Digital culture - a book chapter by Jan Van Dijk

The Network Society, Jan Van Djik
Chapter 8

What is digital culture?
•A culture is a set of coherent values, expectations,
expressions and artifacts shared by a group of people.
•It is both a continuous creative process and a result in the
shape of products or artifacts.
•Digital culture = creative process + set of products made
by means of digital media.
•Digital culture is not as new as it might appear, and its
development is not ultimately determined by technological
advances. Digital culture also refer to ways of thinking and
doing that are embodied within technology. (Charlie Gere,
2002).

Characteristics of digital culture:
Introduction
•
•Digitalization: every item can be translated into separate
bytes consisting of strings of 1s and 0s.
•Cyber-culture: practices of people engaged in using
computers, mobile phones, the internet, etc.

Characteristics of digital culture
•Pre-programming and creativity. These
supposedly will create unlimited choice from our
sizeable cultural heritage and a new creative
potential among the population. However, the
chances that we are dealing with a new and
original type of work are decreasing. We will be
processing, reworking or adapting things other
people have created.
•The work of art has been taken away from the
artist step by step and put into the hands of
consumers.

•People are able to create their “own” works of art
consisting of all the bits and pieces of the cultural
heritage. Professional and popular art have always
been a matter of reworking and adapting the
cultural heritage. But now, qualitatively more
means are inserted between source and result.
•The means of production offered by digital media
are (pre) programmed themselves and they partly
work automatically.
•The material worked upon is filled with existing
cultural content.

•Usually, the user is able to make general choices
only.
•These options lead to both a differentiation and a
standardization of culture
•The amount of content is increasing, but the elements
of these content increasingly resemble one another.
•Everything is arranged in similar (menu) structures.
•Sources of information that used to be separate are
combined in multimedia, which can lead to diluting
sources of information and eroding contents.

•Fragmentation and collage. Digitalization and processing
of analogue sources by multimedia equipment have
already had a fragmenting effect on our culture.
•The traditional linear processing of content is replaced by
the making of links, jumps and associations.
•Finally, we come to the content of pieces of music and
films processed by using interactive programs. This
modularization quickly causes the unity of a creative work
to be lost. The idea is to give listeners the opportunity to
create their own collages.

•User-generation. Digitization makes it easier for the
users of digital technology to write publications, make
drawings, pictures and videos, and even creations
considered to be art. The means of production are
spread among larger sections of the population and
they require fewer skills to master them than the
traditional instruments.
•Andrew Keen (2007) calls it “the cult of the amateur”.
Quality declines but it gives amateurs a voice.
Nevertheless, this accentuates the gap between
professionals and amateurs.

•Van Djik says that producing user-generated
content is not as widespread and popular as it could
be.
•In 2009, 30% of American Internet Users above 18
shared content on the web, 15% remixed cultural
items, 19% used Twitter and 11% had a blog (Pew
Internet and American Life Project, 2009). The most
popular type of user-generated content was creating
a personal profile in an SNS (60%)
•http://searchengineland.com/infographic-how-
where-when-people-share-content-100539

•The biggest contemporary problem regarding
attention is that it is slackining fast. The stimuli
becomes shorter and more powerful as result.
•Background information and reflection disappear
or are pushed to the sidelines.
•This will result in shallower media content
produced and consumed, although we have seen
that the form of images is becoming more
complicated.

•The most fundamental result of the universal presence of
screens is the gradual replacement of a person´s direct
personal experience and direct interaction by observation
through glass and camera lenses, usually someone else´s,
and by mediated interaction.
•Danger of people living in an artificial reality, dependent on
the nature and quality of images.
•Debord (1996) speaks about a “society of the spectacle”.
•Visual perception and visualization are the most important
perceptual and cognitive mental capacities of humans.

•The argument has to be refined in two other ways:
• The results discussed only apply to the extent to
which screens will dominate all media of presentation
and the extent to which they will push aside other
types of mediated communication as the most visible
type.
• We have not taken into account the educational and
cultural policies trying to confront the negative effects.
•The first priority might be an adjustment of teaching
courses in language(s), information and computer
science, social studies and the humanities.

QUANTITY AND QUALITY
OF NEW MEDIA CONTENT
•Exploding quantities of data and information. The
supply of data in our society is increasing rapidly, perhaps
even exponentially. In 2007, the data universe consisted of
281 billion gigabytes; the increase expected for 2011 was
ten times the size of 2006 (Gantz et al. 2008)
•However, demand in the form of information lagged behind
with an increase of about only 3% each year. The increase
in the amount of knowledge our society extracts from this
information is even less. Information supply overlaps and
repeats itself many times, and in receiving information we
have to deal with selective attention, selective perception
and a surplus of information.

