Digital Culture & Society-Ppt 2

Digital Culture &
Society
Dr. M. Isnaini
Program Pascasarjana Ilmu Komunikasi
Universitas Bunda Mulia, Jakarta
Pokok Bahasan
1. Pengertian
2. Proses pembentukan
3. Contoh digital culture
Assumption of Digital Culture (Deuze, 2005)
1. The realization that all aspects of everyday life in highly
industrialized modern societies are to some extent
influenced by, and implicated in computerization.
Manovich (2001) states: “Today we are in the middle of a new

media revolution - the shift of all culture to computer-mediated
forms of production, distribution, and communication.”
This culture has been labelled many things – cyberculture by

Lévy (2001), information culture by Manovich (2001), interface
culture by Johnson (1997), Internet culture by Castells (2001), or
virtual culture in cybersociety by Jones (1998)
2. contemporary social changes accelerated by globalization,
post-nationalism and individualization.
If one accepts for a moment that these three key trends are
constitutive elements of global culture, the implication in
the context of new media theory and the literature on
digital culture could be, that ‘cyberculture’ is in fact not a
function of either humans or machines, but an expression
of an increasingly individualized society in a globalized
world.
Digital culture an emerging value-system
and set of expectations as particularly
expressed in the activities of news and
information media makers and users online,
whereas the praxis of digital culture as an
expression of individualization, post-
nationalism and globalization.
• A digital culture does not imply that everyone is
or sooner or later will be online and better for it,
but assumes that in the ways humans and
machines interact in the context of ever-
increasing computerization and digitalisation of
society an emerging digital culture is expressed.
Such a culture thus has consequences on a shared
social level – both online as well as offline.
Digital culture has been conceptualized before, in
particular by Manovich (2001), introducing the
concept of an information culture as manifested in
the convergence of media content and form, of
national and cultural traditions, characters and
sensibilities, as well as a mixing of culture and
computers. In doing so, he extends earlier
developments in new media theory towards an
integrated perspective of ‘old’ and ‘new’ (such as
in the work on remediation by Bolter and Grusin,
1999, and on ‘mediamorphosis’ by Fidler, 1997).
Two mutually constitutive features of
digital culture: remediation as in the remix of old
and new media, and bricolage in terms of
the highly personalized, continuous and more or
less autonomous assembly, disassembly and
re-assembly of mediated reality
This emerging arrangement of the social
presupposes – next to a praxis of
remediation and bricolage - a third
significant type of activity, necessary for
maintaining human agency in the context of
the mentioned social context of
individualization, post-nationalism and
globalization: participation.
• In the proliferation and saturation of screen-based, networked
and digital media proliferate and saturate our lives our
reconstitution is expressed as:
1. active agents in the process of meaning-making (we become

participants);
2. we adopt but at the same time modify, manipulate, and thus
reform consensual ways of understanding reality (we engage
in remediation);
3. we reflexively assemble our own particular versions of such
reality (we are bricoleurs).
• Digital culture is by no means only connected to or spawned
by the convergence and omnipresence of devices – we also
reproduce it as our perceptions of reality (or perhaps:
authenticity) are evolving. This digital culture as emerging
from practices and communicative acts online and offline,
shaping and being shaped by artefacts, arrangements
and activities in ‘new’ and ‘old’ media which distinction
becomes superfluous as all media are converging into the
overall design of the computer – which according to the
developers of the original desktop multimedia system in the
early 1970s in itself is a ‘meta-medium’ that can be “all other
media
Examples of Digital Culture
Internet Memes
The newest forms of media have established internet memes.

