ABSTRACT
Are we living in a ‘digital age’? In this chapter we explore a series of social, economic, political and cultural developments that together suggest we are now living in ‘new times’ in which technology and the prevalence of the ‘digital’ have become powerful infl uences on everyday thought and activity. The ‘digital age’ is one amongst a number of terms (including the ‘information age’ and the ‘knowledge age’) which have been used to defi ne a period in contemporary history allegedly characterized by the proliferation of computing technologies, information processing, and electronic communication. These terms are the temporal equivalents to a range of other, related expressions which characterize modern society as ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-Fordist’, ‘postmodern’, ‘informationalist’, a ‘network society’, ‘virtual society’ and a ‘knowledge economy’ (Webster 2006; Woolgar 2002). Such terms sometimes appear to represent society and history as being at the mercy of an unstoppable force of technologically-determined progress. Indeed, they suggest that we have reached decisively ‘new times’ in history and a new kind of society with its own determinate features and cultural breaks.
