Balbi, G., & Ortoleva, P. (2014). Plea for an un-natural history of digital culture. Contemporanea, 3, 482-489. (original) (raw)

On the road toward a cultural history of digital interconnectivity, there are many potholes. It is not easy to define the digital culture itself and what a cultural history of the digital means. It is unclear what we have in mind with the digital (often used in an oversimplified sense to simply mean the Internet): The geographical horizon of this culture is unclear, and lastly the main trends are unclear. What is more, too many aspects of the contemporary digital landscape are taken for granted, as if “natural”, while they are historically determined. This is the reason why history is so helpful in reconstructing the origins, the changes, the main trends of digital media, simply because it shows how they came into being and they were metabolized by the cultures. This discussion aims to clarify these elements or at least discuss them critically, whereby“critically” is meant first of all in the etymological sense of differentiating, second in the sense of not accepting prima facie what is generally considered to be obvious. This will be only a preliminary contribution that, far from being exhaustive, will aim to start a reflection on the role and benefits of cultural history in analyzing the digital.