Exploding quantities
of data and information.
•The impact of information in affecting behaviour
(pragmatics) appears to be marginal: the activities of
individuals and organizations are highly insensitive to
information once a particular stage has been reached.
•Dordick and Wang's (1993) Productivity paradox:
Information technology produces fewer productivity gains
than expected, especially in the service sectors.
•The level of complexity of our societies, organizations and
personal lives has grown so dramatically that we would no
longer be able to handle that complexity without
technology.

Information overload.
•Too much information is produced in relation to its use.
•Information dud phenomenon (Van Cuilenburg and
Noomen, 1984): an increasing amount of information does
not offer answers to questions asked, but produces
answers to questions that still have to be posed.
•Data smog (David Schenk, 1997). The production of
information has partly become an autonomous, self-
augmenting process.
•"At a certain level of input, the law of diminishing returns
takes effect; the glut of information no longer adds to our
quality of life, but instead begins to cultivate stress,
confusion and even ignorance".

Two solutions
for information overload:
• Selective perception and cognition: part of the
information is ignored.
• Scanning: spend less time on each input. Most web
pages are viewed for ten seconds or less
(Weinreich et al., 2008). But scanning sacrifices
quality for quantity.

Communication overload
• When the law of the limits to attention is true,
communication overload has to occur too.
• As everybody in a network is able, in principle,
to connect and communicate to everyone else
in the network, there is a limit to attention
because the time to read, listen or view for
receivers runs out.
• Portals, search engines and direction services
have to be used to make selections among the
overabundance.

Interpersonal communication
overload.
• SMS and instant messages are sent by the dozens
or even hundreds a day. E-mails, news alerts, RSS,
updates...
• External observers are mainly looking at the
assumed burden for receivers, but they tend to
forget that messages have an expressive function
for senders too, and that interpersonal
communication also has the informal function of
bondage and staying in touch continually.
• Solutions: selective reception or reply and the
scanning of messages.

Information agents as a solution
• These are technical solutions to both
information and communication overload:
personal or information agents, filter systems,
and search engines.
• But we should not rely on them completely, as
three great risks are associated with them...

Information agents as a solution
1. To rely too much on their intelligence and to allow one's
own ability to judge to remain weak.People's standards,
values and emotions change much faster than intelligent
systems and they cannot be entirely (pre-) programmed.
2. People might cut themselves off from new and
surprising impressions and contacts. We may create a
personal subculture locked away from the rest of the world.
The growing supply of personalized media content on the
Web runs this risk.
3. To threat to the privacy of users who increasingly
entrust their personal preferences and characteristics to
systems of registration.

Quality of content
The appreciation of information and communication quality
is an arbitrary affair, therefore, we need to develop criteria
for the quality of information and communication.

Quality of content
• In the process of digitization, endless amounts
of bits and bytes are produced.
• Binary digit: the basic unit of information in
computing and telecommunications. It can have
a 1 or 0 value.
• Every digital 0 and 1 can be translated
technically into certain data by means of
computer machine language. Then, humans are
able to mentally translate these data into
information, as long as they consider it relevant.

Quality of content
• Knowledge is information that has a lasting importance.
It consists of facts (describing reality) and relations of
cause and effect that explain how things work and how
we can use them.
• Wisdom represents the deeper experience to be gained
by associating specific types of knowledge over time,
putting them in a context, offering explanations about
backgrounds, and connecting them with values and
standards important to humans.
• The use of digital media is no guarantee of higher
information quality. It does provide us with more
opportunities if we make more and better selections
simultaneously, through experience and education.

DIGITAL YOUTH CULTURE:
FORESHADOW OF THE FUTURE?
• Patterns of digital youth culture. Digital youth
culture has been called "Wired Generation",
"Facebook Generation", "Multi-tasking
Generation", "Einstein Generation"... The most
common and meaningless term is "The digital
generation".
• "Digital natives" at least indicates young people
born after 1990 have grown up with digital
technology.

Patterns of digital youth culture.
• Some say this is a global culture, first of all in
mobile telephony (Castells et al., 2009) while
others argue that local digital youth cultures are
different (Goggin, 2008; Katz, 2008).
• Holmes and Russell (1999: 75) claim that the
digital lifestyle of young people has created a
'crisis of boundaries' as it moves them away
from family, school and the mass media to their
own worlds of experience.

Common patterns of
digital youth culture.
• Collective identity as expressed in a shared
language (SMS codes), and individual identity as
created in personalized messages and mobile
phone fashions (Castells et al. 2009: 11-5).
• New patterns of communication and entertainment.
Internet applications young people use most, are
communication and entertainment applications
(Oxford Internet Institute, 2009...). SNS, chat-
boxes, online forums, uploading and downloading
music, photos or videos and online gaming. Older
generations are more pragmatic and use less
texting in mobile phone.

