Notes from Van Dijk. 2012. The Network Society, 3rd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Chapter 8 – Culture

What Is Digital Culture?

• It is a creative process and set of products that are made by means of digital media.
• Not to be confused with technology
• It refers to ways of thinking and doing that are embodied within technology.

Characteristics of Digital Culture

• Pre-programming and creativity
• The next phase in the evolution of art is the processing, reworking, or adapting of things other people have created.
• The means of production offered by digital media are pre-programmed and partly work automatically.
• The material worked upon is not empty; it is filled with existing cultural content.
• Creativity stems from options in a menu (pre-programmed).
• The options lead to both differentiation and standardization of culture.
• The amount of content from which one can choose is increasing.
• The elements of this content increasing resemble one another.
• Fragmentation
• The structure of the internet
• Traditional linear process is replaced with links, jumps, and associations.
• Re-assembly: collage
• Digital music can easily be isolated, manipulated, sampled, and recombined and gives consumers (listeners) the opportunity to create their own collages.
• Traditional artists, designers, and producers either dissociate themselves from these reworkings or accept them because it pays to do so.
• User-generation
• Digitization makes it easier for people to contribute higher forms of culture such as writing publications, making drawings, pictures, and videos
• Means of production has spread to larger sections of the population
• Keen’s “Cult of the Amateur”
• Is there a decline in traditional quality media by the Internet because their economic position is undermined by ubiquitous free copying?
• Instead of reducing the gap between professionals and amateurs, it makes it more noticeable.
• User-generated content is not as widespread as it could be.
• The most popular type of user-generated content is creating a personal profile in an SNS.
• A majority of internet users prefer consumption over production.
• Lack of motivation and digital skills to create
• Acceleration
• Digitization allows a considerable increase in production, dispersion, and consumption of information.
• The importance time is increasing, as time saving measures allow for new ways time needs to be filled.
• The need for speed is determined by three motives:
• Economy: maximization of profits on the surplus side value of working time
• Organization: efficiency
• Consumption: immediate fulfillment of needs
• Culture of speed
• Expressions of culture date quickly.
• Information is sent in increasing amounts, more frequently and at higher speeds just to gain attention.
• Information and communication overload
• Images gain importance, as they are consumed more quickly than other types of data like text, speech, and numbers.
• Language becomes more abrupt and uses more jargon and abbreviations.
• Visualization
• Screens are ubiquitous in the networked society.
• It is not merely a medium of reproduction but it increasingly dominates all communication
• Text on paper is partially replaced with audiovisual displays on screens.
• Will this lead to losses in creativity and imagination?
• Jean-Marie Peters argues images have the capacity the capacities of reproduction and representation, as well as convey symbolic and creative values.
• Images are becoming more complicated rather than less.
• Screens will present large amounts of information.
• The average American spends about 8.5 hours in front of a screen.
• Screens attract our attention, and background information and reflection may be pushed to the sidelines.
• A person’s direct personal experience and direct interaction are gradually replaced by others’ observations and interactions (mediated through glass and camera lenses).
• Debord’s “society of the spectacle”

The Quantity and Quality of New Media Content

• Exploding quantities of data and information
• There is a difference between data, information, and knowledge.
  1. The supply of data is increasing exponentially.
  2. Information grows at a much slower pace; knowledge at a slower pace still.
  3. The impact of information in affecting behavior is marginal.
  4. Public institutions and companies are using more information than before to reach the same kinds of decisions.
  • Productivity Paradox
  5. Perhaps our society and institutions have grown so complex that they would not be able to operate without the current use of information technology.
• Information overload
• Too much information is produced in relation to its use.
• David Shenk’s concept of “data smog”: our information supply is so contaminated with useless and redundant data that information is no longer valuable or empowering – it is making us helpless.
• People have two common solutions for information overload.
  1. Selective perception and cognition – part of the information is ignored
  2. Scanning – spending less time on each input and low-priority signals are ignored
• Communication overload
• It will be difficult to find an audience on the Internet because the number of sites is so large that only a tiny percentage can ever be used by an individual.
• Most email users complain about the number of messages in their inbox (even excluding spam).
• News alerts on SNS feeds are so numerous that many of them will be ignored by a large part of their audience.
• It is difficult to objectively determine when communication overload is occurring.
• Must be considered a burden subjectively by both receiver and sender.
• Solutions to communication overload are similar to information overload above.
• Information agents as a solution
• Technical solutions to information and communication overload are also being developed.
  1. Systems that filter all incoming information and messages
  2. Search engines
• There are 3 risks associated with relying completely on these information agents:
  1. Relying too much on their intelligence and allowing one’s own ability to judge to remain weak
  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 society (an “information prison”).
  3. There is a threat to the privacy of users who increasingly trust their personal preferences and characteristics to systems of registration.
• Quality of content

