Rethinking Cultural Criticism pp 1-15 | Cite as
Introduction: Rethinking Cultural Criticism—New Voices in the Digital Age
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Abstract
In this introduction, we outline the book’s overall take on the rethinking of cultural criticism in the digital age. First, we outline the book’s approach to its two key concepts, culture and criticism. Our goal is not to offer an exhaustive definition of either concept but to provide a context for the subsequent chapters and how they contribute new theoretical and empirical perspectives to current understandings of cultural criticism. Second, we contextualize the book in broader scholarly debates about changing notions of cultural authority and expertise in the digital age, occasioned by the hybrid media ecology and its intertwined mass media and social media logics, and how these developments reconfigure traditional valorization circuits and modes of performing cultural criticism. Finally, we summarize how the chapters in the book address these newer conditions for and dimensions of cultural criticism in the digital age.
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