to ‘an intellectual capacity which has to do with
making or creating (in Greek poiesis) something new in accordance with a
refl exive rational capacity. As such it also has to do with truth and falsity’
(Ruin 2010: 184).
Technē is thus the activity of gaining insight through cultural or artistic
practice. In the writings of Aristotle, technē clearly has a di erent mean-
ing than what it usually has today, as was Heidegger’s point as well, but it
might be good to remind ourselves of its Greek roots, not least because of the
a nity between technology and knowledge. So, this meaning of the concept
from antiquity—the ‘Greek conception of technology’ as Heidegger called
it, according to Ruin—as being the study of arts and crafts, as well as its
philosophical connection to truth, has drifted—in English just as in Swedish
(and other languages)—and in everyday parlance technology usually refers
to the material tools and machines already described, as well as to social
and cultural techniques or practices (ways of doing things) employed in vari-
ous situations. If we think of how we in modern life have developed social
techniques for organizing our daily lives at work, we can see that business
meetings, kick-o s, symposia, retreats and other practices are developed in
order to reach ends, and to make our daily routines more e cient (sometimes
even more pleasurable). Historian Lewis Mumford (1967) even considered
society a megatechnology: the organizational principle of division of labour,
the structured ways social life is formed, altogether form a giant technology
for ordering and adjusting our common life together.
CULTURES OF TECHNOLOGY
Refl ected on in this way, we can see that our lives truly are permeated by
technologies. Not only do we surrounded ourselves with machines and tech-
nical aids of di erent sorts, we also constantly use social technologies to
learn how to raise our children, how to arrange our relationships, how to
educate the young, how to relax and how to take care of our health. We can
then safely say that we live in cultures of technology, or technological cul-
ture, as Jennifer Slack and Macgregor Wise (2005) label it. These are cultures
not only marked by high degrees of technological penetration, but also where
technology comes to be celebrated as the solution to most problems.
Already early in the industrialization process, national industrial exhibi-
tions were arranged, beginning in Paris in 1798 with the exhibition on the
Champs de Mars (Benjamin 1955/1983: 165). These exhibitions concen-
trated around the display and demonstration of technical advances within
the then slowly emerging industries of the gradually modernizing nation-
states. This focus on the technological developments within the industries
followed as a theme in the World’s Fairs, the fi rst of which was the Great
Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851. The technological focus
was clearly revealed in the catalogue:
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Other nations have devised means for the display and encouragement
of their own arts and manufactures; but it has been reserved for Eng-
land to provide an arena for the exhibition of the industrial triumphs
of the whole world. She has o ered an hospitable invitation to sur-
rounding nations to bring the choicest products of their industry to
her capital, and there to enter into an amicable competition with each
other and with herself. (Catalogue text for the World’s Fair 1851, cited
in Friedberg 1993: 82)
The World’s Fairs addressed the ‘Industry of All Nations’, according to the
catalogue (Friedberg 1993: 82), and the symbol of industrial development
the catalogue text mentions was equalled to technological development.
Furthermore, technological advancement was also popular among visitors,
which is also why Benjamin saw them as forerunners to the entertainment
industry, which had not yet emerged at the time. A phenomenon such as
electric light contributed to the public success of the Chicago Columbian
Exposition of 1893, if measured in number of visitors—27.5 million fair-
goers paid entry to the exposition to watch, among other spectacles, the
Edison Tower of Light (Marvin 1988: 171f). Not least the successively new
media technologies became the main attractions at the fairs: In 1855, the
technology of photography had a special section of its own; mechanical
typesetting was introduced and displayed in London 1862; the telephone in
Philadelphia 1876; the phonograph in Paris 1878; wireless in Bu alo 1901;
television in Chicago in 1933; and so on (Roche 2000: 160).
The World’s Fairs are but one of the arenas where technology is intro-
duced, celebrated, marvelled at, and sometimes also criticized. In cultures
of technology, technology also becomes thematized in literature, art, fi lm,
music and other cultural expressions. Consider for example the science fi c-
tion genre, or the high-tech detective drama, or the spy novel. Naturally,
in cultural expression we see both technological utopia and dystopia where
the gadgets used by, for example, James Bond in the novels and even more
notably in the fi lms, represent the a rmative stance, while the horror movie,
especially if mixed with science fi ction, often takes the dystopian perspective,
representing technology gone berserk. Of course, all these technological self-
refl ections are indicative of (late) modernity and can be read as symptoms of
the changes brought on by the modernization process, and the accompanying
need to refl ect on the consequences of techno-social progress.
