As part of my Independent Study, “Religious Communication and Digital Life” this semester at UND, I recently read Vincent Miller’s “Understanding Digital Culture.” It turns out that it’s difficult to write a review with the audience of both professor and blog readers in mind, but I need to do this before I get it confused with the digital religion book I’m currently reading. So, here comes a hybrid review/reflection of sorts.

Miller’s book is a good overview of digital culture. A sociologist by trade, Miller certainly uses that lens often, but it’s really an interdisciplinary work, looking at digital issues from multiple perspectives. Since his task is to describe the field rather than make a particular argument, I can’t quote a provocative thesis, but the text, “strives to integrate and made explicit the link between the more economically-based ‘information society’ literature and literature emerging from cultural studies that focuses on the production, use and consumption of digital media and multimedia” (9).

Each of the nine chapters takes on a different aspect of digital culture with helpful sub-headings and extensive summaries of authors’ arguments with shorter quotations from their work. Miller does well to consider multiple sides of each topic.

For instance, in the chapter “Digital Inequality: Social, Political and Infrastructural Contexts” Miller considers digital divides from the point of view of practice, economic, and theoretical perspectives. Then he expands the conversation beyond the US and Europe to a discussion of digital divides in the developing world, and how those have emerged differently than in the US due to the relatively low cost of setting up mobile phone networks. But Miller does not stop there. He also considers how such phones “are potentially empowering to farmers, fisherman and other people who produce market goods” in the developing world (108).

Having read Pramond Nayar’s “An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures,” much of Miller’s material was somewhat familiar to me, but I found Miller’s broad perspective helpful in expanding my understanding. Generally speaking, Miller gives more history and economic background than Nayar, though the books work well together. Nayar tends to emphasize cultural understandings a bit more than Miller.

Three Ideas from “Understanding Digital Culture” that I’ll Keep Mulling

• In a chapter on understanding key elements of digital media, Miller describes the work of Walter Benjamin on the implications of reproducing cultural objects such as art, music, film, even nature. Technology makes it possible to, for instance, reproduce the sound of an orchestra but in doing so something is lost, what Benjamin called “aura” – “the feeling of awe or reverence created by being in the presence of unique or remarkable objects” (23). I wonder then about what these theories of Benjamin would have to say about current discussions in the church on whether something is lost when preachers give sermons via Skype, or sacraments are celebrated out of the context of tradition worship services.
• In a discussion about the contrast between what is “virtual” and what is “reality,” Miller helpfully points to the work of Shields who argues, “the virtual is in opposition to the concrete, not in opposition to the real, and that reality in fact is always part virtual in everyday concrete, as well as electronic instances. The virtual is real, but not actual” (33). Miller actually links this discussion to the debate about whether the bread and wine of communion actually become the body and blood of Christ, or whether they virtually do so. In everyday usage, it’s important to remember that virtual reality is not something to be thrown away as insubstantial, it’s just not concrete reality.
• Similarly, in a more theoretical portion of the book, Miller explains some poststructuralist/deconstructive online research to break down false distinctions “between the social and the technical, between the real and the virtual, between the public and the private” (167). Most every teenager can tell you that cyber-bullying hurts just as much as bullying in school, so making a false distinction that it is only “virtual” and so not real would be unhelpful and just plain silly.

So, if you’re looking for an academic but very readable overview of digital culture, where it comes from, what theory is behind it, what economies are driving it, and what sociology, cybertheory, media studies scholars are writing about it, pick up a copy of Miller’s book. It’s thought-provoking and a solid overview of an exciting field.