Critical Digital Studies: A Reader

From the spectacular emergence of new media innovations such as blogging, podcasting, flashmobs, mashups, and RSS feeds to video-sharing websites, like MySpace and YouTube, and online role-playing games, contemporary society, culture, and politics are being transformed continuously by new digital communication technology. In Critical Digital Studies, internationally renowned theorists Arthur and Marilouise Kroker lead the search for a new method of understanding digitally mediated culture.

Digital studies is a rapidly expanding field that encompasses the research interests of social scientists and humanities scholars, multimedia artists, and activists. With this ground-breaking reader, we are introduced to a new style of thought that has emerged directly from Internet culture itself. Critical Digital Studies is inspired by the same spirit that gave rise to the Open Architecture Movement, Shareware, Web 2.0 - a creative mashup, mixing the enduring human demand to understand the world around us with the new means of analysis, communication, and living that define the twenty-first century. Among the contributors are: Sara Diamond, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Lynn Hershmann, Lev Manovich, Charles Mudede, Stephen Pfohl, and Stelarc.

An indispensable resource for instructors and students in digital studies programs, Critical Digital Studies is a comprehensive, creative, and fascinating look at a digital culture that is struggling to be born, survive, and flourish.

Arthur Kroker is the director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, and Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture, and Theory at the University of Victoria.


Marilouise Kroker is a senior research scholar in the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture at the University of Victoria.