Theorizing Digital Cultures

Grant D. Bollmer

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526453099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The rapid development of digital technologies continues to have far reaching effects on our daily lives. This book explains how digital media—in providing the material and infrastructure for a host of practices and interactions—affect identities, bodies, social relations, artistic practices, and the environment.

Theorizing Digital Cultures:

• Shows students the importance of theory for understanding digital cultures and presents key theories in an easy-to-understand way
• Considers the key topics of cybernetics, online identities, aesthetics and ecologies
• Explores the power relations between individuals and groups that are produced by digital technologies
• Enhances understanding through applied examples, including YouTube personalities, Facebook's 'like' button and holographic performers

Clearly structured and written in an accessible style, this is the book students need to get to grips with the key theoretical approaches in the field. It is essential reading for students and researchers of digital culture and digital society throughout the social sciences.

Part I Defining Digital Cultures

1 What Are Digital Cultures?

This chapter reviews the legacy of the term ‘digital culture’, updating it to provide a framework for thinking about digital media and its cultural significance. This framework ties together narratives about technology and its infrastructural materiality, alongside the physical capacities of the body – human or otherwise. In providing this framework, this chapter discusses the importance of materiality in media studies, conjoined with attention to narrative.

• TERMS: collective intelligence; cultural determinism; digital dualism; epiphylogenesis; liminality; materiality; metaphysics; metaphysics of presence; noosphere; print culture/oral culture; technological determinism; technological Singularity; Web 2.0
• THEORISTS: Tom Boellstorff, Jacques Derrida, Milad Doueihi, Nathan Jurgenson, Pierre Lévy, Marshall McLuhan, John Durham Peters, Bernard Stiegler

Throughout this book, I’m using ‘digital culture’ to refer to the general context in which the changes mentioned in the introduction have taken place. This term is, however, somewhat old, and its present use does not precisely follow the claims with which it is commonly associated. Many current invocations of digital culture refer to social media and smartphones in everyday life, along with the practices performed by individuals online (e.g. Dobson 2015). This follows a version of media studies that suggests our key focus should be on investigating what people are doing with media (Couldry 2012). Given the sheer proliferation of digital media, this means that we might say that the ‘digital’ in digital culture is redundant. But I would advise against doing this. Concepts become less useful as they become synonyms for nearly everything, and the digital does not touch everything in the same way. The difference between digital media and culture is a difference we should maintain.

The plural ‘digital cultures’ is better, as there is no one, singular digital culture. Digital media are distributed unevenly across the globe, and the effects of digital media are not uniform. Even if I use the singular ‘digital culture’ in this book, I must stress that there are only digital cultures – the ways that digital media have influenced culture are different in specific places and at specific times. Given the vagueness of the term digital culture today, we’re going to review how it has been defined in the past, and how that definition has changed over time. And while using ‘digital culture’ to refer to what people do with digital media is completely valid, there should also be more of an attempt to pin down what we mean by this phrase. In fact, we should reject many of the associations that characterized digital culture in the 1990s and early 2000s in favour of a more complex understanding of both ‘digital’ and ‘culture’.

We’ll continue with this task of defining digital and culture as separate, if linked, concepts in the next two chapters. In this chapter, I want to discuss historical associations that have characterized digital culture – associations we should question and challenge. In particular, we should refuse a theological way of thinking of digital media as a metaphysical perfection of the human. Technology has often been endowed with spiritual abilities, and many of the ways we talk about digital media are remnants of religious beliefs that position technology as a kind of god. Instead, I claim, we should think of digital culture as made up of three elements, narratives about technology, material infrastructures that shape communication, and the physical capacities of bodies, human or otherwise, in their ability to move and perform specific acts. Digital culture is found at the intersection of these three elements.

Past Ways of Defining Digital Culture

The Theology of Digital Culture

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, ‘digital culture’ was one of several names used to describe the cultural impact of computational technologies. It arrived alongside ‘technoculture’ (Penley & Ross 1991) and ‘cyberculture’ (Bell 2001). Digital media were (and by many, still are) thought of as ‘new media’ (Lister et al. 2009; Manovich 2001), representing a distinct historical and cultural break.

These terms often referred to utopian, even theological technological potentials. Media have regularly been imagined as technological gods that, through communication, unite people across the planet, absorbing and fusing different bodies into one. This is a metaphysical understanding of technology, where media perfect some human essence that may otherwise be obscured in daily life. For instance, human beings are imagined as fundamentally social and communicative. The fact that we regularly misunderstand each other, then, is a problem. The essence of the human, the theology of digital media suggests, will be revealed once we can finally understand others, directly knowing and feeling their experience – at least supposedly. We’ve long imagined how media will correct for the fact that we do not have access to what another person is thinking or feeling, and that we can unite different people through better technologies that have higher resolution and less noise in the transmission (see Krämer 2015; Peters 1999). This understanding of communication comes with spiritualist beliefs about using media to talk to the deceased, be it through photography to visualize spirits, or by ‘resurrecting’ someone from the data they left behind, having them ‘live’ forever as a hologram or robot.

