#GLOBAL DIGITAL CULTURE

Global digital cultures are evident world-wide through the global village of 2014 that is enabled by the technology of today, specifically the World Wide Web. A global digital culture definition can quite ironically not be found through a simple Google search, witch according to Manovich the search or to ‘Google it’ is ‘the new dominant way for encountering information’. The topic of global digital culture requires further reading and research to develop an understanding of a definition.

Lev Manovich’s piece ‘How to Follow Global Digital Cultures or Cultural Analytics for Beginners’ allows readers to grasp the idea of a Global digital culture. A global digital culture is a multicultural group the global community linked by mutual interest through the online sphere. Moreover the piece by Manovich introduces the idea of tracking and visualising the vast global cultures in the digital world. While the idea of tracking and visualising all interactions in the online sphere may seem inconceivable, it is to a certain extent already occurring.

The hashtag (#) is a fundamental part of many social media outlets, namely instagram and twitter. In the case of instagram every time individuals upload an image, the hashtag is incorporated at the individual’s digression; this then links the photo to this hashtag. This allows other uses exploring the vast digital culture of instagram to find relevant photos based on the hashtags. While the use of hashtags is not a perfect way of tracking and visualising global digital cultures as individuals can hashtag things not relevant to the photo. Furthermore tracking what hashtags lead people to what photo (as most photos have more than one hashtag on them) is not an option. However the hashtag system of instagram still allows for both tracking and visualisation of the interactions of individuals on instagram.

While this is functional for instagram as a way of both tracking and visualising the global digital cultures is contains and their interaction, this would not function for the entire infrastructure of the internet, as hashtag are not a part of all sites and online interactions. However it is a great and simple example of how tracking and visualising of global digital cultures is possible.