The book ‘Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics’ by Aleksandra Uzelac and Biserka Cvjeticanin is available for free in digital version. This title is a part of Culturelink’s Joint Publications Series No 12.
‘Digital culture is a new complex notion: today digital trends are increasingly interloping with the world of culture and arts, involving different aspects of convergence of cultures, media and information technologies, and influencing new forms of communication. The new possibilities created by ICT – global connectivity and the rise of networks – challenge our traditional ways of understanding culture, extending it to digital culture as well. So, culture today should be understood as an open and dynamic process that is based on interactive communication, and we cannot think of it as an enclosed system which makes up a ‘cultural mosaic’ with other similar or diverse cultural systems. The ICT and especially the Internet, has given these interrelations a new dimension, by changing our relation towards knowledge and knowledge society, by intensifying the flow of cultural goods and services, and by causing a new understanding of cultural creativity.
The book entitled Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics, is the result of discussions among experts, members of the Culturelink Network and IMO’s researchers, in the course of the past few years on the impact of information and communication technologies on culture and the changes that in the context of the information era affect established cultural practices and concepts. The inspiration for producing this book rose from the meeting of experts at the Culturemondo conference, held in Dubrovnik, Croatia in 2006, hosted by Culturelink. Informal debates led to the proposal to unite different approaches, opinions and reflections about the phenomena transforming the world today into one book focusing on digital culture.
The papers in this book examine possible shifts in the integration of new technologies and digital culture in the processes of affirming cultural diversity and intercultural communication by presenting different case studies and trend analyses – examining the changes brought about by the new context of the interactive and participatory Internet and the responses of the cultural sector to them, and analysing how cultural policies deal with digital culture. By providing insights into these interrelated aspects, the book is trying to answer the question – can we talk about cultural diversity in the digital domain and what are the current trends? To understand the interrelation of the local and the global, the articles in this book analyse existing practices in the digital realm. The SEE context is analysed in one part of this book, thus providing evidence-based research of digital diversity trends and informing cultural policies in the SEE region.’
