Technology and Cultural Identity in Modern Society

Abstract

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the role of technology in shaping cultural identity in modern society remains both monumental and complicated. Contemporary identities, local and global, are shaped by multiple media and technologies in which narratives of belonging, resonance, and collision are performed in unequal ways across diverse urban geographies. Such complexities span feminist, post-colonial, post-humanist, intersectional, queer, and digital perspectives that unravel identifications across race, ethnicity, faith, gender, sexuality, class, generation, ability, political ideology, profession, and other circuits of belonging. In an age defined by globalization, migration, and technological connectivity—sometimes described as the “transnational turn” or even the “post-global world”—people increasingly retain ties to home while simultaneously establishing new connections to host societies.

Urban digital centres serve as lenses for analysing the socio-technical entanglements, new materialities, and imaginative practices reassembling cultural and technological identities within the shifting geographies of late modernity. The interplay of technology and identity corresponds to a larger social debate in contemporary sociology regarding the situation of culture and cultural practices in the modern world (Krstić, 2017). The chapter aims to build a theoretical framework to inform understandings of how technology circulates and constitutes identity in contemporary societies, thereby addressing the ongoing socio-techno-cultural transformations occurring in rapid and unpredictable ways.