Digital Culture
Digital Culture has changed remarkably over the past decade, with new mediums constantly being established. We have this want of being on all of these different types of medium just to preach the same overall message.
Silverman’s The first step stated that, “The ethnographer adopts a cultural lens to interpret observed behavior, ensuring that the behaviors are placed in a culturally relevant and meaningful context. The ethnographer is focused on the predictable, daily patterns of human thought and behavior.” By focusing on normal day to day lives, it’s easier to gain a perspective into a person’s life. We can learn their daily patterns and learn about them through their different mediums. We can see the similarities that we might have with this person. This would have been impossible years ago, because we would have had to pick up a phone and call them just to learn more about this person.
Danah Boyd stated,
“From letters to the telephone to the Internet, geographies of social life are shifting because of mediating technologies. Increasingly, people live in a networked world where they communicate with people through mediating technologies, even when they share geographical proximity. This introduces questions about the boundaries of cultures. Geography is not the only meaningful delimiter or framer of culture, although it is not completely absent either. It just requires re-examination. Culture is still made up of people, artifacts, symbolism, etc. It’s just that the underlying architecture that we’ve taken for granted has changed.”
With the advances in technology, things that might have seemed far-fetched is now at our finger tips. We use different mediums to learn about different cultures and religions through these mediums. By doing this we can get an up close and personal way to learn what is allowed and what is not allowed. We learn of different food recipes and different techniques that we would not have known without different mediums.
