Are the humanities still relevant in the twenty-first century? In the context of pervasive economic liberalism and shrinking budgets due to a deep and prolonged recession, the exigency of humanities research for society is increasingly put into question, even within academia. Why should governments finance research that does not generate computable and marketable results? Are the immediate costs worth the alleged long-term social benefits? Similar arguments are also made about the arts and culture more generally – one of the main fields of inquiry in humanities scholarship, past and present. With Contemporary Culture: New Directions in Arts and Humanities Research, we want to show that the humanities matter and in fact offer much-needed insights into contemporary cultural and social practices, thus opening up new ways of understanding the cultural contexts that shape societal transformation.

The essays in this volume come out of a large-scale research program that was initiated in 2002 by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The Transformations in Art and Culture programme was launched with two aims. It challenged scholars to think how the humanities could contribute to a better understanding of present-day processes of cultural and social change. The programme also aimed at reinvigorating the theoretical foundations and conceptual frameworks of humanities research and at building bridges with other fields of inquiry, notably the social sciences and the arts. By doing so, NWO sought to enrich the scholarly debates about the nature and future of the humanities and thus set the agenda for the years to come, well beyond the scope of the program itself.

This volume investigates how the interlocked processes of mediatization, globalization and commercialization have shaped cultural practices, social behaviour and feelings of belonging since the 1990s. While it is not a book about new media per se, most essays directly or indirectly address the profound impact of new information and communication technologies on everyday life. The introduction of the World Wide Web thereby figures as the implicit starting point for studying new modes of cultural production, distribution and consumption as catalysts for societal change. While such a perspective runs the risk of epochal thinking, overlooking continuities and relations to earlier periods, there is little doubt that the rapid expansion of new ICT technologies, fuelled by intensified globalization and commercialization after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, have changed the world profoundly, propelling us into a new stage of history.