The current digital shift has been described as a motor of comprehensive cultural change within which we constantly have to localise ourselves. Its influence on our cultural and political self-image, our medial ways of worldmaking, our global and local connections and responsibilities, as well as our social coexistence, is renegotiated with each technical innovation. To think through the relationship of routines, information flows, communication acts and spaces of action with digital technologies is the aim of the book series Digital Cultures.

Digital cultures arise in different contexts and times. By observing their variable aesthetic, social and technological characteristics, we can observe how they are practiced, stabilised or undermined. In this sense we are confronted with a heterogeneous field of phenomena as much as with an imaginary harmonization when we speak of digital cultures. Every theoretical access to their presence should therefore be aware of its origins and its location. That is why the book series is shaped by a transdisciplinary attitude and a gathering of very different perspectives, as much as it is marked by an entanglement of new methods and established approaches. In this way we can seek to characterize and render discursive the apparatuses, institutions and practices of digital cultures. What forms of perception and cognition, interaction and cooperation, subjectification and control accompany them?

The book series Digital Cultures presents contributions which expose themselves to decisive fault lines: the diversity of approaches from media studies, social and political sciences, the tension between contemporary and historical-epistemological perspectives, as well as the conflicts between their respective methods. Our authors hold these debates in three formats: in Conversations they discuss a specific problem or a controversial thesis and lend insight into processes of thought and the development of arguments; Essays are short monographs, which take on current challenges in a concentrated manner; Collections consist of a small number of chapters that pointedly discuss specific questions from different perspectives.

The book series appears both in print and in open access. It is thereby part of the current transformation of knowledge production, the economics of information and of distribution channels. In this sense all contributions to Digital Cultures trace the contours of the present and show what it means not to be able to step outside of it.

The book series is edited by the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University of Lüneburg.