In cultures of technology, then, cultural praxis and expression are cen-
tred on technology. Technology becomes the overarching value that sets
the agenda for all spheres of society. Technology becomes teleology, the
ultimate goal and the unquestioned positive value—and all who question
this value are considered technophobic and backwards striving, resist-
ing the progress of technological advancement and development. In one
of Swedish techno-sceptic Lasse Svanberg’s many books on the discourses
surrounding technology, he reported on a small badge he once spotted on
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the jacket sleeve of an engineer: ‘Technology is the answer’—under which a
parenthesis was added in smaller type, ‘But what was the question?’ (Svan-
berg 1983: 180). The wit of the badge builds on this commonly held and
unquestioned assumption of equalling technology with progress and gen-
eral human development.
Even if most people celebrate, or at least have an unproblematic relation
to, technology, there are naturally also some that question technological
development, and take a sceptical stance. Techno-sceptics are quite often
accused of being Luddites, technophobic standing in the way of progress,
referring to the Luddite movement of the early 19th century that resisted
technological developments in the textile factories of England through
‘negotiating, bargaining, striking, burning, rioting, and machine-breaking’
(Slack and Wise 2005: 70). As Kevin Robins and Frank Webster argue,
Luddism should be historically contextualized as a response to ‘the dis-
placement of traditional social relations by the relations of laissez-faire
capitalism’ (Robins and Webster 1999: 39), where the changes to social rela-
tions were brought on by the mechanization of production and the deskill-
ing of labour. However, despite the historical contextualization made by
Robins and Webster, Edward Thompson (1968) and others, Luddism has
mainly lived on as a derogative label for those regarded as backwards-striv-
ing enemies of technological progress.
And there can be no doubt that technology has had consequences on
social relations, in a variety of ways. As Joshua Meyrowitz (1985/1986)
argues in his oft-cited book No Sense of Place, electronic media have had
clear impacts on our social behaviour, exemplifi ed by the changed relations
between the genders, between citizens and politicians and between genera-
tions. Through the media, most notably television in the case of Meyrowitz
(after all, his book is from 1985), men and women gain access to each oth-
er’s ‘back regions’ and get glimpses of what those of the opposite sex talk
about in single-gendered settings. In a similar way, argues Meyrowitz, citi-
zens gain access to the back regions of politics and politicians through the
media, and the young in corresponding ways gain insight into the worlds of
older generations in ways not possible before electronic media became an
established ingredient of our everyday lives.
While Meyrowitz is thinking about the changed relations between front
and back regions, that is, in relation to our private or intimate spheres, we
can also see how technology is altering the more semi-private sphere of work.
Not only has the increased technological sophistication and the increased
technifi cat ion of vocat ions m ade d ead e nd jobs disappea r. Today many w hite-
collar jobs disappear by the minute, in favour of the self-administration of
employees with the aid of digital and mobile technologies. One such occupa-
tion is secretaries, a job that largely has disappeared due to the widespread
use of computers, and the increased demands on self-administration (not
least within universities) (cf. Dagens Nyheter, 19 June 2011, p. E4, where
also other examples are given on recently vanished jobs).
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However, jobs do not only disappear. Admittedly, there are also new
occupations that appear on the job market. Some of these are also unskilled
jobs, and they are most often outsourced to low-wage countries. Some of
these jobs, such as telephone service and computer support, can take advan-
tage of ICTs, where call centres and support serves customers on the oppo-
site side of the world. One of the more spectacular job niches made possible
by the widespread access to computers and high-speed broadband technol-
ogy is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mturk.com), were mobile phone apps
that build on recognition (of food, for example) can be fed with informa-
tion from a worldwide source of what you might call ‘micro-workers’, who
can identify colours, meals, and so on, and send this information back to
the ‘requester’, with very small sums in return for their work (sometimes
as little as $0.02). So, some of the things we think are the result of cleverly
constructed algorithms, programmed to recognize amount of calories in
meals, for example, as in ‘Meal Snap’, are really the result of dispersed
global labour (see also mealsnap.com).
CULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES
In cultures of technology, however, culture also has become a tool in and
of itself, an arbiter for the achievement of various other ends. It has often
been used as a means to reach economic, political, social and other goals.
Seen from such a perspective, culture is technology: a cultural technology.
This could be exemplifi ed by the quote from the main architect behind
the European Community (EC), Jean Monnet, when he retrospectively
lamented, ‘If we were beginning the European Community all over again,
we should begin with culture’ (quoted from Schlesinger 1987: 222). In
this sense culture is the tool by which social solidarity, and political unity,
is built. Many have taken approaches such as this ad notam today, which
can be seen in phenomena such as nation branding or destination brand-
ing. But culture is also used as a means in advertising, promotion and
in the ways in which cultural phenomena such as search engines, social
networking sites and the social web generally, are used as means to create
economic value. Often culture even becomes reduced to a means, and its
existence only justifi ed if it serves ex ternal demands. If we analyse the dis-
cussions on cultural policy (in Sweden and elsewhere), culture constantly
has to be justifi ed in terms of serving other purposes (not least economic;
that it creates job markets, that it attracts attention to non-cultural phe-
nomena, etc.). However, even if reduced to the mere means of other kinds
of production, the production processes involving cultural technologies
has their by-products, where cultural patterns evolve—sometimes beyond
the scope of economic, social or political use value, and sometimes in
conjunction and combination with these values (see the more elaborate
discussion on this in Bolin 2011).
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Take nation branding, which is a quite recent phenomenon, and one
which I have spent some energy on writing about elsewhere (Bolin 2006a,
2006b, 2010; Bolin and Ståhlberg 2010). Nation branding e orts typically
engage cultural technologies in order to construct favourable images of
nation-states, in order to raise interest from corporate business, and hope-
fully get them to invest in the branded country (cf. Dinnie 2008a), or to take
advantage of this nation-state’s production or consumption force (Bolin
and Ståhlberg 2010). Nation branding processes are adopted by many
states, but they are arguably as most obvious in post-Soviet and other post-
colonial states that have felt a need to rebrand, and cast away their Soviet,
French, British or other colonial heritage and its accompanying imageries
imposed ‘from outside’. Accordingly there have been several such case stud-
ies published lately, focussing on nation-states with felt needs to change
their appearance on the world stage (e.g., Aronczyk 2008; Dinnie 2008b;
Jansen 2008; Kaneva and Popescu 2011; Ooi 2004; Rajagopal 1999).
In nation-branding campaigns, culture is most often used as a pris-
matic focus, such as when the campaign Brand Estonia was centred on the
arrangement of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in 2002, when Estonia
as the fi rst post-Soviet state were to arrange the fi nal for this very popular
European media event after having won the competition the year before.
Through engaging the British PR agency Interbrand, the Estonian govern-
ment launched a campaign that resulted in ‘the deployment of targeted,
strategic messages communicated using visual and verbal components’, that
would supposedly ‘enable Estonia to achieve greater success in attracting
foreign-direct investment, to expand our tourist base beyond Sweden and
Finland, and to broaden European markets for our exports’ as quoted from
the foreword in the fi nal report of the campaign, the portfolio Eesti Stiil
(Estonian Style). This portfolio included, besides a description of the back-
ground research of the campaign (focus groups, questionnaires, etc., to key
target groups), a bank of pictures of people and things that would symbol-
ize Estonia, an Estonian colour palette, a specifi c typeface, a logotype, and
examples of Estonian handicraft among other things (see Bolin 2006b for
more details). Since the ESC is broadcast in most European countries, as
well as quite a few outside of Europe (e.g., Australia, Japan), this event not
only gathers a viewing and voting audience of some 200–300 million view-
ers. It is also covered intensely by the tabloid and weekly press the weeks
before the event in May each year, a consequence that the Brand Estonia
campaign took full advantage of through planting strategically targeted
messages about Estonia in the hands of the 1,500 accredited journalists
present for the occasion (Bolin 2006b).
