Postdigital Cultural Recycling

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Given that we are now in a postdigital condition (Cramer 2014, Cox 2014, Berry 2015, Jordan 2020) that affects all our daily cultural practices, we have to ask ourselves how this affects the production, circulation and reception of cultural elements. As the shift towards the postdigital condition involves using mass digitisation and datafication to transform the way we communicate and organise knowledge, these practices of production, circulation and reception show that content recycling is now the dominant trend. This trend is driven by several specific features of postdigital culture. This chapter investigates the extent to which these recycling practices and phenomena have acquired specific characteristics as a result of this postdigital condition. Using various discourses and conceptualisations of the term ‘recycling’ applied to culture, it addresses the question of whether “cultural recycling” is an appropriate and productive conceptualisation of certain communicative phenomena characterised by the postdigital condition.