Tim is Senior Lecturer at King’s College London at the Centre for Culture, Media and Creative Industries. His current research interests are primarily in the cultures of the Internet, both in cultures that are specific to the Internet and the way internet technologies have affected culture more widely. This currently looks into online gaming, hybrid mobile communication, and pre-Internet communication. Tim has also researched popular protest and social movements and will continue this interest in cultural change. Tim is also interested in the way issues of work, leisure and play are being reconfigured and is developing research in relation to sport, music and possibly other practices and how these relate to bodies and post-humanity.
What one insight from your field, approach, method, findings etc. do you think is most important for scholars working in this topical area?
Cultural production is now closely intertwined with forms of communication that are operating differently depending on whether internet technologies are essential to the form of communication or are not essential. However, “different” does not mean separate or mutually exclusive so communicative complexity is always present in the co-presence of two forms of communicative practice.
What are two issues that are not adequately treated within current work on cultural production in the digital age in your field or in others?
Understanding the creation and maintenance of different types of bodies in communication and cultural production after the internet is not yet well understood.
The effects of an information politics that values flows of information over information content (and in doing so disregards the common axes of political thought) on communication and cultural production still requires analysis.
Are humanistic values such as justice, equality, democracy or (insert preferred humanistic value here) currently served by cultural production in a digital networked environment?
If values such as justice, equality, democracy and so on can be separated from a humanism that places a conception of “the human” as its core value, then we might begin to see new forms of justice, equality, democracy and so on that understand the inter-relations of machines, humans, post-humans, non-humans, animals and all the possible hybrids and in that seeing might allow us to articulate an ethics of a better world. A politics of information will be crucial in this rethinking.