Digital Culture Notes

Digital Culture

Digital Culture vs. Mass/Popular Culture

  • Key questions to consider:
    • Is digital culture simply a form of popular culture?
    • Does digital culture alter the power dynamics within culture?
    • Is culture inherently a contested space?

Renaissance of Folk Culture?

  • Yochai Benkler's (2006) perspective in "The Wealth of Networks:
    • He contrasted pre-industrial folk culture with the alienation of 20th-century mass popular culture.
    • Argued mass culture displaced folk culture turning individuals from co-producers to passive consumers.
    • The rise of peer-produced culture could be seen as a revival of folk culture
  • Burgess & Green's critique:
    • This view oversimplifies the relationship between the culture of the people and commercial popular culture.
    • Platforms, like Youtube, blur the lines, creating both convergences and tensions.

Pre-Industrial Folk Culture vs. Mass Culture

  • Folk Culture:
    • Characterized by co-production, with individuals participating as storytellers and within community events.
  • Mass Culture :
    • Relies on a broadcast model.
    • A message is sent to a large, undifferentiated audience.
    • The audience primarily receives or consumes content, even with critical interpretation.

Digital Culture: Key Characteristics

  • Shift from broadcasting to a communications infrastructure.
  • Technology as Media:
    • Tools that enhance communication abilities.
    • Practices and activities surrounding these tools.
    • Social structures that evolve around these tools and practices.
  • Peer-Produced Culture:
    • Operates horizontally, enabling widespread production.
  • Key concepts:
    • Networks of social production.
    • Convergence.
    • Participatory culture.
    • Remix (active agency).

Timeline of Digital Culture

  • 1980s: Personal computers become prevalent.
  • Mid-1990s: Public use of email expands.
  • 1993: The Internet becomes publicly accessible.
  • 2004: Facebook is founded.
  • 2005: YouTube is launched.
  • 2006: Twitter emerges.
  • 2010: Instagram gains popularity.
  • 2016: TikTok appears.

Tech as the New Media

  • How does today's technology compare to prior forms of media such as :
    • writing
    • book printing,
    • photography
    • moving images.

McLuhan: "The Medium is the Message" (1964)

  • Media defined as "any extension of our being in a new technical form".
    • Examples:
      • Hammer extends our arm.
      • Wheel extends our legs and feet.
      • Language extends our thoughts.
      • written word, printing, car, trains, planes, electricity, radio, television, internet, phones.

McLuhan: Impact of Media

  • Media reconfigure us:
    • Internally (sense perceptions).
    • Externally (social structures and relations).
  • These changes occur subtly over time, affecting our context without our awareness.
  • Media is not a neutral pathway for pre-existing thinking but shapes and changes our thinking.

Media's Influence on Our Lives

  • Media changes our:
    1. Sense perception. "The effect of radio is visual, the effect of the photo is auditory. Each new impact shifts the ratio among the senses”.
    2. Habits of life, patterns of thought, and valuation.
    3. Scale, pace, and pattern of human association and action.
      • Machines restructured work and association.
      • Railways accelerated human functions, leading to new urban and work structures.
      • Print-culture influenced social/political structures.

McLuhan: Awareness and Freedom

  • If we're unaware of how media reconfigures us, we are controlled by it.
  • Unconscious acceptance makes media "prisons without walls".
  • Surrendering our senses to commercial interests equates to handing over essential aspects of life (speech, atmosphere) to private entities.

Convergence (Fagerjord)

  • Production tools converged:
    • Computers are used to create and edit various media types.
  • Distribution networks converged:
    • Networks can carry digital signals.
  • Business sectors converged:
    • Traditionally separate industries now compete in the same digital space.
  • Genres and services converged:
    • Websites combine different media forms and services.
  • Consumer technologies converged:
    • Various devices are merging.

Convergence Culture: YouTube Example

  • YouTube showcases a mix of content:
    • TV and film clips.
    • Amateur videos.
    • Professional marketing.
    • Personal diaries.
    • Political messages.
    • Viral marketing.
    • Music videos.

Digital Culture: Broader Implications

  • Digital culture's core assumption (Deuze):
    • It is about interaction of humans and machines in society with increasing computerization and digitalization.
  • “Hypersociability”:
    • Networked individualism allows rebuilding social structures from the bottom up.
  • Digital culture becomes embedded and “disappears” into everyday life.

