It is also important for any business because at some point, you need to use social media in your business. Social media developed international business and marketing. People prefer to buy stuff online. Social media created an opportunity to widen your world and make new friends from other countries.
It is easier to learn about breaking news on social media because it has unlimited access and flexibility. On the other hand, social media has influenced our culture in negative ways. People can share whatever they want to on social media and some of them might be inappropriate pictures.
Social media had negative effect on youth. There was, a decade ago, a lack of explanation about what happens to culture in digital environments.
How much might culture change when certain practices move online? How often can existing cultural beliefs and expectations be transferred intact? Deuze does not think digital culture is merely a recreation of physical world culture in online spaces, but he does not have a good answer for what has been emerging.
He analyzes independent media sites, blogs and radical online media outlets to see what these new forms of communication demonstrate about digital culture. That these forms are not meant to represent all culture but rather a cultural vanguard. They are or were the tip of the spear of newly evolving digital cultures. These sites are often progressive politically, so this is not as much a prediction of what will happen with all digital culture as it is a discussion of what is possible.
Deuze finds individualization in blogs most frequently written by one person and focused on a specific topic or small geographical region. It means that even in authoritarian nations such as North Korea, Russia, China and Iran that try to control the behavior of their citizens, individuals may seek freedom of expression on the internet, although it comes at a greater risk.
Both are named for individual founders. They are digital mass media outlets that started largely as personal points of view. The importance of individualized expression on social media is clear. This increases our reach. Each of us can potentially connect with every other individual on a given social media platform, but these platforms also raise questions about surveillance and privacy.
Suppose someone living in North Korea would like to use a social media channel such as Twitter to connect with like-minded people without government officials finding out. Should Twitter protect those users? What if a state threatens legal action or violence against Twitter employees? Would social media channels give up their users? There is a difference between government surveillance that is, state-sanctioned data gathering and analysis on massive scales and corporate data aggregation for targeted marketing purposes.
Usually, by accepting the Terms and Conditions of apps and web services, you opt in to having your data stored, crunched and analyzed by corporations. Legally, you are responsible for that decision. Should Google protect your searches and refuse to divulge information about your habits to governments, even if they share that data with other companies for marketing purposes? Should Google give you a way to hide your online activity?
Is there a way for the liberty-loving Southeast Asian to have his privacy protected while still enabling Western governments to watch out for terrorists? These questions relate to larger issues of freedom and individualism in digital culture. Throughout its history, the United States of America has taken pride in its First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights as guarantees of liberty. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. Support for strong leaders increased until very recently.
Concerns about the global rise of authoritarianism have people questioning government surveillance and corporate surveillance as they may limit our ability to engage as individuals in digital culture.
This sentiment is echoed by Mark Zuckerberg, who has suggested that privacy is dead. What this means is that physical world behavior is expected to adapt to the demands of digital culture because the capabilities of digital culture also carry with them unique risks that we are not necessarily adapted to deal with.
Our experience with the anarchy of online mass communication platforms is quite limited. As we learn what government surveillance and corporate invasions of privacy are capable of, it may continue to deeply affect our physical world behavior. Zuckerberg bought several properties around his house to keep his physical location secure. Eric Schmidt does not want people to know where he lives. Does it matter in the broader cultural sense?
This text argues that privacy does matter. The vast majority of us are not using digital platforms to break laws or to interact in negative ways with others and yet we still have aspects of ourselves that we would like to remain private. Has a parent or guardian ever snooped on your Facebook account or followed your Instagram? We have incredible freedoms and amazing digital communication capabilities as individuals living our lives in the new digital culture.
It comes with a price we have yet to grasp. The film Terms and Conditions May Apply details the ways our private information, such as our emails and texts, can easily be related to our public information on social networks. The filmmakers note that the knowledge and hardware needed to snoop on people are bought and sold all over the world and are often unregulated. Are we becoming more open because of the ways social media function? Is there anything wrong with that? Are we surrendering our privacy in ways that cannot be undone?
One of the major cultural challenges of the network society will be to deal with people in power who would like to use our information against us as a means of control. It has already happened in some of the countries where the Arab Spring revolutions took place Egypt, for one. What this means for our efforts to define digital culture is that digital culture can free us as individuals, but it can also imprison us.
We can use the internet and smartphones to help us to get questions answered and to draw attention to ourselves in good ways. We can coordinate with others for fundraisers and to have parties. Digital communication networks are amazingly sophisticated tools that can help us connect as individuals to form groups to celebrate all sorts of interests, political and otherwise.
On the other hand, if individuals believe they have no privacy, digital networks could become virtual wastelands where innovative collaboration is hindered and where corporate commercial speech and government surveillance dominate.
Capitalism depends on risk-taking, and if you kill risk-taking online, you have hindered the entrepreneurialism that the network society offers. We scholars will study for decades to come how individual behavior changes and how relationships morph in a digital culture that discourages behavior we want to keep private while simultaneously encouraging levels of sharing that border on exhibitionism.
