Welcome to our brave new digital world

This blog is dedicated to exploring digital culture, taking as its premise that our culture has become something distinctly new due to the "technium" -- the set of conditions that include technology, new media, networked communications, and ubiquitous computing.

We've been colonizing this brave new digital world for awhile (or it has colonized us!), but like this early 18th century world map, we are only getting started on labeling the features of this broadened space of activity. There remain parts identified as "unknown." Our digital world may be familiar to us in many respects, but much is foreign. We must set about exploring, mapping, and testing -- measuring the riches and the risks along the way.

"A New Map of the World With Trade Winds" (1732)
CC License, David Rumsey

This map depicts a variety of implements: a crown, a book, tools, weapons -- and like the earlier Europeans we must also make use of the implements we know to make sense of the places we do not know. We face the foreign with the familiar, recognizing that the journey, as we take it, will inevitably change our tools and our maps.

As tools to map and manage our brave new digital world, I offer the following:

• Blogs 
• "Brave New Digital" (this blog)
• The "Digital Civilization" blog
• Student blogs from Digital Culture (Fall 2012)
• Books 
• A virtual bookshelf on Digital Culture at Goodreads.com
• A virtual bookshelf on Digital Culture at ebrary (requires authentication for access)
• Wiki
• The Digital Culture Wiki (a hyperlinked, text-based, intellectual map). 
• Social Bookmarks
• A set of bookmarks and a bookmarking group on "Digital Civilization" at Diigo.
• Videos
• A YouTube playlist on the topic of Digital Culture

I also invite my students and readers to create and contribute other maps or tools of our brave new digital world. For example:

• Photos -- A curated photo gallery (on Flickr, Picasa, etc.)
• Videos -- Outside of YouTube, sets of relevant videos from services such as Vimeo or TeacherTube
• OER (open educational resources) on related topics, including open online courses, syllabi, and teaching media (from sources such as MIT OpenCourseWare, Connexions, and iTunesU)
• Pinterest -- A board or boards on topics of digital culture
• Presentations -- A curated set of presentations on topics related to digital culture (via slideshare.net or prezi.com)
• Twitter -- A Twitter list following meaningful voices on topics related to digital culture
• Podcasts -- A curated set of podcasts or podcast episodes on related topics
• Conferences -- A curated set of conferences where main topics of digital culture are discussed
• Scholarship -- Bibliographies of articles and scholarly monographs on related topics
• Social networks -- Bookmarking groups, book groups, educational networks, student groups of interest to these topics
• Apps -- Applications for mobile devices that are related to topics in digital culture