History of the Digital Age
How was the digital transformed and how did it shape the culture of an age?
Discussing this question using tools from cultural studies and history was the aim of an anthology entitled "History of the Digital Age“, which was edited by Ricky Wichum and Daniela Zetti and published by Springer VS in 2022.
The fundamental reorganization of culture with digital media, logics, and practices has led to massive changes in all areas of human interaction in recent decades. This history is full of contradictory experiences, far-reaching expectations, difficult learning processes, shrewd solution strategies, and reliable hopes. New modes of communication, logics of action and orders of knowledge changed the self-understanding of people and their collectives. The new media constellation is characterized by a variety of combinations and surprising interconnections of the analog and the digital.
The study of digital reality and its development challenges the self-understanding of historical subjects, none of which can claim to be the sole representative of its study. Reflecting on the digitization of the historical sciences is also a challenge. In the past decades, historical cultural studies have more or less willingly adopted digital research and communication tools, without this process itself being the focus of attention. The investigation of changes in (historical) scientific topics, methods, and theories in the context of digitization has become an obvious desideratum of historical-cultural studies research.
This volume brings together contributions from a conference held at the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich in November 2019. The conference inaugurated the book series "History of the Digital Age" at Springer VS. Series editors are Martina Heßler (TU Darmstadt), Martin Tschiggerl, Thomas Walach, and Stefan Zahlmann (University of Vienna), and David Gugerli (ETH Zurich) and Daniela Zetti (University of Lübeck).