Such technologies embed most, perhaps all, of the key features
that seem to characterize new media artefacts, such as
participation, self-organization, free labour, amateur culture,
networks, and even virality. In league with the popularity of
internet memes is the ubiquity of social media across different
technological devices such as computers, mobile phones, TVs,
tablets, watches and any ordinary devices that can be re-shaped
by internet mobile technology. The ubiquity of social media,
across platforms and personal devices, have furthered the notion
of universality peculiar to memes.
Internet memes raise increasingly legitimate cases
during web-based and mobile applications
whereby users prescind their awareness about
dynamic feeds, pop- up boxes and ever-changing
off-topic (OT) sections of forums. These emergent
forms of new media can take the form of still-
images as well as audio-visual material via
videos and animations.
• In 1994, Mike Goodwin wrote a piece in the
magazine Wired which described “Godwin’s Law
of Nazi Analogies”. This law posited that as an
online discussion grows longer, the probability of
a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler
approaches (Goodwin 1994). This law was based
on what Goodwin termed the Nazi-comparison
meme. According tom knowyourmeme.com’s
editor Brad (2009), this was one of the early use
of the term ‘meme’ in association to internet
culture
• The concept of meme was inaugurated by Richard
Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976) and then
popularized by Hofstadter and Dennett’s The Mind’s I
(1981). Dawkins pioneered the inherently vital principle
of genes that ‘selfish’ survival of the species relied on
genes as selfish agents: a “revolutionary” position later
dubbed ‘gene selectionism’ (e.g., Hoffmeyer 2008: 75).
But Dawkins’ efforts were not limited to biology – he in
fact imported this view to the understanding of culture.
Dawkins contended that “cultural transmission is
analogous to genetic transmission in that, although
basically conservative, it can give ise to a form of
evolution”
• Further, ‘meme’ was pressed into widespread use in the study
of culture by linguistic and technology scholars of ‘memetics’
during the 1990s, especially after the publication of
Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (1999). Dawkins’ views on
culture (or perhaps his preoccupation with organized religion)
were so influential that ‘memetics’ or the science of memes
was born. Thanks to Dawkins, the identifiable ‘memeticians’
claimed they had found an appropriate framework for grafting
evolutionary enquiry beyond the purely biological world and
onto the social sciences (Dawkins 1976; Lynch 1996;
Blackmore 1999; Rose 1998; Wilkins 1998).
• Memetics’ emphasis on memes as ‘units’ of cultural
evolution is a conception indebted to early information
theory and resonates with structuralism’s conception of
signifying unit too. However this view was already
surpassed by cybernetics (Bateson 1970), and has been
made obsolete by semiotics (Tartu–Moscow semiotics
and especially Lotman 2001), biosemiotics (Hoffmeyer
1996, 2008) and cybersemiotics (Brier 2008) and in
retrospect, also Peircean semiotics (MS 930: 31–33,
1913). These frameworks instead suggest that
information should be considered as a relational entity.
• Hence, if memes-as-cultural-information should be thought of
as relational entities, internet memes should be thought of as
systems. Also, memetics’ view of cultural evolution as the
‘distribution of memes between individuals via copying’ is a
conception grounded again in the idea of information
transmission. Developments in semiotics suggest that
memes should be considered as signs (Deacon 1999; Kull
2000), an observation which in turn suggests that it would be
useful to think of internet memes as sign systems.
The semiotic turn on memes implies that ‘copying’ is no longer
an appropriate choice to account for the growth of culture. At
the very least, cultural change should be seen
as translation, which enables one to envisage the generation of
new information. In this view, internet memes are to be
considered as systems of signs that are subject to translation.
• Instagram influencers
• The monetization of attention
Ada pendapat?
• Digital co-creation
• Digital co-creation has emerged as a new practice that is
changing how cultural content gets made,
used, and exchanged (Katz, 2010)1. A new generation of
digital consumers increasingly samples and reuses parts
of accessible content in an effort to customize the content
to their own personal tastes. Many users then share this
altered content with others. Such co-creation activities
include remixes of music, video, and movies that are
posted on content-sharing platforms in online
community and social networking sites.
• An example of such a consumer co-creation
activity is a personal mashup home video in
which parents film their children in a private
setting (e.g., a birthday party or a vacation trip),
add commercially released music as a
soundtrack, and then share the video with family
and friends online.
• Contoh lain?

Digital Culture & Society-Ppt 2

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Digital Culture & Society-Ppt 2

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Digital Culture & Society-Ppt 2

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

What are some assumptions of digital culture according to Deuze (2005)?

What are two mutually constitutive features of digital culture mentioned in the text?

Digital Culture &

Manovich (2001) states: “Today we are in the middle of a new

This culture has been labelled many things – cyberculture by

1. active agents in the process of meaning-making (we become

The newest forms of media have established internet memes.

You might also like