The Digital Culture and Media Initiative encourages thoughtful analysis of today’s device-littered planet; retrospective study through the lens of cyberculture of prior moments in the histories of computation; and speculative scholarly visions of the mediated future.

In its original coinage, the word cyberculture was more about people than about computers. It named the impact of new machines on the very human capacities for dignified work, bodily security, and lasting peace. Decades later, computers and code proliferate, still affecting those same areas of human activity. The continuity and prehistory of this relationship are the main concern of the DCMI.

The present conjuncture is marked by an urgent, if somewhat belated and occasionally opportunistic, analysis of digital technologism. The DCMI contributes to this analysis by supporting research and coursework in the Department of English, in digital studies as well as in literary theory, histories of science and technology, rhetoric, film and media, social movement history, political economy, gender and sexuality studies, visual studies, studies of race and ethnicity, sound studies, and textual studies, each of which bears a long-established intimacy with the digital. As well, the DCMI supports work that looks beyond these fields and their moment: toward past worlds, where conceptual affordances of digital studies might now retroactively refine or reshape our comprehension of nondigital linguistic and technological forms; and toward worlds to come, where the human-machine entanglement grows increasingly complex, and increasingly resistant to its emplacement in any easy narrative of either salvation or ruin.

The Digital Culture and Media Initiative is a project of the Department of English in the College of the Liberal Arts.