From the example Brand Estonia we can see that not only were the
e orts to attract foreign investment and tempt tourists to travel to Estonia
centred around the ESC, one also worked with cultural symbols such as
logotypes, typefaces, design and handicraft, all of which became the tools
for what in the end are pure economic goals. This is naturally nothing
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new—all advertising build on these principles, where media texts and cul-
tural expressions are the lures that help construct the audience commodity,
a commodity that can ultimately be sold to advertisers. This is also how
cultural and aesthetic value are subsumed the overarching goal of produc-
ing economic surplus value. This is also the logic that underlies the will of
governments to engage in social networking sites such as Facebook, or to
take part in virtual worlds extending their activities to the digital domain
(eg. Bengtsson 2011, and Bengtsson’s chapter in this volume).
HISTORICIZING CULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES
Cultural technologies, however, have not appeared in late modern society
from nowhere. Arguably language is our fi rst cultural technology, and one
each individual is in possession of. Not all individuals master language to
the same degree, however. Some are more rhetorically refi ned, which means
that they have developed linguistic techniques to inform, control or to per-
suade more e ectively.
If language could be said to be our fi rst cultural technology, we can
see that language as a communicative device have met with more and
more refi ned technological contemporaries. In fact, many technologies in
modern society are media and communication technologies: tools for the
dissemination of information, for entertainment and for the organization
of increasingly complex societies. If it is true, as John Dewey (1916) once
remarked, that society exists in communication, we can safely say that
modern society through its increasingly complex ways of communicating,
exists in mediated communication (in the sense that we extend our commu-
nicative capabilities through communication aids that exceeds the human
body). The ways in which communication is technologically mediated of
course changes over time, and we are continuously provided with ever-new
means of mediated communication.
Culture as lived and experienced in advanced, late capitalism (or late
modernity, if you will), then, is increasingly imprinted by media technology.
It is produced but also consumed with the help of technology. The means
of production used to produce these cultural expressions is also technologi-
cally complicated. Since the rise of modern mass media the complexity of
the production of culture has indeed increased, beginning with the rotary
presses of the mid-19th century, over fi lm production, television, and so on.
Today, the means of production have become technologically even more
advanced, built around algorithms and computer software in sophisticated
networks of communication.
However, we can see that we also surround ourselves more and more
with technologies in order to consume cultural expressions: In digital cul-
tural landscapes we are increasingly dependent on machines in order to
access images, music, fi lms, television and all the multimedia expressions
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that surround us. Paradoxically, as cultural expressions are increasingly
freed from their tangible form due to digitization and can be consumed in
a variety of ways, this also means that we become dependent on material
means of consumption in order to decode cultural texts and make them
take on consumable form, allowing them to be interpreted.
With the interactive possibilities of Web 2.0 we are moving into yet
another stage of media technologies, whereby access to the means of media
production is disseminated to an ever-greater portion of media users (at
least in the technologically advanced countries of the world). On the one
hand, this means a dissemination of power to express oneself in contem-
porary culture, to be in control of the cultural technologies. On the other
hand, the opportunities provided by the new media technologies also open
up for new means of surveillance and control on the part of the media
industries, providing for new business models built around Internet tra c,
behavioural targeting, and so on (cf. van Couvering in this volume).
While there are new tools that can be used by the media and culture
industries, indeed a ecting the ways the industries work (cf. Miller in this
volume), there are also changes brought on by technology that concern our
uses of new digital media. Continuously more refi ned ways of representing
the world we live in are also arguably a ecting our relation to that world,
as the new means at our disposal give us new ways to perceive (cf. Uricchio
and Rothenbuhler in this volume). At a more fundamental level, these new
technologies also a ect how we come to learn about the world, e ectively
changing our epistemological abilities and comprehensions. Knowledge in
itself becomes deeply intertwined with technology (cf. Braman in this vol-
ume), something that the self-refl exive researcher can also have an impact
on and thus take advantage of (cf. Hermes in this volume).
CONCEPTUALIZING CULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES
The concept of cultural technology has been used in di erent contexts. Most
of the time it is used synonymously with ‘the media’, as a qualifi cation and
alignment with the theoretical legacy of thinkers such as Marshall McLu-
han’s (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man or Raymond
Williams’s (1974) Te le v i sion: Te c h nolog y a n d C ultural Form. Thus, one can
read books on cultural technologies like Barbara Gentikow’s (2010) Nye
fjernsynserfaringer (New television experiences), in which cultural technol-
ogy refers to television and how this specifi c mass media technology is used
and experienced. In this sense all media are per defi nition cultural technolo-
gies, as they are (one of) the tools by which culture is formed, reproduced
or changed. In Gentikow’s writing the concept is somewhat undertheorized,
and she does not take advantage of its conceptual possibilities.
