Digital Culture & Society Series

»Digital Culture & Society« is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiries into digital media theory and provides a publication environment for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation. The third issue »Politics of Big Data« edited by Mark Coté, Paolo Gerbaudo, and Jennifer Pybus, critically examines the political and economic dimensions of Big Data and thus details its contestation. The contributions focus on the materialities and processes which manifest Big Data and explore forms of value beyond the state and capital. These range from open data initiatives, social media metrics, machine learning algorithms, data visualisation to data dashboards, critical data analysis, and new modes of data action research and practice.

Digital Culture & Society is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for inquiries into digital media theory, methodologies, and socio-technological developments. The fourth issue "Making and Hacking" sheds light on the communities and spaces of hackers, makers, DIY enthusiasts, and 'fabbers'. Academics, artists, and hackerspace members examine the meanings and entanglements of maker and hacker cultures - from conceptual, methodological as well as empirical perspectives. With contributions by Sabine Hielscher, Jeremy Hunsinger, Kat Braybrooke, Tim Jordan, among others, and an interview with Sebastian Kubitschko.

»Digital Culture & Society« is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiry into digital media theory. The journal provides a venue for publication for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation in digital media studies. It invites reflection on how culture unfolds through the use of digital technology, and how it conversely influences the development of digital technology itself. The inaugural issue »Digital Material/ism« presents methodological and theoretical insights into digital materiality and materialism.

Digital Culture & Society is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiries into digital media theory and provides a publication environment for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation. The second issue »Quantified Selves | Statistical Bodies« provides methodological and theoretical reflections on technologically generated knowledge about the body and socio-cultural practices that are subsumed, discussed, and criticized using the key concept »Quantified Self«.

»Digital Culture & Society« is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiries into digital media theory and provides a publication environment for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation. This issue, edited by Anna Lisa Ramella, Asko Lehmuskallio, Tristan Thielmann and Pablo Abend, discusses the mobility of people, data and devices from the perspective of digital mobile practices. As the authors of various empirical case studies show, these need to be studied both situationally, and on the move. With contributions by Marion Schulze, Jamie Coates, Geoffrey Hobbis, Samuel Gerald Collins, among others, and an interview with Heather Horst, David Morley, and Noel B. Salazar.

Digital Culture & Society is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for inquiries into digital media theory, methodologies, and socio-technological developments. This issue shows: The meaning of AI has undergone drastic changes during the last 60 years of AI discourse(s). What we talk about when saying AI is not what it meant in 1958, when John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky and their colleagues started using the term. Biological information processing is now firmly embedded in commercial applications like the intelligent personal Google Assistant, Facebook's facial recognition algorithm, Deep Face, Amazon's device Alexa or Apple's software feature Siri to mention just a few.

Digital Culture & Society is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for inquiries into digital media theory, methodologies, and socio-technological developments. This issue presents empirical studies as well as theoretical and methodological reflections on inequalities and divides in digital cultures. From various (inter-)disciplinary perspectives, the authors examine three main themes - inequality of access, inequality by design and discursive divides, and inequality by algorithms - while suggesting ways for research to move beyond these.

»Digital Culture & Society« is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiries into digital media theory and provides a publication environment for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation. This special issue discusses theoretical and artistic investigations on citizen engagement, digital citizenship and grassroots information politics. The articles reflect on the role of the digital citizen from the perspectives of (digital) sociology, science, technology and society (STS), (digital) media studies, cultural studies, political sciences, and philosophy.

As DIY digital maker culture proliferates globally, research on these practices is also maturing. Still, particular terminologies dominate beyond their Western contexts, and technocultural histories of making are often rendered as over-simplified technomyths that render invisible diverse local practices. This special issue brings together contributions that highlight how historicising plays a role in mythmaking and the creation of social imaginaries. The peer-reviewed articles present cultural-historical perspectives, technology and design histories and historiographies, and alternative histories related to postcolonial resistance. The contributions illustrate the relevance of craft to making as a reparative practice after the Salvadoran Civil War and as a leisure activity to spark »innovation« in mid-century corporate culture; the political-economic background to the diffusion and differentiation of community workshops in contemporary Spain and post-war Germany; and the various aesthetics and politics of technology culture manifestos over the years. The issue features an interview with Peter Harper of the Alternative Technology movement by Simon Sadler, as well as an interview with Felix Holm and Suné Stassen on the antecedents of making and design in South Africa. The special issue is rounded off with six short alternative (hi)stories of DIY making including multiple practices, geographies and temporalities.

