A Digital Janus: Looking Forward, Looking Back

Book excerpt: This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. Cyberculture and cyberspace have become part of our realities. This is an inescapable fact. Their digital technologies have come to underpin many aspects of our lives, our history, and our future. Already, these technologies exert considerable influence upon the institutions and structure of our societies, including those that define our concepts of art and aesthetics, our social interactions, societal and individual remembrance, even how we govern and are governed. Cyberculture’s ubiquity raises questions of our concepts of being and aloneness. Can we experience solitude if we are all connected? Will the natural state of being soon be ‘always on, always connected?’ To remember everything, is it a blessing or a curse? Is the promise of digital ‘immortality’ possible or even desirable? When do we cease mourning, if the dead are memorialized in digital perpetuity? Within this volume is a collection of essays from an international group of scholars, artists, and practitioners who address these and other questions about our future, looking at where we have come in our past.