• The huge quantities of new media to not necessarily lead to better quality.
• The pyramid of information technology can be ordered accordingly (from greatest quality/lowest quantity to lowest quality/greatest quantity):
  1. Wisdom – deeper experience
  2. Knowledge – facts and effects
  3. Information – interpreted data
  4. Data – figures, letters, and other signs
  5. Bits and bytes – strings of 1s and 0s
• Ascending the pyramid gets harder as one approaches the top.
• More and more data smog or information and communication overload must be disposed of to reach the next step.
• Though digital media use does not guarantee higher information quality, it does provide us with more opportunities.

Digital Youth Culture: Foreshadow of the Future?

• Patterns of digital youth culture
• Young people have been the forerunners in the adoption of new media applications.
• They have been called the “Facebook Generation” and “Digital Natives.”
• The use of this technology has permeated their daily life, almost from birth.
• Young people develop a collective identity as expressed in a shared language.
• Young people are more likely to use internet applications for communication and entertainment purposes.
  1. Communication purposes
     • New ways to control contacts and relationships
     • A complete integration of online and offline types of communication
  2. Entertainment purposes
• Practices of sharing cultural forms and participating in collective media (music and video exchange sites) have appeared.
• A participatory culture of new media use
• Special needs of teens and adolescents
• New opportunities and risks appear, though risks have drawn greater attention.
• Valkenburg and Peter identify three tasks teens should complete in their psychosocial development that can be supported by new media use.
  1. Develop a sense of self or identity
  2. Sound out intimacy to learn to form, maintain, and terminate close relationships with others
  3. Develop their sexuality by experimentation
• To achieve these tasks, teens need to develop two skills: self-presentation and self-disclosure.
• Online communication offers three features to work on these two skills: anonymity of messages when desired, asynchronicity of messages to prepare and read them at self-chosen times, and extended accessibility of others that are not always easy to meet in offline environments.
• Turkle interprets this as adolescents wanting to escape personal confrontations.
• Another way to interpret this is a desire to have more control over communication to satisfy the three aforementioned tasks.
• The rich-get-richer hypothesis (people who already have strong social skills will benefit more from the internet) has more empirical support than the social compensation thesis (people who are already lonely and anxious are benefitted more from the internet).
• The stimulation hypothesis (online communication stimulates the maintenance and depth of existing friendships) has more empirical support than the displacement hypothesis (online communication impairs teens’ quality of existing friendships because it displaces time that could be spent with offline friends). 
• The strength of ties is reinforced instead of reduced by online communication.
• Patterns extended in the future?
  • People’s media use is learned in social environments and then turns into patterns.
    • Complete integration into daily life
    • “Digital natives” have learned to use and adapt the new media for nearly every purpose in their young lives.
    • Control on forging contacts and relationships
• Contacts no longer need to disappear from their lives anymore.
• Priority of self-presentation
  • This will be extended and taken to a higher level in SNS profiles and the design of Tweets, blogs, and personal websites.
• Priority of self-disclosure
  • This must occur for people wanting to develop meaningful and lasting relationships.
• Sharing information and other things
  • The idea that networking as a practice of giving and taking is more productive than keeping knowledge and information to oneselves as a personal asset will prevail on more occasions.
• Creation of user-generated content
  • Content from younger people may start out for entertainment purposes, but it will later be extended to higher education and in jobs.
• Participatory media culture
  • There are relatively low barriers of artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices.
• Differences in skills and access exist in younger people (“Digital natives") just as they do for older adults.
• Most young people have fairly high operational and formal digital skills, but they also possess fairly different information and strategic skills.
• Young people of different demographic backgrounds are different in the new media or internet applications they prefer to use.

