Digital Culture: Complete Connectivity But At What Price?
It is almost impossible to live “off the grid” anymore. At one time, a person could literally just disappear without a trace, no cell phone to track, no credit cards to scan, no facial recognition software to analyze. But today, disappearing completely would be a huge feat. This is because we live in a world totally intertwined with technology where almost every person participates in our new digital culture. According to the blog Digital Culturist, run by Clayton d’Arnault, 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.”
The internet has forever shifted how we interact with our social networks. Utilizing ethnographic tools can help us understand how digital culture influences our lives. A well rounded approach will help uncover not only the positive changes but also the negative consequences of constant online engagement. In her article, “Choose Your Own Ethnography: In Search of (Un)Mediated Life”, Danah Boyd discusses her research on teens and how they engage with the social network platform MySpace. Boyd found that teens benefited by creating a new online space to engage with their peers and express themselves. But her research received enormous backlash from parents as well as the academic community. They viewed Myspace as detrimental and saw Boyd as a collaborator with the Myspace corporate entity. However, Boyd found that one of the major draws to Myspace was the ability to interact with people all over the world. Boyd pointed out that the teens are “using the technologies with their friends. It’s not about them and the machine. It’s about them and their friends interacting through the machine.” This is a common concern still expressed today, that people in a digital culture are just engaging with the technology, such as a video game or cell phone app, but in fact these platforms are acting as “mediating technolog[ies]” connecting people together despite their physical locations. If I use FaceTime to talk to my friend in another state, my friend and I are building a shared experience that feels just as real as if my friend had been there in person.
There are drawbacks to living in a digital culture however, such as the debate over internet privacy, which has become an especially important topic in our current political atmosphere. According to an article from The Hill, in April, Trump repealed FCC regulations that would have prevented broadband companies from using their customers’ personal information, such as browsing history and geolocation, and selling it to advertisers without permission. This is a blow to the online privacy that consumers expect when companies handle their sensitive data. But targeted advertisements are not a new phenomena and because of how much of our lives are lived online, our personal information is readily accessible to the people who want to find it and use it to their advantage. As technologies continue to develop and our digital culture expands, more debates will arise about how to blend our online and offline cultures together in meaningful ways.
