Digital Textualities and Cultural Changes
We are living in a digital world—one that is produced by writing. We derive our identity from writing: personal profiles, data entered into databases, lines of code. Every one of our actions is in some way based upon writing, from clicking to buying a book or planning a trip.
Dr. Marcello Vitali-Rosati, the Canada Research Chair in Digital Textualities, is proposing a new way to read and understand this writing that is reshaping our world. The development and dissemination of digital technologies, particularly over the past two decades, have profoundly affected our culture by redesigning the way we produce, circulate and legitimize literary content in the digital age.
At the same time, the cultural changes generated by these new technologies are transforming our moral values underpinning our social actions. The work Vitali-Rosati and his research team are doing in conducting a theoretical analysis of these changes will help them develop tools to address the challenges they pose.