Mathias Fuchs

This double issue of Digital Culture & Society addresses the complex thematic field of the dialectics of play and labour. The journal takes a closer look at the problem of play and work from two overlapping, albeit not mutually exclusive, perspectives: laborious play and playful work.

As DIY digital maker culture proliferates globally, research on these practices is also maturing beyond conceptual speculation and propositional dogma. Nevertheless, particular terminologies dominate beyond their Anglo-Saxon contexts, and technocultural histories of digital making are often rendered as over-simplified technomyths and hagiographies of selected gurus. This issue brings together contributions from cultural-historical perspectives, technology and design histories and historiographies, as well as alternative histories related to postcolonial resistance. The papers give voice to hidden antecedents that play a role in maker subcultures and their social imaginaries.

Alongside peer-reviewed articles, the special issue will feature an interview with Peter Harper, Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales, by Simon Sadler. The interview sheds light on the »Exhibition of People's Technology« that was displayed at the Moderna Museet during the landmark United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in June 1972. Very little has been published on this compelling exhibition.

This double issue of Digital Culture & Society addresses the complex thematic field of the dialectics of play and labour. The journal takes a closer look at the problem of play and work from two overlapping, albeit not mutually exclusive, perspectives: laborious play and playful work.

The issue examines inequalities and divides in digital cultures, starting from three themes: inequality of access; inequality by design and discursive divides; and inequality by algorithms.

The special issue Rethinking AI will explore and reflect the hype of neuroinformatics in AI discourses and the potential and limits of critique in the age of computational intelligence.

This issue discusses theoretical and artistic investigations on citizen engagement, digital citizenship and grassroots information politics.

This issue discusses how digital mobile practices can be described, framed and researched through the mobility of people, data and devices.

The articles collected in this fourth issue investigate the multiple meanings of hacking and making, and shed light on the communities, spaces, and practices of hackers and makers.

The third issue »Politics of Big Data« critically examines the political and economic dimensions of Big Data and thus details its contestation. The contributions focus on the materialities and processes which manifest Big Data and explore forms of value beyond the state and capital.

The second issue »Quantified Selves | Statistical Bodies« provides methodological and theoretical reflections on technologically generated knowledge about the body and socio-cultural practices that are subsumed, discussed, and criticized using the key concept »Quantified Self«.