Introduction

The term “networked public culture” refers to the contemporary emergence of cultural forms produced online digitally through the peer-to-peer sharing and appropriation of visual, musical, and textual materials, forms that inevitably affect cultural production in the wider public sphere. Networked public culture tends to collapse traditional distinctions between production, distribution, and consumption (and between professionals and amateurs) in ways that dramatically contest more traditional notions of “culture,” “originality,” and the “artist.” We’ll begin by reading some classic texts in the history of cultural studies in the west (by Arnold, Horkheimer and Adorno, Benjamin, and Raymond Williams), and then a more recent book on cultural studies (Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction, by Simon During). With these critical texts as a foundation we’ll spend the rest of the semester studying visual, musical, and textual materials characteristic of networked public cultures, along with some critical and theoretical texts dealing with these new cultural forms. We’ll pay particular attention to the networking of academic culture, research, and scholarship, but also to how the production, distribution, and consumption of music, creative writing, journalism, and the visual arts are being transformed by forms of cultural convergence associated with networked public culture.

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