However, other scholars have been more inclined to theorize the con-
cept. For Friedrich Kittler, initiator of the Helmholtz Center for Cultural
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Technologies at Humboldt University, Germany, ‘“media” are fi rst and
foremost cultural techniques that allow one to select, store, and produce
data and signals’, in the words of his colleague at the centre, Sibylle Krämer
(2006: 93). The strong structuralistic element in Kittler’s (e.g., 1986/1999)
conceptualization, and the transmission perspective privileged, give it a
determinist bias that fi ts less well with the intentions in this book. To Kit-
tler, subjectivity is seemingly an e ect of the media as cultural technologies,
which means that there is little room for individual action and experience in
relation to them. Kittler ‘gives us a media studies without people’, as John
Durham Peters (2010: 5) concludes in his foreword to Kittler’s (2002/2010)
Optical Media. This means that there is also very little room for the inter-
relation between culture and technology.
Canadian media scholar Jody Berland, working in the tradition of
McLuhan although with a more coherent theoretical approach that also
includes theories of the production of space in the following of Henri Lefe-
bvre (1974/1991), might be the one who has most often returned to the
concept of cultural technologies. In her recent collection of essays, North
of Empire (2010), summarizing her work over the past two decades, Ber-
land describes cultural technologies as integrated relations between tech-
nology, space and power; they are, on the one hand, ‘spatializing mediators
of power’, and on the other, ‘assemblages of space, technology, identity
and meaning’ (Berland 2010: 303). This conceptualization, which encom-
passes both the structuring aspect of culture and technology as well as the
assemblages (the structured results of these processes), is a more dynamic
and appealing way to theorize cultural technologies. This specifi c dialec-
tic quality of the concept shares Bourdieu’s (1980/1990: 52 ) concept of
‘structuring structures’ and ‘structured structures’, and allows for a more
nuanced analysis of cultural and technological phenomena. The structures
we have to adjust to in our personal and professional lives are not static,
but are themselves structured by various cultural and societal forces, and
we need to acknowledge that this is dynamic.
The way the concept is fi tted into this volume through the represented
perspectives on culture and technology is more in line with how Berland
uses it, and has less to do with the technological determinist usage of Kit-
tler. It is used to highlight the technological side of culture, how culture is
formed historically as a process or set of technological practices but also
how it can be appropriated as a tool in a social setting where technology
has become one of the core values of society.
To summarize, one could say that the concept of cultural technologies as
used here has four dimensions. First, and in its most general sense, it refers
to technologies of communication—speech, writing and the technical aids
with which we communicate and represent the world around us. These
are cultural technologies that help produce cultural expressions in art and
popular culture. We could call this the expressive dimension of cultural
technologies. Second, it refers to those practices and ways of organizing
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our lives that we adopt in private or professional contexts; how we as par-
ents go about bringing up our children, making them competent cultural
and social beings, but also those rules and practices by which we organize
our professional lives, and how these practices result in cultural patterns.
We can call this the social dimension of cultural technologies. Third, such
organizational principles can also include the more physical organization
of professional lives, for example, in the buildings of the media, the archi-
tectonics of media houses (cf. Ericson and Riegert 2009 and Colomina
1994) and how these buildings are constructed in order to foster specifi c
work ethics or promote e ciency. This is the physical dimension of cultural
technologies. Fourth, we have the dimension where culture is subordinated
technology—where culture is not the end result but the means deployed for
other ends. This is the administrative dimension of cultural technologies.
Heidegger thought of technology as a ‘bringing-forth’, something that
produces something. Interestingly enough, the Latin combination of pro
and ducere in the word production also refers to something that can be
called ‘bringing forth’ (pro=forward and ducere=to lead).1 Technolog y,
then, is deeply connected to the production of knowledge, and hence to
epistemology. This is not only because the more administrative pedagogi-
cal technologies used in teaching and learning bring with them tools for
e ciency in educational spheres. It is also connected to the critique of tech-
nology and its critical uses, that is, the deeper penetration of technological
processes that help us be aware of the worlds (in the phenomenological
sense) we inhabit, be it in the observation of new technologies of seeing
(Winston 1996, 1998) or those of hearing (Sterne 2003).
