Global digital culture

10 or so years ago, it was easy to define and identify each and every different culture that exists within the world. With the internet and social media landscape forever growing and dominating the way we run our very own lives. We are always told to adapt to new surroundings but when it came to the internet a persons real identity may have changed thus resulting in them putting themselves into a new culture they are in.

Cultures all have different ways in identifying themselves but in the digital world it is a lot harder to find a specific culture as it has created many more that what we knew of. As a constant user of Facebook and Twitter, I always think to myself that it would be easy to find a specific page or person to follow as I want to feel well contected to something I have a strong interest in. They are easy to find however once I have started following them on my news feed pages are full of recomendations for me, whether it may be a newspaper article to read or just another page to follow. It is this spam which personally annoys me yet intrigues me with the dark ways in which social media companies get the most out of the people who use their sites. All of a sudden one thing I am following becomes so broad that it is hard to nail it down now to the one thing I want to look at. So how can we overcome this?? Is there a way we can stop spam so we can get exactly what we want with no incentives involved.

Having extensively search through settings on Facebook and Twitter it was hard to find anything suggesting I could block off all the suggestions based on a page I follow. And I very much doubt that the social media giants will do anything to do this as quite simply they want their users to feel connected as well as possible to those things that interest them. And the only real solution for someone to not have the spam on their newsfeed is to stop following the particular page all together but again what is the point in that. Facebook and Twitter are smart in how they can get people to follow pages but another thing they could do is use the hashtag (#) in a different way.

Since the introduction of Twitter and most recently Instagram the use of hashtags has increased dramatically. If it was up to me to solve the way in tracking global digital cultures I would make it so that, pages, articles and what not which is involved in a culture all use the same hashtag, but more specifically so it is not so extensive when looking up the hashtags to make them more specific. For example I live in Australia and I want to look at “something” I would use the hashtag “#somethingAUS”. This in my opinion narrows down the search for a culture a lot for the users of social media and as well can help when wanting to connect with those who have a similar interest with them as it can both broaden who you connect with but narrow down who would be best to connect too.

To me such a topic on global digital culture really made me think hard for solutions, but in this day and age with new technology coming in everyday the consumers do not want something they will find difficult to use. They want something that they can get the hang of straight away even if they are new gadgets it is just the way we adapt these days, by using small steps. So what is the point of coming up with a difficult solution which could change the way we use things, it is easier for the people if we can easily adapt to an easy solution.