Digital environments?

Since the late 1980s it has become accepted wisdom that we are living in a 'digital environment', one that embodies a 'law of code' (a law founded on US libertarian values regarding free speech and private enterprise) that will bring nations - and individuals - together in a global market featuring ubiquitous access to information via electronic media. That environment is supposedly both unprecedented and inevitable, although delayed in parts of the world such as Kazakhstan or Zimbabwe that have not inhaled the zeitgeist.

This guide, and by extension the caslon.com.au site, question some of the digital pieties.

The following pages suggest that it is more useful to speak of a range of digital environments, in which culture is often as important as the availability of infrastructure or hegemonies regarding markets, the state, individual autonomy and community.

Few of the digital environments are unprecedented: many of the laments about digital woes (or merely the discontents of modernity) look distinctly traditional and rhetoric about the evils (or wonders) of the net could have come from writing about television, the telegraph or the printing press. Eschatological visions of the Telecosm, the Noosphere or what Nicholas Negroponte acclaimed as 'Being Digital' (sort of 'cool' without taxes or inconveniences such as governments and the distressingly un-hip lower classes) are also misplaced.

Like any description of an environment it is necessarily patchy. We have highlighted online and offline writing about work, gender, the arts, morals, communities and the state