What is Digital Culture (to me)?

To be able to define what digital culture is, we first have to establish what culture is. Collins English Dictionary (p. 181) states following:

Culture
1. the ideas, customs and art of a particular society
2. a particular civilization at a particular period
3. a developed understanding of the arts

So if we start out from that digital culture is culture, only digitalized, the definition should not be that difficult; all three definition above are applicable to digital culture. But with the complex and global world that the digital world is, it is not as simple anymore.

If we start with the arts, digital arts is more or less similar to traditional arts, methods have change but as soon as people start to consider something as art, it is art. As long as the conception “art” has existed, people have disputed what is and not is to be considered as art and in this sense, digital art should therefore be no different to traditional even if it itself is a part of digital culture.

But what about digital culture in the meaning of societies or civilizations? There is no doubt there are thousands societies and communities deriving from different digital phenomena. They have all their own ideas, customs and some of them are already in the past. Still, I would argue, there is not such a thing as one digital culture. Assuming all digital cultural occurrences are the same is like assuming all cultures over the world are the same. The behaviours of a digital community or practice, differs according to what it is and what it does, the users interest, the users cultural and national belonging and the history of how it arised. Therefore, we can not speak of one uniform digital culture, instead we can speak about different cultures sprung out of digital phenomena. They might have more or less things in common but every group is unique in some sense. The “ideas, customs and art” in Second Life for example is not comparable to communities founded around blogs or on a forum. Even within Second Life there are plenty of different societies and groups of people who’s behaviours and views of the world differs according to their cultural view. The wide conception “digital culture” consist of an enormous amount of things; everything from sending an email, logging on to MSN, making a blog entry, posting a message somewhere, entering SecondLife or joining a game. What they do have in common is that it is digitalized, communities that in some sense demand interaction between its members, a creation of selves and identities and something that seem to want to be parallel to, but instead becomes a part of, the physical world we live in.

In the same way as digital culture is a word collecting billions of cultures underneath it, it is also a part of our “real” culture of the 21st century. We are constantly affected of it and a part of it. It changes the way I handle my relations to people and it creates relations to people I have never, nor will ever, meet. It affects my life in such a fundamental way I do not even question it anymore. My daily routines and tasks are as much digital as lived and much of my life, personal and professional, are not taking place in a physical space.

Where there are people there is culture and digital culture is no exception
-it is only in a digital environment.


"Culture." 181. Collins English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Bath: CPI, 2003