Trends in New Media Use

• Convergence
• The integration of the world of the telephone, radio, television, and the computer has inspired popular ideas of a complete merge of digital media in a single medium (like broadband internet) and of the disappearance of the separate old media.
• Technical convergence will not automatically lead to convergences in social practices and daily media use though.
• Media differentiation is also present in contemporary society.
• A single all-embracing medium that serves all applications and usage contexts is not a realistic prospect.
• Different social classes, age groups, and cultures keep using different media or advanced and simple types of the same media.
• Multi-functionality instead of replacement
• The new media will not replace the old media (TV has not replaced cinema).
• Longitudinal media research indicates the internet has not (or only partially and very gradually) displaced broadcasting and print media.
• Readership of printed books, newspapers, and magazines is reduced every year.
• Media is only changing forms – being read online and on tablets.
• Only a partial and gradual replacement of old media by new media occurs
• All media is increasingly multi-functional
• Until recently, media were used for a particular main purpose (TV for entertainment, telephone for conversation, computers for processing data).
• The rise of electronic, digital, and multimedia technologies enables all these media to become more multi-functional and integrate in information, communication, transaction, entertainment, sociability, education, and identity building functions.
• Contextualization and growing diversity
• People’s selectivity in choosing media in increasing and is driven by context.
• The most appropriate medium is chosen for a particular need in a specific context.
• The diversity of media use also increases when we look at the social inequality of media use.
• Media diversity is rising more among people of higher SES than with people of lower SES
• Hypermediation
• Hypermedia is a process of information retrieval, communication, and entertainment as people jump from one source to another
• Hyperlinks interconnects content instead of people.
• Conventional media were offered as separate products: devices, pieces or bundles on content (books), services, and programs.
• Visible distinctions will begin to disappear (for instance, searching for journal articles online rather than looking through the stacks at the library).
• The rise of user-generated content
• Many will take advantage of content generating opportunities, but we cannot be certain that a majority of new media users will.
• Many media users prefer relatively passive viewing, reading, and listening and do not want to make their own contributions.
• Intermediation
• We are not necessarily seeing intermediation of publishers, editors, and service providers becoming obsolete.
• More than ever, users require assistance in the overly extensive and complicated new media environment.
• There is a transition from broadcasting to narrowcasting and from mass marketing to the customization of media content.
• Personalization
• Service providers are attempting a one-to-one approach in personalized media forms and content.
• Consumers are able to compose their own service packages and adapt the features of shopping, banking, and service sites to their needs.
• This can benefit consumers as well as providers (who use personalized ads and customized marketing).
• Personalized content
• Google’s personalized search offers results it “thinks” will suit your personal preferences.
• The filter bubble/self-selected information prison
• Have three characteristics:
  1. You are the only one in a particular bubble.
  2. It is invisible to you.
  3. You have not chosen to enter the bubble.
• This trend of personalized content is also used by Facebook, YouTube, Microsoft Life, Yahoo, Amazon, and many others.
• This could lead to information ghettos in which people only receive information they like and agree with, escaping all other information.
• It could destroy the main benefit of the internet: access to a large array of sources, options, and opinions.
  • Could become a collection of “echo chambers” for people only seeking and listening to people with the same opinions.
• Concentration
• Hindman showed media concentration is currently larger on the internet than in the traditional mass media of the press and broadcasting.
• Chris Anderson discusses the “long tail” of internet sources leading to some fragmentation.
• The total of less-trafficked sites is relatively small compared to the total of “big shots” on the Internet (Google, Facebook, etc.).
•  The “middle” on the distribution curve is largely missing.
• Demonstrates the extremes of the rich-get-richer phenomenon
• Concentration and fragmentation occur simultaneously.
• Personalization helps users make choices on a network that has simply become too big in choice options.
• Concentration occurs because “everyone” goes to the most popular sites.
• The overwhelming majority of small sources and media in Anderson’s long tail will only reach the attention of very few people.

Chapter 9: Networked Information

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