Center on Digital Culture and Society
Reimagining our common future through critical scholarship and dialogue on digital culture, technology, and society
Latest News
Call for Abstracts – Narratives of COVID-19 in China and the World: Technology, Society, and Nations
As COVID-19 spreads across the globe and poses multiple crises to nations and humanity, our previous assumptions of community, mobility, personhood,...
Call for Applications: CDCS Postdoctoral Fellowship
CDCS invites applications to fill one postdoctoral fellowship position for the 2020-2021 academic year.
Digital Launch Symposium Videos
The Center on Digital Culture and Society hosted its Digital Launch Symposium on April 3, 2020. Titled “Social Justice and the Remaking of...
Upcoming Events
VIRTUAL EVENT — Digitizing Bodies: the Politics of Evidence and Avenues for Sociotechnical Change
January 25 @ 12:00pm-1:00pm ...Details
The Digital Radical
About Us
Founded in July 2019, the Center on Digital Culture and Society (CDCS) at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication supports critical, interdisciplinary scholarship and dialogue on digital culture, technology, and society. CDCS aims to create collaborative spaces for discussion and debate among academics, citizens, and activists; develop critical approaches to the study of digital culture and technology; help train new generations of digital researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and beyond; build global networks of researchers; advocate for socially just design, production, and use of digital technologies; and explore and foster new visions of digital futures through scholarship and public communication.
Publications
I SEE YOU, I BELIEVE YOU, I STAND WITH YOU: #MeToo and the Performance of Networked Feminist Visibility
Feminist Media Studies, 2019
Rosemary Clark-Parsons
Hashtag feminism, a form of activism that appropriates Twitter’s metadata tags for organizing posts to draw visibility to a cause, has become a central component of the feminist media repertoire. Much discourse about hashtag feminism revolves around whether or not Twitter is an effective tool for activism. This instrumentalist approach leaves activists’ strategies for juggling both…See More
Notes from the Web that Was: The Platform Politics of Craigslist
Surveillance & Society, 2019
Jessa Lingel
Surveillance is an increasingly common feature of online life, with user activity logged and tracked in order to sell advertising. Rather than focusing on platforms that have consistently violated user privacy, this paper uses Craigslist as a model of a widely used and profitable online platform with policies that emphasize user privacy. By focusing on its monetization strategies (which are straightforward rather than obfuscated) and its defense of anonymity, this paper argues that Craigslist successfully maintains Web 1.0 ethics around user surveillance that are worth remembering in a contemporary digital landscape.…See More
Free Country, Free Internet: The Symbolic Power of Technology in the Hungarian Internet Tax Protests
Media, Culture & Society, 2018
Elisabetta Ferrari
In 2014, the Hungarian government announced the introduction of a tax on internet usage. The proposal generated large protests, which led to its eventual withdrawal. In this article, I investigate the puzzling success of the ‘internet tax’ protests: how could a small tax on internet consumption generate so much contestation? I argue that the internet tax was able to give way to a broader…See More
Get Involved
Join
CDCS is an open, collaborative space for research and dialogue on digital culture and society. Our events are open to the public and all are welcome to attend.
Write
We invite submissions to our online magazine, The Digital Radical, from anyone with a story to tell about a person or group who practices a radical orientation toward digital media and technologies. A new story is published every month. See our call for submissions.
Collaborate
Want to work with us? We welcome invitations for collaborations and cosponsorships at the intersection of digital culture and society and also offer opportunities for nonresidential fellowships. Contact us for more information.
Connect
To stay up to date on CDCS news and events, follow us on Twitter (@cdcspenn) and subscribe to our newsletter below!
Office Location
3620 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA
cdcs@asc.upenn.edu