7 am. The alarm on your phone sounds. Just 5 more minutes. You swipe at the screen. Where’s the snooze button? You downloaded a new alarm clock app last night because you’ve had trouble waking up in the morning. It’s one of those alarms that require you to solve a problem to turn it off.

You consider deleting the app. Sigh. You hate math.

Get out of bed and get ready for work. At breakfast, you check Google maps for the current weather forecast and the fastest route to work.

…loading…loading…

Your WiFi has been acting spotty lately. That aggravates you. You grab the umbrella just in case and leave home. As you leave, your Nest thermostat automatically adjusts the temperature to save you a few bucks on next month’s energy bill.

Subway to work, or call an Uber? You look down at your phone. No UberX drivers in your area. UberBlack is too expensive.

On your walk to the subway, you open Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, and cycle through them in a habitual order to catch up on what you’ve missed since last night. You encounter:

• Another person profiting off pointless videos, useless tweets, and mildly comical Instagram memes.
• Spoilers from last night’s episode of GoT.
• Selfies.
• A listicle entitled: “10 Ways to a Better You.”
• Snapchats of last night’s escapades.

You look up. Practically everyone has their heads down, staring at their phones, walking en masse. Bright billboards above you advertise the newest tech. Your wrist dings. It’s your smartwatch notifying you of a text. You use your watch at the coffee shop down the street to pay for your coffee.

Before you enter the subway, you queue up a playlist on your phone with offline podcast episodes that you downloaded the night before, put your headphones in, press play, and tune the world out. Again, everyone has their heads down, completely immersed in this digital world, headphones in, no one talking.

Right before you get on the train, you use the last drop of service to snap a video of a street performer to your friends, it won’t send. Quickly switch to Twitter and send out a tweet:

MTA needs Wifi. #oneday #wishfulthinking

Connection drops in and out as you pass each stop. 5 retweets, 10 favorites. A proud, euphoric feeling washes over you as you exit the train.

The preface above describes the typical morning of someone living in a culture in which people are surrounded and consumed by technology — a digital culture.

Digital culture is a blanket concept that describes the idea that technology and the Internet significantly shape the way we interact, behave, think, and communicate as human beings in a societal setting. It is the product of pervasive technology and limitless access to information — a result of disruptive technological innovation within our society.

It is a lifestyle, and you’re part of it. You’re living it.

Digital culture is the Internet, transhumanism, AI, cyber ethics, security, privacy, and policy. It is hacking, social engineering, and modern psychology. More contextually, digital culture is using social media as our main mode of interaction with others; sharing every moment of your life on the internet; the selfie phenomenon; the live streaming obsession; the anonymity provided by online communities; Apple Pay and Android Pay; wearable technology; the use of emoji to enhance communication; internet/cell phone addiction; the sharing/on-demand economy; cloud computing and storage; the internet of things.

I think you get the idea.

Digital culture is many things and applicable to multiple topics — but it all boils down to one: the relationship between humans and technology. These ideas are often overlooked as technology becomes a second nature to us.

Humans are using modern technology to enhance or alter the quality of living to accommodate our changing environment and human needs. For example, we’ve created the on-demand economy for the goods and services we need instantly, and cloud computing for working on the go. As our lives become more and more fast paced, we innovate to adapt. And because technology does not pause, as explained by Moore’s law, we have to compensate by evolving our culture as needed.

With all this in mind, the goal of Digital Culturist is to explore this concept. We want to dive deeper into what makes technology tick, why it’s created, how it changes the way we live our lives, why it makes us behave the way we do, and what that means for our future.

There’s an enlightening sense about taking a step back to analyze where we are and how far we’ve come that makes digital culture so mind boggling.

There’s a cause and effect to everything. Digital culture is the effect of the ever evolving technological fetish we have developed, and we’re here to find out what effect it has on us.