THE SHAPING OF CULTURE IN MEDIA AND SOCIETY
The collection of essays in this volume discusses both the culture of technol-
ogy that we live in today, and culture as technology. Cultures of technology
and cultural technologies are discussed in the chapters of the book, focussing
on a variety of examples from di erent national contexts, and from historical
as well as contemporary perspectives. It contains analyses of technological
phenomena as well as epistemological discussions on the uses of technology.
The edited collection is structured in one introduction and three sections,
focussing fi rst on the historical dimension, second on the epistemological
nature of technologies, and third on the uses of cultural technologies.
In the fi rst section on Histories of Cultural Technologies, in Chapter 2
William Uricchio discusses changes in visual perception as a consequence
of new representational technologies and ‘algorithmic interventions’ in the
subject–object relationship provided by visual technologies such as Photo-
synth. As Uricchio argues, this is not merely a change from the uniqueness
of the subject–object relationship of artists of the modern era to the mul-
tiple people’s perspective that we might think technologies like Photosynth
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provide us with. It is also something deeply embedded in technology that
refl ects the ‘interplay of algorithmically determined points of uniqueness’
that is activated by the navigational work of the user within these techno-
logical frameworks.
In Chapter 3, Eric Rothenbuhler historicizes another perceptual trans-
formation related to technology, although his focus is on the audible rather
than the visible. His discussion is centred on the changes in fi delity that
occurred with the change from analogue to digital technology, and how
accessibility and convenience have become more important than sound
quality in contemporary music cultures. Up until the introduction of the
CD, Rothenbuhler argues, music production had strived towards increas-
ingly better sound quality. Since digitization we have seen a decrease in
quality to the benefi t of greater accessibility to recorded music, whereby
today we can access most music over the web, in compressed formats
and with less dynamic sound range. The consequence of this change, it is
argued, is a shift from the strive for audible fi delity, truth and perfection
that was indicative of the analogue sound culture to a strive for e ciency,
convenience and price, e ectively transforming the listener into a consumer,
driven by market logics.
In Chapter 4, Mats Björkin continues the discussion of the changes
brought on by digitization, in his case connected to the distribution tech-
niques that have been developed for media content through tracking sys-
tems and BitTorrent technology. The question Björkin focuses on is how
the cultural object—primarily fi lms and video clips—is transformed due
to these changes, especially through fi le-sharing techniques. As Björkin
argues, new skills are required for those who seek to orient themselves
among the vast amount of content available.
The distribution of media content is highly dependent on infrastructures
for the dissemination of information and communication. As part of such
infrastructures, the satellite dish can be said to symbolize transnational
communication fl ows. In Chapter 5, Lisa Parks discusses the ways infra-
structure becomes intelligible to media users, and how the ‘intelligibility
of infrastructures is interwoven with the politics of knowledge, place and
aesthetics’. Infrastructure is often concealed and not openly accessible to
citizens, but the satellite dish has a manifest materiality around which
discourses of taste, ethnicity and social status are formed. Parks shows
how the satellite dish, through this material quality, can be a ‘platform for
thinking through key issues of technological literacy, social power, and
resource use’.
In the second section of the book—Epistemologies of Cultural Technol-
ogies—the relation between technology and knowledge is in focus. These
are chapters that broadly thematize the ways cultural technologies help cor-
porate actors as well as policy makers and individual citizens gain knowl-
edge about the world. In Chapter 6, Toby Miller discusses the consequences
of new surveillance techniques, and how the market logics actively embrace
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active audiences who share their tastes and preferences. Even the acts of
resistance to hegemonic ideologies become just another market niche in the
eyes of the television industries, Miller argues, pointing to how ‘our view-
ing and social identities are governed and commodifi ed and our mental
labor sold to others without our consent or remuneration’.
The intelligence produced through surveillance technologies is deeply
dependent on computational power and storage capacity. The data centres
and server farms that serve Google, Facebook, Twitter and other services
that build on the ability to process enormous quantities of digital informa-
tion and data are of fundamental importance for the digital infrastructures
that enable clo ud comput in g, data m in in g and ha rves ti ng (a nd su rvei lla nce) .
