Revisiting Digital Media Technologies? Understanding Technosociality

摘要

In this special issue we provide an analysis of contemporary developments in digital media practices and theory by revisiting. Revisiting is an approach that resists tropes of speed, constant innovation, and futurology. To revisit is to come to again, to sit with, to pay attention to historical dimensions of a technology or a techno-social formation, to spend time with it again. It is an opportunity to open up a different space of reflection.rnThe need to revisit stems from the constant requirement to define what is being done when "digital culture and communication" is researched. More specifically, there is the increasingly often asked question of what is specific about the digital nowadays - after all, in media research, it is increasingly difficult not to research the digital. This led to a conference, organized under the banner of the European Communication Research and Education Association's (ECREA) "Digital Culture and Communication section" that would revisit some of the already rich history of theories and empirical research around "new media" and see what was still relevant, what needed to be updated, and what the old might tell us about the new "new"1.