Introduction

This collection of essays explores the interfaces between new information technologies, their impact on contemporary culture, and recent transformations in capitalist production. From a transnational frame, the essays investigate some of the key facets of contemporary global capitalism: the relativization of a production based model of capital, the ascendance of finance capital, and the increasing importance of immaterial labor (understood here as a post-Fordist notion of work that privileges the art of communication, affect, and virtuosity). The contributors address these transformations by exploring their relation to new digital media (YouTube, MySpace, digital image and video technology, information networks, etc.) and various cultural forms including the Hispanic television talk show, indigenous video production, documentary film in Southern California, the Latin American stock market, German security surveillance, transnational videoconferencing, and Japanese tourists’ use of visual images on cell phones. These diverse analyses of cultural production and digital media – itself a paradigmatic technology of global capitalism – reveal persistent lines of continuity between the virtual and the material, as well as between contemporary and earlier cultures and economies (racial, colonial and imperial legacies). Engaging with recent critical debates on the intrinsic entanglement of the digital and the corporeal and its relation to the logic of global capitalism, the essays collected here offer profoundly transnational perspectives on how we can think about the possibilities for socio-cultural transformation in light of speculative capitalism and the new information and communication technologies.