Influence of Capitalism

  • Technologies shape interaction with the world.
  • Companies continue inventing new gadgets and content.

Time-Space Compression

  • Rapid, widespread communication.
  • Challenges traditional notions of culture tied to specific groups or locations.
  • Potential for global connection.
  • Enclaves, echo chambers, and digital subcultures persist, causing localization, polarization, and tribalization.
  • Fast content/trends/news cycles are described using the language of virus/virality due to speed and spread.

Theories of Participatory Culture (2000s)

  • Accessible digital technologies, user-created content & power shifts between media industries and consumers.
  • Consumption has become a dynamic site of innovation and growth.
  • Users are producers and consumers.
  • Transformation in reception and relation to news, journalism, information.
  • Participation, remediation/distanciation, and remix are 3 characteristics of digital culture

Platforms of Participatory Culture

  • Creation & Sharing Platforms:
    • Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and Quora enable content creation.
  • Active User Roles:
    • Users shape meaning & discourse through posts.
    • Reality is constructed, assembled, and manipulated by media; intervention helps adjust worldviews.
  • Digital Forms of Expression:
    • Internet lingo, code-switching, avatars, social media.
    • Humor (memes).
  • Decentralization and Democracy:
    • Content created by people fosters a democratic landscape.

Examples of Participation

  • Peer-to-peer guitar lessons.
  • Memes based on everyday consumption.
  • Empathetic spaces for identity-based communities and personal stories.

Burgess & Green vs. Fagerjord

  • Burgess & Green:
    • Focused on positive applications of YouTube for cultural practices.
  • Fagerjord:
    • Interested in forms and practices.
    • Proposed "remix" as a better descriptor than "convergence".

Remix vs. Convergence

  • Convergence levels the differences, creating a shared digital space.
  • Remix splices genres and technologies.
  • Each medium has unique aspects e.g. financing, legal status, social conventions, dominant genres

Remix Culture

  • New combinations of media.
  • Similar to bricolage or mash-up.
  • Re-assembling found materials.
  • Creativity is in the combining, not originating.
  • Accessibility of tools links back to craftsmanship or folk culture.
  • YouTube is a remix with video gallery, blog-like commenting system, social network, file-sharing.

Remix, Bricolage, Repurposing

  • Bricolage involves borrowing, hybridity, mixture, and plagiarism.
  • Re-constructing and reusing elements to create new insights.
  • Focus on self-production and self-reference.
  • Values assemblage over originality.
  • Favors open file exchange.
  • Bricolage is both grassroots and top-down, like news sites using content from other media.

Shifting Perspectives on Reality

  • Post-modernist argument.
    • Rejection of grand narratives; we actively create meaning.
  • Reality is open source and up for discussion facilitated by tech (cell phones, wireless internet).
  • Fragmented, edited, networked world view shapes how people interact.
  • Digital applications accelerate digital culture.

Implications for Politics

  • Winograd & Hais predicted a technological shift away from top-down practices toward peer-to-peer sharing.
  • More political activism or participation.
  • Highly personal politics shape the individualized society; meanings aren't always consistent.
  • Changing notions of citizenship: activist citizens reject status quo, relate through solidarity, and create new media to address social, political, and ethical issues.
  • Access to popular culture is a means for political participation, especially for marginalized groups.

Information Overload

  • Everything converges into data.
  • Information abundance but too much information.
  • Desensitization from too much information.
  • Attention economy determines ways of communicating.
  • Algorithms differentiate content and automate access.

Freedom and Its Limits

  • Users can express opinions on social media platforms, but may face censorship based on local governments or technology companies.
  • Anonymity allows for bolder expression, but also hate comments.
  • Privacy is reduced through data mining.
  • Increased surveillance.
  • Participatory culture incorporates subcultural production within commercial logics.

Labor and Participation

  • Are users unpaid laborers producing value for corporations?
  • Is our participation a myth?
  • The culture industries are superseded by the vulture industries that collect rent on all social media time, public or private, work or leisure.
  • As Mackenzie Wark says, Capital is Dead: Is this Something Worse?