This double issue of Digital Culture & Society addresses the complex thematic field of the dialectics of play and labour. We will take a closer look at the problem of play and work from two overlapping, albeit not mutually exclusive, perspectives: laborious play and playful work. The term laborious play points to practices and processes that turn playful activities into hard work. Laborious play happens whenever playfulness turns into work, and may be observed in such activities such as e-sports, excessive play, »goldfarming«, and Twitch gameplay broadcasting, amongst many others. A complementary phenomenon to that of laborious play is the practice and concept of playful work. The promises of a joyful and rewarding working experience have been promoted as »gamification« while critical voices denounce such attempts as ideology, exploitation or simply »bullshit«.

This double issue of Digital Culture & Society addresses the dialectics of play and labour, taking a closer look at the problem of play and work from two overlapping, albeit not mutually exclusive, perspectives. After the first issue explored the notion of laborious play, this second one studies the concept of playful work. The contributions feature critical inquiries into various phenomena of playful work - ranging from interfaces of play and work in the BDSM subculture over labour in digital gaming to high frequency trading. Alongside the articles, the issue features an interview with Fred Turner, Chair of the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He talks about the Bauhaus in the US, countercultural cybernetics, technology and consciousness, and work in the Silicon Valley.

What happened to the 1960s ideas of machine art, cybernetic art, »algorithmic revolution«, and the hopes for a democratization of the art market? How do contemporary art practitioners cope with the political situation and with the attempts of the Silicon Valley giants to appropriate algorithmic generation of art-like artefacts? This issue aims to discuss how the early concept of computer art is now being reframed as digital, post-digital or algorithmic art under the prevailing conditions of big data, smart AI, an almost all-encompassing surveillance technology and the political state of neo-liberalism.

The design and use of metadata is always culturally, socially, and ideologically inflected. The actors, whether these are institutions (museums, archives, libraries, corporate image suppliers) or individuals (image producers, social media agents, researchers), as well as their agendas and interests, affect the character of metadata. There is a politics of metadata. This issue of Digital Culture & Society addresses the ideological and political aspects of metadata practices within image collections from an interdisciplinary perspective. The overall aim is to consider the implications, tensions, and challenges involved in the creation of metadata in terms of content, structure, searchability, and diversity.

Code is intended both as a computer-based language to program software and as a functional and visual language for organizing administrative processes, visualizing information, performing behaviour control, and reinforcing shared imaginaries based on surveillance and dread. This special issue of Digital Culture & Society deals with the concept of code in relation to the Covid-19 crisis. The contributions depart from the idea that both forms of coding have become dramatically intertwined during the pandemic and are structuring a new way of being in and seeing reality. They explore the new forms of data-driven surveillance and representation of the pandemic evolution at the level of real-time epidemiology, sensor technologies, science policies, push media, and the heterogeneous counter-discourses that try to subvert them.

Capturing personal data in exchange for free services is now ubiquitous in networked media and recently led to diagnoses of surveillance and platform capitalism. In social media discourse, dataveillance and data mining have been criticized as new forms of capitalist exploitation for some time. From social photos, selfies and image communities on the internet to connected viewing and streaming, and video conferencing during the Corona pandemic - the digital image is not only predominantly networked but also accessed through platforms and structured by their economic imperatives, data acquisition techniques and algorithmic processing. In this issue, the contributors show how participation and commodification are closely linked to the production, circulation, consumption and operativity of images and visual communication, raising the question of the role networked images play for and within the proliferating surveillance capitalism.

Modern mundane life is brimming with a variety of data-driven technologies that are supposed to augment the practices they are involved in. As humans bring these technologies into their lives in a process of domestication, they tame them and are simultaneously influenced by their presence. In combining domestication research and an empirical analysis of current, digital, and interconnected media, this issue examines the process of taming with an emphasis on practices. The contributions in this issue explore the use of digitally connected media such as vacuum robots, smart speakers, drones, and kitchen appliances with reference to the domestication paradigm from interdisciplinary perspectives including media studies, sociology, anthropology, and human-computer interaction.