This dream of spiritual unification through media has long influenced how we imagine new technology, be it the telegraph, telephone, or the internet. In the 1990s it took a specific form. The online world was thought to be a ‘cyberspace’ of infinite potential, detached from physical geography. Communities were no longer anchored by proximity, but through open and collaborative knowledge production and sharing. Authorship belonged to no single individual, but a collective body with a shared collective intelligence. Pierre Lévy, the French theorist who came up with the concept of collective intelligence, imagined digital culture to be a new stage in human evolution, leading to larger social transformations from how we communicate (Lévy 1997: xix–xx). Lévy saw this new moment as the invention of a noosphere, a space of pure information in which individual minds would become synthesized into a collective brain, to be contrasted with the ‘biosphere’ of biological life and the ‘atmosphere’ of the air around us. Where ‘bios’ refers to the Greek word for life, and ‘atmos’ to vapour or gases, ‘noosphere’ derives from the Greek word for mind, ‘nous’. Lévy adapted this idea from the writings of Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1959), who saw human evolution as gradually moving away from physical matter and towards a world of ideas, in which all human minds would become synthesized with god at a time he referred to as the ‘Omega Point’.

The theological vision of Teilhard de Chardin, where humans would leave their bodies behind for a noosphere of communication, permeates many common assumptions about digital technologies, which are often influenced by a desire to transcend material reality (Hillis 1999). In early discussions of digital culture, bodies seemed to vanish as social interaction migrated online. Identities were thought to be fluid and flexible, with our physical bodies replaced with self-fashioned avatars that reflected a playful and transgressive approach to embodiment and identity (e.g. Stone 1995; Turkle 1995). The means of production for creative work no longer belonged to an elitist culture industry but were placed in the hands of any fan with the desire and time to produce, consume and share online, collaborating in an online democracy of creativity (Jenkins 2006). States would disappear as the internet would replace federal governments, and national boundaries would be rewritten in the name of global flows of information (Castells 2010; cf. Dean 2009). The distinction between human and computer would wane away, and we would become posthuman cyborgs, synthesized with digital media (Hayles 1999).

These beliefs can be found in numerous examples of science fiction from the past several decades. The Matrix (1999) has probably been the most popular and influential depiction of these ideas, but they also inform television shows like Chuck (2007–2012), Mr. Robot (2015–), Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), and the dystopian visions of Black Mirror (2011–), the videogame Watch Dogs (2014), the Johnny Depp bomb Transcendence (2014), and countless others. Maybe you’ve heard echoes of these ideas in the words of Silicon Valley elites when they speak of the promises of digital media yet to come, and how the connection and collaboration of social media will enable true democracy and justice, without the regulation of federal governments (see Morozov 2013).

Beliefs associated with the technological Singularity (Kurzweil 2005), which have informed both science fiction and research on artificial intelligence and robotics, are almost identical to Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘Omega Point’. Instead of synthesis with god, however, those awaiting the technological Singularity believe that humans and technology will converge around 2040, when it’s predicted that computer processing and storage capacity will become advanced enough to simulate a human brain. As a result, ‘Singulatarians’ believe that we will leave our corporeal bodies and live forever in a computer simulation, or perhaps inhabiting a robot body. Beliefs associated with digital culture in the 1990s, we can see, have informed popular representations of digital media for some time.

There is a reason for this. These arguments do describe the promises of digital media, which are grounded in everyday uses of social media and the internet. You may have personally felt the impact of some of these effects, especially if you have ever used software to write a story or song or video and then shared it online, or if you have contributed to Wikipedia (as your authorship becomes part of a collective project of world knowledge). Many forms of participatory Web 2.0 technologies change how we understand authorship and sharing. It’s easy to imagine the internet as a collaborative space, immaterial, and detached from much of daily life. These utopian, theological beliefs combine longstanding views about the ability of technology to achieve metaphysical perfection with the everyday experiences of collaboration fostered by networked media.

We must acknowledge that these beliefs are wrong, partial, or misguided. They reflect very old ideas associated with theology and religion, not the physical or social effects of new technologies. But the theological perspective we often bring to new technologies is responsible for shaping many of our uses of digital media, and directly informs predictions about the future of humanity and technological progress. An early advocate for digital literacy in contemporary culture, Milad Doueihi, has claimed, ‘digital culture is the only rival to religion as a universal practice … [digital culture is] a world religion with its prophets and priesthood, its institutions and sects and believers, its dissenters and schismatics’ (2011: 3).