In a case study in Chapter 7, Peter Jakobsson and Fredrik Stiernstedt anal-
yse discourses around this specifi c centralization of information, centred on
‘three di erent but related narratives that operate on three time scales: geo-
logical, historical and technological time’. Underlying these three temporal
discourses, they also fi nd a deeper dialectic of durability and ephemerality
that they consider inherent in discourses on digital data and the informa-
tion society: on the one hand, the ephemeral quality of digital information,
and on the other, the tendency of data centres to occupy the same societal
space as the library, symbolizing cultural continuity.
One of the main activities on the Internet is web searches. Google, Yahoo!,
Bing and other search engines compete for the domination of the search mar-
ket, because the larger the information base, the better the search behaviour
commodity can be refi ned. And around the business of search, a range of
new occupations has arisen, web optimizers being one of them. In her chap-
ter, Elizabeth van Couvering analyses how ‘search engine bias comes to be
embedded into both local practices and larger systems’, that is, how certain
web sites are becoming privileged in the search system over other sites. She
then goes on to show how this indicates a confl ict between ‘the search engine
as a private media enterprise and the search engine as a public good’.
The intelligence produced by search engines is but one of the sources
of knowledge in the digital environments. In Chapter 9, Sandra Braman
takes on a wider discussion of the epistemological implications of technol-
ogy, especially related to information policy. She suggests that informa-
tion policy actually equals epistemology policy, because communicating
social, aesthetic or other facts also means producing knowledge of the
world around us. Taking her departure in John Locke’s four elements of the
fact—the perceptual entity, the subjective experience, the symbolic expres-
sion to others and the group discussions in which we construct reality in
social interaction—she asks the fundamental question for epistemological
inquiry: ‘What knowledge can we produce about the decisions we make
about how to produce knowledge?’
The third section of the book covers the Uses of Cultural Technologies.
In this section, three chapters analyse cultural technologies as means to
other ends. In Chapter 10, Maria Bakardjieva and Georgia Gaden discuss
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the uses of Web 2.0 technologies for the construction of self. Following
Foucault’s famous ‘technologies of the self’, Bakardjieva and Gaden refl ect
on the abilities of blogs and social networking sites to function as cultural
technologies in the service of the individual in his or her self-construction,
not least through their abilities to provoke refl exivity and play.
Whereas Bakardjieva and Gaden focus on the individual construction
of self, in Chapter 11 Stina Bengtsson focuses on the formation of collec-
tive social identities. Her focus is on the Estonian embassy in the virtual
world Second Life, and how the Estonian government used this forum as
a cultural technology and ‘o ered a national space in the media’ where
citizens could take part in events, get Estonian news, and so on. Contrary
to other embassies launched in Second Life, and despite the fact that it was
launched by the Ministry for Foreign A airs, the Estonian embassy gradu-
ally changed its address from the usual external address to foreign investors
and tourists (the mark of nation-branding campaigns) to a more domestic
address, directed at Estonian citizens—making it a tool for nation building
rather than nation branding.
In the fi nal chapter, Joke Hermes refl ects on the possibilities of technol-
ogy to serve qualitative, empirical audience research. Hermes argues that
‘technology needs to be rescued from its ambivalent status’ in the humanities,
and, on the one hand, should be acknowledged as an area of study in itself,
and on the other, also employed as an aid in interpretive approaches that
seek to analyse meaning-making processes, for example, in qualitative audi-
ence research. Comparing technological aids of the social sciences and the
humanities, she concludes that while there have been dramatic methodologi-
cal developments within the social sciences, making the means of statistical
calculation accessible to a wider circle of scholars, the technological instru-
ments for conducting qualitative research have not followed pace. She espe-
cially wants to see analytical software developed, not only to analyse large
qualitative datasets but also to guide longitudinal consistency. In developing
such software, she argues, we need to see new types of cross-disciplinary col-
laborations between qualitative researchers and software developers.
Taken together, these chapters are supposed to give an insight into the
varieties of our cultures of technology, indicating the wide spectrum of
media and other technologies that in conjunction with each other form
this culture: expressively, socially and physically. In the chapters are also
given some examples on cultural technologies, the cultural tools by which
we administer or construct our selves and our environments individually,
socially and professionally.
NOTES
1. For a fuller account of the Latin root of production, see the Oxford English
Dictionary. Available at http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/151994?redirected
From=production#eid. Last accessed 2011–10–05.
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