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: