Digital transformations of self- and world-relations and the genealogy of digital culture: historiographic sketches

Abstract

‹Digital Culture› and the digitalization of culture, as to be noticed by phenomena like selfies, quantified selves and big data, are often regarded as effects of emergent technological and medial transformations of culture. Accordingly, historical perspectives – if recognized at all – tend to focus on the history of technology, media and communication as a history of emergent upheavals rather than of transformed continuities. However, the enormous dynamics and speed in which digital technologies develop and establish points towards the very conditions of their enablement. The obvious (cultural) connectivity and compatibility of mostly everything digital leads to the central argument of it being rather thoroughly based upon, at least prepared by certain cultural-historical continuities rather than only emergent discontinuities – what, in the end, would be a precondition for the digital to ‹make sense› at all. The article focuses three exemplary phenomena since the European early modern period by re-reading (well known) cultural histories a) on the quantification of numbers, b) on the organization on knowledge into proto-database-like ‹tableaus›, and c) on the intertwinement between subjectivity and visuality, in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between culture and digitality.