Editorial: Technology and Culture (original) (raw)

Judging from the outpouring of proposals and submissions we received in response to our original call for papers, there is enough critical thought on the theme of technology and culture to occupy whatever space can be made available to it. We filled the space we had with contributors who enlivened the difficult questions (albeit in words, now on pages): What does such critical space look like, and how does it emerge in relation to the spaces it critiques? In the changing force-fields of the university and the knowledge-based economy, these are particularly important questions. Like other production contexts shaped by the rapidly escalating scale of their operations and the changing agendas of their administrators, institutions of higher learning have re-dedicated their organizations, their budgets, their curricula and their material futures to the enhancement of digitally mediated knowledge processing. Like farms, offices, retail organizations and medical institutions, universities offer generous resources for those seeking to develop technological solutions to institutional objectives that are posed in such a way that no other solutions can be imagined. This milieu challenges us to think simultaneously in, through, around, and outside the socio-technical environment within which the technologies of culture multiply upon the world. In this issue, authors have taken a range of critical paths, offering pointed reflections on various sites in which the technologically mediated imagination is put to work.