Digital Culture

Digital Culture 1 How do information and information sharing impact the digital culture of today’s world? This question can best be answered by understanding the ways in which today’s digital culture uses information. Grassegger and Krogerus note that Big Data is the big elephant in the digital room: this is the collection of information on every Internet user on the planet, stored and provided so that today’s advertisers can market their organization’s products exclusively to Internet browsers.

Those ads that pop up everywhere you go, no matter what type of site you’re on, that seem to know exactly what type of product you’re currently interested in? They know what you’re interested in because your personal browsing habits are being watched are recorded: that’s what Big Data is. And it’s also more than that—because today even your Amazon Fire is watching and listening: your phone is taking note of where you go when your travel.

Google is recording your every movement. As Grassegger and Kregerus state, “Big Data means, in essence, that everything we do, both on and offline, leaves digital traces” (3). Those traces are monetized—and they are also used to pry into the private lives of individuals. Thus, the world has gone from allowing privacy in many cases where individuals can be relatively certain of being unobserved to being a world where even private actions are monitored and released into the public in one way or another.

What is even more interesting is that some people participate in this data sharing process deliberately. For example, many teens get on social media platforms and publicize their private lives: they embrace the private is public lifestyle of digital culture, according to Zaslow (“Surveillance and Privacy”). As a result, information and the sharing of information have impacted the digital culture of today’s world by making it more ubiquitous, more intrusive, more evasive, and even more omniscient if that is possible.

It is as though everything were being watched, and as an individual living in the modern world, where technology is a part of every process of human activity it seems, cannot escape the digital eye many simply shrug their shoulders: if you cannot beat them, join them. So Big Data and the purveyors of it are allowed to reign. Digital culture, it appears, is thus controlled by the man behind the curtain: call him Zuckerberg; call him Bezos; call him Schmidt.

Whatever name you choose, just know that he and his platform are watching the flow of information and using that stream to benefit themselves and their stakeholders—and you participate in that process just be having a phone, a laptop, or a conversation with Siri. 2 How does the digital culture impact our sense of identity? The digital culture impacts our sense of identity by dictating the terms on which people of today think of themselves and define themselves.

The online world offers a platform for people to engage in self-aggrandizement or, on the other extreme, complete anonymity. The latter extreme even has an organization—“Anonymous”—a hacktivist group that allows online users to anonymously engage in devious exercises designed to undermine the operations of organizations and persons who serve as target’s of the hacktivists’ ire.

Boyd maintains that “alongside the identity work done within common social media sites and wildly popular gaming services, a subculture has emerged in which participants outright eschew recognizable identity altogether by proclaiming the virtues of anonymity” (42)—and one of those virtues can be the ability of being a veritable ghost. In the real world, you may be a real person with a real job, a real wife, real kids, a real house, and so on.

In the digital world, the digital culture provides you with a mask and the tools to wreak havoc, become someone else, act stealthily and steal others’ secrets, engage in online relationships, and more. Anonymity obtained online both liberates one’s sense of identity and destroys it. On the other hand, the digital culture also provides a venue for extreme self-love, with social media sites like Facebook and YouTube allowing people to upload content that essentially serves as a celebration of self.

Zaslow points out that the Internet is perfect for letting people manipulate their self-image, brand themselves, and curate their profile (“New Relationships, New Selves?” 8). In other words, participants in digital culture can create shrines to themselves, market themselves, become celebrities even—all thanks to the power they are afforded by the Internet and the connectivity of so many sites like Twitter and Instagram and all the rest.

Thus, thanks to digital culture, people can go anonymous (renouncing their identity or embracing the idea that they create a new identity) or they can go all-in.