ABSTRACT
The interdisciplinary field that most directly addresses the set of issues raised in this book looks at digital cultures—the social relationships that occur through immersion in the realm of the Internet, video games, smartphones and other high-tech platforms and devices. The analogy breaks down, however, in that Russian dolls are far more clearly demarcated than are cultures. Cultures are fluid, not neatly bounded entities. In other words, cultures create technologies, and the extent to which a given technology comes in time to alter culture is never a simple one of technology dictating to society. Technocultural approaches to digital culture issues avoid the extremes of viewing technologies as running amok, out of human control, and the equally dangerous assumption that technologies have no likely social consequences, including unintended ones, built into them. In addition, as with literary textual analysis, textual studies of digital cultures pay attention to the forms and formats in which digitized texts appear.