How can we maintain privacy and gain attention, which is so often the currency of the open Internet? This is an interesting dilemma that arises in an individualistic digital culture. Post-nationalism is another aspect of digital culture that Deuze notes in his article. It may seem unrelated to our previous discussion of individualism and privacy in digital culture, but in fact, it is an analysis of the ways individuals represent themselves online. This does not mean that we should expect to see an end to nationalism in the tangible world.
Quite the opposite seems to be true: As post-nationalism appears in digital spaces, nationalism is on the rise in global politics. It might seem odd that people drop their nationalism online but demand it in physical spaces, but if you look at the way culture is expressed online, it is clear that for many people their nationality has little to do with their online identities. For example, your country may be important to you, but it may not be one of the ways you define yourself in social media environments.
You can love America without talking about it all of the time on Facebook or Twitter. Remember as well that national boundaries may be felt more readily in the daily lives of Africans, Asians, Europeans and others living in nations that are geographically smaller, more tightly packed and culturally distinct.
In digital spaces, these cultural differences can evaporate. Although war and immigration are highly influential on the current cultural climate in the physical world, the perception of evaporating culture in networked spaces may help drive the sense that physical world cultures are being threatened. Recent political developments, however, make it somewhat more difficult to think of digital culture as post-nationalistic given the rise of online nationalism — particularly white nationalism in Europe and the United States.
White nationalism is a brand of nationalism related to white supremacy, but it is an identity connected to the nation-state nonetheless. Even so, there is evidence that some factions will use digital spaces to promote a return to nationalism.
Does this mean that post-nationalism in digital culture is a false notion conceived in the early s that has no bearing on culture today? Perhaps, but it is more likely that we are seeing a backlash against the rise of a global post-nationalist space online. Digital culture, Deuze posits, reflects a globalized or globalizing world. Behaviors, interests, and relationships cross international boundaries. The economic structure of digital networks, including the mass media system, is global.
For example, multinational conglomerate corporations tend to dominate the media industry, not just in the United States but around the world.
Books, academic articles and simple infographics show that most mass media companies fall under the ownership of large corporate firms. Mass media consumers should be aware of the environment in which media products are produced, but this is not to say that the globalization of mass media is always a negative thing. When it comes to culture, globalization has its supporters. Here is a site in English about K-pop music. The music comes from Korea, but the fanbase is spread worldwide, and the site can reach a global audience only because of the global nature of digital networks.
It works only because computer servers are connected by wires all over the globe to make this bit of culture, like many others, available to the entire globe. There exists a global point of view in both the physical world and in digital culture which is open to all kinds of cultural production as long as it is interesting, funny and shows great talent.
There are videos that go viral globally, although it is not always clear why. But PSY is a global success. He is popular, many argue, because he is quite funny and because he is not the prototypical K-pop hero.
He comes from a particular national cultural tradition, but he also transcends it by being absurd. Thus, as a distinctly individual performer, he personifies a type of post-nationalism and the globalization of digital culture.
Deuze makes one more observation not about what digital culture is but rather how it works. Deuze argues that the production of digital culture will be carried out through participation, remediation and bricolage.
Participation means that every individual will have the ability to contribute to online media. Because people do not want to work for free, they will not flock to an online platform simply because it has been opened up for contributions. If anyone could build a Facebook, there would be hundreds or even thousands of competing platforms.
It is also clear from social networking sites, Reddit, and similar social news sharing sites that people will contribute to a platform even if it is not necessarily well-policed or easy to use. In digital culture, it helps to be the first to be big. Success breeds success in an economy based on attention, and what dominates tends to be emotional issues, as satirized here. Consistency also seems to help, but what matters most is the ability to consistently draw an audience.
Think of a person trying to become a YouTube influencer. They must publish interesting content regularly for months or even years before they develop a following that they might be able to sell to advertisers. Once the YouTube star does begin to peddle products, they run the risk of alienating a portion of their audience. Participation is an essential part of digital culture. It can be easy and fun to do it for free. If you want to make a career out of it, it takes professional-level commitment, and the resulting content often favors what is popular and emotionally gripping rather than what is informative or socially beneficial.
Remediation means that old media are made new again in digital spaces. Television becomes YouTube. Radio becomes podcasting, Spotify and Pandora. Newspapers become … online newspapers! In the practice of digital culture, media are remade in digital environments in a process that combines the appealing parts of existing forms of media with additional functionalities made possible by new ICTs and digital networking capabilities.
The widespread use of smartphones also makes it easier than ever to double check the accuracy of information we see. Our internet culture already embraces social media, memes and the modification of the English language. Given how easy the internet has made it, fact checking should also be added to that list. Our internet culture, like the internet itself, is always changing. Whether through casual references to the latest meme or through finding sources to corroborate claims in an essay, our internet culture has and will continue to influence the way we communicate and interact with one another, both in person and on line.
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