Digging into Digital Roots. Towards a Conceptual Media and Communication History

Abstract

The digital age did not arrive from nowhere; it grew from its own roots and even the roots of previous ages. It already has its own narratives, made up of key players and heroes, brilliant technological ideas, disruptive devices, spectacular forecasting and sometimes epic failures. But over the past few years, scholars have started to narrate these histories in new ways, challenging heroic and teleological narratives and underlining multiple temporalities, stakeholders and cultural reappropriations. New histories of the digital age have also adopted a critical perspective, focusing on issues like global and equal distribution of digital tools (and in parallel digital inequalities and asymmetries of access), maintenance of digital networks, devices and content, co-shaping of digital technologies, and connection and disconnection in different societies. This has expanded our knowledge of the digital past and, of course, of the digital present. Nevertheless, a chapter in these histories is often missing. The digital age is also made up of theoretical concepts which are mostly taken for granted and used “automatically” in the academic literature as well as in everyday life. Concepts influence the way we look at social reality, they shape how and in what terms we think and speak about the digital era, and they affect the ways we communicate and live. So, it is high time that we set a new trend in research that focuses on the concepts of the digital age. Indeed, by grounding research in concepts that are not properly problematized, we run the risk of making erroneous assumptions, which may prevent us from looking in the right direction and impair our ability to see beyond simplistic narratives about technology and its immediate impact on society. For example, in the 1990s and early 2000s, utopian visions of how the internet would usher in a new era of cultural democracy and undermine the power of dictators concealed the fact that the concepts of digital