Principal Components Of

Digital Culture

Shannice Singletary & Kathleen

Donahue

Digital culture

An emerging value system & set of expectations expressed in the activities of news and online information media makers & users

An expression of individualization, post nationalism and globalization

Does not imply that eventually we’ll all be online, but assumes that the way humans and machines interact in an increasingly digitized society leads to an emerging ‘digital culture’

Indymedia in Digital CultureIt’s a form of user-generated participatory content or “we media”

Loosely organized and developed around practices/ideals of open publishing and collaborative nonlinear storytelling (such as in weblogs)

Serves as a platform for the production/dissemination of news and information

Principal Components Of Digital CultureValues/Practices the multitude need in order to have the freedom to make an identity and participate in identity politics

Expressed and reproduced via blogging/open publishing etc and doesn’t necessarily constitute to digital culture as a whole but the preferred values that go along with it

Principal Components cont.

Information Culture- the convergence of media contents/forms, national/cultural traditions, characters/sensibilities, a mixing of culture and computers

Remediation- the mix/remix of old and new media

Bricolage- the highly personalized, continuous assembly/disassembly of reality

Digital Media relies on participation:

1. We’re active agents in the process of media making (we become participants)

2. We doubt/modify reality (we engage in remediation)

3. We assemble our own particular versions of this reality (we become bricoleurs)

• Digital Culture isn’t defined just by convergence of devices, we reproduce it via our perceptions of reality

Participation“Hypersociability”- social consists of networked individualism, “enhancing the capacity of individuals to rebuild structures of sociability from the bottom up.”

News has now evolved into a collaborate, participatory activity. Online Peer to Peer news is considered more reliable and preferred compared to more traditional business to consumer news

More and more people have the tools to create, circulate, archive content (via RSS, twitter, yahoo)

Active partcipation

So to put that in context…

How are social movements (such as the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Middle East Uprising via social media) prime examples of participatory culture in media? (Via twitter etc)

Participation cont.People are more willing to voice their concerns and claim their place in society (and have the available tools) but usually only do so if they feel their personal interests are at stake

Do-it-yourself culture, people are claiming the right to be heard rather than spoken to which is the case in traditional media

We see this in Web 2.0, which has gone from a one way flow to a two way flow

Why is participation relevant to the spread of digital media?

Remediation

Immersed in the system while at the same time attributing legitimacy/credibility to a self definition of working against/outside of the system as well from within

How webloggers tend to do what they do in distantiation from what journalists do, while at the same time remediating some of journalism’s peculiar strategies, techniques and content

Bricolage

Incorporates practices and notions like borrowing, hybridity, mixture and plagiarism

Such as content cocreation, “Wiki” based software and Peer2Peer networks

In journalism, seen in ‘shovelware’ or the repurposing or windowing of content across different sites to reach potential audiences. Journalists reuse and redistribute content originall produced by other media

In Conclusion

Digital Culture is created, reproduced, sustained and recognized via social systems like politics, economy etc.

It fosters community but can be fueled by isolation. We can ‘feel’ connected to everyone in the system without actually going anywhere