What are the potential new patterns
of communication?
• New ways to control contacts and
relationships. Young people use selectivity,
interactivity and stimuli-richness enabled by
asynchronicity and anonymity in texting and
online messages. Low cost on this type of
communication.
• A complete integration of online and offline
types of communication. Young people are the
first mobile phone and Internet users who have
explored the combination and integration of face-
to-face communication with computer-mediated
communication.

What are the potential new patterns
of entertainment?
• Practices of sharing cultural forms and
participating in collective media (exchange
sites and peer-to-peer networks) have been used
first by young people (with the exception of social
media).
• A participatory culture of new media use
through user-generated content contribution.
This has introduced a new culture of media use
enabled by advertisement and other business
models.

Special needs
of teens and adolescents.
Main concerns related to teens are:
• Online solicitations by strangers with bad
intentions
• Online bullying,
• The supposed shallowness or triviality of young
people's new media use.

Special needs
Valkenburg and Peter (2009, 2011). Young people
have three tasks in their psychosocial development
that can be supported by new media use:
1. Teens and adolescents have to develop a sense
of self or identity.
2. They have to sound out intimacy to learn to form,
maintain and terminate close relationships with
others.
3. They have to develop their sexuality by
experimentation.

Special needs
Teens and adolescents need to develop self-
presentation and self-disclosure. Online
communication offers 3 features to work on them:
1. Anonimity when desired
2. Asynchronicity of messages.
3. Extended accessibility of others that are not
always easy to meet in offline environments
(Valkenburg and Peter, 2011: 1-2).
But this features deliberately reduce the level of
interactivity.

Empirical research of online communication
among peers and adolescents
Rich-get-richer hypothesis vs. social compensation thesis.
All adolescents who
already have strong
social skills will benefit
more from the Internet
The Internet is
particularly beneficial for
lonely and socially
anxious adolescents.
The power law in networks: in large, scale-free networks
those units already having many links acquire even more,
while most units keep only a few links.

Displacement hypothesis vs. stimulation hypothesis
Online communication
negatively affects
adolescents' quality of
existing friendships because
it displaces the time that
could be spend on
interactions with offline
friends that are more
meaningful.
Online communication
stimulates the
maintenance and
depth of existing
friendships.

The law of small worlds: in large-scale networks, most units
are not neighbors but still can reach almost every other unit
in a few steps, creating a small world.

Patterns of digital youth culture
Social-cognitive theory: in the course of time, people's
media use is learned in social environments and then turns
into habits.
• Complete integration into daily life
• Control on forging contacts and relationships
• Priority of self-presentation, due to struggle for attention
on the web.
• Priority of self-disclosure
• Sharing information and other things. Enterprise 2.0
• Creation of user-generated content. Widening gap
between the world of self-guided learning and the
traditional classroom.

Patterns of digital youth culture
• Participatory media culture: culture of relatively low
barriers of artistic expression and civic engagement,
strong support for creating and sharing creations, and
some type of informal mentorship. (Jenkins et al.,
2009:3).
Differences among the "Digital generation" are as big as
they are in the general population.

Trends in new media use
• Convergence: We can belief on a total
merge of media and the disappearance of
the old ones. But people still need private
places where they can concentrate and be
left alone, and contemporary society is in a
process of social and cultural differentiation
that does not fit with a unitary media
environment.

• Multi-functionality instead of replacement: The
use of the Internet and all kinds of computers in
western countries has not displaced broadcasting
and print media.
• Television viewing time tends to grow.
• At first sight, the decline of the use of print media
is dramatic. However, these media only change
forms.
• Digital media have only amplified the rise of
audio-visual media in the mass and network
society, according to the law of trend
amplification.

• Networks are relational structures that tend to
amplify existing social and structural trends.
• Conclusion: only a gradual and partial
replacement of old media by new media
occurs.
• Reason: the growing multi-functional use of all
media. Both old and new media integrate
information, communication, transaction,
entertainment, sociability, education and
identity building functions.

• Contextualization and growing diversity.
Differences between media do not disappear.
• People's selectivity in choosing media is
increasing, and depends on the context.
• Multi-tasking in media use is on the rise.
• There is also the social inequality of media use.
Digital media is primarily extended by people with
high income and education. People with low
income and low education have considerably less
media, with a concentration on entertainment.

• Hypermediation. Hyperlinks and hypermedia in
general will cause a revolution in media use,
because until now, media were offered as separate
products.
• In hypermedia, they become processes of
information retrieval, communication and
entertainment.
• Hyperlinks do not interconnect people but content.
They will diminish the linear perception and
processing of content and turn them into
associative modes of perception, processing,
memory and learning.

• The rise of user-generated content. New
media users are using ever more
interactive facilities and make their own
contributions to the media contents
offered to others.
• Many doubt whether there is sufficient
need for interactivity among users,
because many prefer relatively passive
viewing, reading and listening.

Digital culture - a book chapter by Jan Van Dijk

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