Many of these early beliefs about digital media have little to do with what’s happened in the past several decades. With social media, identities have become more rigid. You only have one identity on Facebook, at least supposedly. Even if you do perform multiple identities online, data analytics companies attempt to identify and control the ‘real you’ beyond your awareness and intention. There is no immaterial cyberspace but rather a proliferation of connected, material devices throughout the planet. Local community and the state, while certainly transformed by digital media, have not been remade into a single, global village. Rather, community has become fragmented, and governments are increasingly building physical walls and detention camps to control migration to reaffirm the power of state government (Brown 2010). There hasn’t been an embrace of collective intelligence aside from Wikipedia and other forms of social media deliberately designed to foster collaboration (although usually with the goal of accumulating individuals’ user data and commodifying it in some way). Instead, creativity in recent years can be characterized by an intense effort to use digital media to maintain control of creative properties through intellectual property and copyright law. Many of the remixing techniques that characterized hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s, often celebrated as a major part of digital culture (cf. Deuze 2006), are now more intensely policed than ever in the name of the intellectual property (see Katz 2010; Vaidhyanathan 2001). Laws now explicitly prohibit forms of sharing and creative (mis)use we once had. In fact, with what we know about digital media today, many of the theological beliefs associated with digital media are not only false but have been damaging in terms of obscuring the material, environmental, and social impact of our technologies. Many of these effects continue to be hidden below a theological rhetoric that sees in new technology a digital, communicative saviour for the ills that currently plague the world.

Digital Culture and Print Culture

Not all historical beliefs associated with digital culture have been misguided or incorrect. Digital culture has referred to changes associated with literacy, juxtaposed with print culture. Since the work of the foundational media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1962, 1964; also see Ong, 2002), it has been argued that the physical qualities of a medium transform knowledge practices. McLuhan claimed that there is a difference between societies organized around speech and those organized around writing, which are themselves different from societies organized around print.¹

What would happen if you only communicated through speech? How would your life be different? How would you relate to others? How would you know the past? With books, newspapers, and magazines, our knowledge is reproduced, distributed, circulated, and archived in specific, technologically shaped ways. It’s wrong to suggest that oral cultures have no way of storing information. But the fact remains that practices of ritual and oral performance have a different relationship to objectivity, truth, and memory than written documentation. It is possible that writing transforms memory so individuals no longer possess an ability to remember that they may have once had. (For instance, do you remember any phone numbers? Or does your phone remember them for you?) But this is not to suggest that one way of remembering – or one way of communicating – is better than another, or that more technology makes us less human, a point we’ll return to later. It is merely to suggest that the way we communicate, in the physical form through which information is transmitted between individuals, has a profound way of shaping how different people relate to each other and to themselves.

Print culture emerges from the technologies we have for writing and reading, producing specific senses of community and nation through the exchange of printed materials (see, for instance, Anderson 2006; Warner 2002). Just as print culture is different from oral culture, digital culture signifies a distinct series of changes from print culture. Digital media transform practices of literacy, of reading and writing, and changes in literacy are ultimately responsible for other transformations in ‘identity, location, territory and jurisdiction, presence and location, community and individuality, ownership, archives, and so on’ (Doueihi 2011: xv). These changes remake the knowledge of history and the jurisdiction of law, potentially contributing to the shaping of democracy through the distribution of knowledge (Davies & Razlogova 2013). But it’s quite difficult to figure out what these changes are, to sort out what’s genuinely an effect of a new technology or if something has actually characterized social relations for some time.

So, What Should We Do about These Incorrect Narratives?

The radical changes thought to be produced by digital technology in the 1990s and early 2000s never arrived. Instead, we have a history of media – in its infrastructural materiality – and another history of beliefs about what media are imagined to do. Many of the things people believe about new technologies are not grounded in material reality. But this does not mean that we can simply dismiss these beliefs as wrong, as if the vast majority of people are merely duped, ignorantly navigating a world they do not understand. Both narratives and materiality are important dimensions of media history.

John Durham Peters makes a similar point though an anecdote about the use of the word ‘digital’ in Bangladesh:

Because the state has boosted the term so much, digital in Bangladeshi slang has apparently come to attach itself to things that are newfangled or modern, including the disposable toilet ‘Peepoo’ baggies distributed in hopes of reducing the spread of disease and keeping the water clean. This felicitous coinage has discerned a crucial truth: sometimes the digital just collects the same old poop. (Peters 2015: 50)

We should be constantly vigilant about misleading narratives told about new technologies and how these narratives are often handed down from history, reflecting not the actuality of media ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Why Theorize Digital Cultures?
• Part I Defining Digital Cultures
• 1 What Are Digital Cultures?
• 2 Culture and Technique
• 3 Digital and Analogue
• Part II Histories, Concepts, and Debates
• 4 Cybernetics and Posthumanism
• 5 Identities and Performances
• 6 Bodies and Extensions
• 7 Aesthetics and Affects
• 8 Forms and Judgements
• 9 Infrastructures and Ecologies
• Afterword What Comes After Digital Cultures?
• Glossary
• References
• Index