Cada día aparecen más artículos, ensayos y textos sobre el mundo digital y cómo la cultura se va renovando en este contexto. DiditalCultureBooks es un emprendimiento conjunto de la University of Michigan Press y la Scholarly Publishing Office, perteneciente a la Biblioteca de la misma Universidad. Gracias a esta iniciativa, el público puede tener acceso libre, total y gratuito a una interesante colección de textos, los cuales son vistos, revisados o leidos online antes de ser comprados. Aquí se publican trabajos sobre nuevos medios y su impacto en la sociedad, la cultura y la comunicación académica.

Entre los principales títulos tenemos: The Best of Technology Writing 2008; The Hyperlined Society – Questioning Connections in the Digital Age; Originality, Imitation and Plagiarism – Teaching Writing en the Digital Age; y más. Aquí un fragmento de la introducción del primer texto que vimos en DigitalCultureBooks.

“New technologies endow us with new skills, and those skills define how a society operates. Back in 3300 BC, tinkerers figured out how to smelt bronze, and suddenly they could produce metals with then-unheard-of-strength—metals which in turn produced drastically deadlier weapons and radically more efficient farming tools. A few thousand years later, the telegraph wire allowed people to send a message from Europe to the United States instantaneously, and suddenly the pace of business and news sped up to a degree that seemed almost insane. (Previously, a message took two weeks to cross the ocean on a steamer.) Twenty years ago, computer scientists figured out a technique for compressing a pop song into an e-mailable three-meg file, and, boom: they reshaped the entire recording industry, dooming the slow-to-react labels and empowering amateurs to reach the globe from their bedrooms. They probably didn’t intend these things to happen, but they did. Every new technology changes society. Usually the changes are small and meaningless. And then, every once in a while, they’re huge, weird, and totally unexpected.”