Those of us who study cultural production in the digital age for a living face a number of distinct challenges: how to gain some perspective on the technologies and practices in which we are immersed; how to resist the seductive claims of  revolutions and catastrophes that new media are sure to spark; how to convince funding organizations, tenure committees, and skeptical family members that studying { YouTube // online gaming // Twitter // lolcats } is a worthwhile and scholarly pursuit.

But perhaps the most pressing challenge is simply keeping up. It’s easy, too easy, to say that technology outpaces our ability to make sense of it. This is perhaps true, in a way, though it is also somewhat true of many things, and it is also true that our thinking outpaces our technology’s ability to embody it. Still, the practical and institutional mechanisms for turning academic research and insight into a material form that can be circulated to other scholars, or to interested readers outside of academia, or to policymakers and software designers and venture capitalists and amateur filmmakers, are traditionally not swift. Publication in journals is a shockingly slow process. Trade books and monographs take 2-3 years from concept to bookshelf. White papers and institutional reports are slow-going. Collaboration between scholars adds its own time challenges. Workshops take months to organize, collaborative research stalls at the slightest hitch, conference papers are submitted months before they’ll be presented — and true interdisciplinary engagement, when it happens at all, incurs all of these delays. And all the while, the cultural phenomena, the sociological rhythms, the technological innovations, and the policy debates that we hope to investigate move on, with little concern for our efforts to grab hold of them.

When Hector Postigo and I started thinking about how to bring together the scholars we’d come to recognize as important voices in this area, and how to link them and their home disciplines into a rich conversation, we immediately began struggling with this problem. We considered the traditional approaches, eliciting these scholars to contribute to an anthology, forging research collaborations that could seek external funding for innovative projects. These things may all happen. But, particularly in light of the desire to speak in a more timely way on the pressing issues we’re examining, we wanted to develop a more responsive way to share our ideas. This meant not only developing a space in which to speak and interact, but also being willing to offer our work before its polished to a publishable sheen. There are some models out there for doing this. Law scholars seem to be ahead of the rest of us on this regard, having moved not only most of their published work to an open, online collection at SSRN, but embracing group blogs (see Madisonian, Balkinization, Stanford CIS, or Univ. of Chicago Law): among our colleagues we looked to, among others, Crooked Timber, the Networked Publics project, and Terra Nova as exemplars.

With the generous support of the National Science Foundation, who also sponsored the workshop that helped us initate this collaboration, we have developed Culture Digitally to serve a number of purposes. First and foremost, it is meant to be a gathering point around which scholars who study of cultural production and information technologies can think together. We come from a range of fields, including Communication, Sociology, Media Studies, Science & Technology Studies, and Anthropology. But we are connected by our research interests, an emerging area of scholarship that currently lives across, or sometimes falls between, our home disciplines. It’s our sense that this emerging discussion needs more homes, be they virtual or institutional.

On this group blog, we hope to offer thought-provoking scholarly conversations, provocations and starting points for intellectual inquiry in our field, discussions of problems and tensions in the arena of cultural production and in the scholarship addressing it, links to references vital to the scholarship we do. We hope to comment on current events, emerging cultural trends, new laws and policies, and technological innovations. We hope to deepen the discussion of new media and digital culture by bringing to it historical, comparative, and ethnographic perspective. And we hope to enliven the blog modality, by incorporating tools that allow for synchronous collaboration and creative engagements with ideas, objects, and images.

At the start, the authors of the blog will be those who took part in the initial workshop. We hope, in the comment space beneath posts and in the twitter-verse (our Twitter hashtag is: #cultd) this group of participants can expand. in addition, for those who want to contribute to the discussion more substantially, we will be looking to invite guest bloggers to join in. We hope you’ll help us move these ideas forward.