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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
information always, and necessarily, refer to the essence of community and human
relations” (Pasquali, 2003: 198). For Hamelink “information contents are cultural
products. Information is a part of a society’s cultural fabric. Among the important
issues of this dimension are the sharing of knowledge and the protection of cultural
identity” (Hamelink, 2003: 124). Thus he claims that the ways in which societies deal
with the provision and processing of information is determined by cultural
perspectives. His understanding of the concept of communication is wider than just
the transfer of messages and he states that to communicate “refers to a process of
sharing, making common or creating a community” (Hamelink, 2003: 155). Cultural
expressions, like language, are systems of signs for communication, and through
common cultural codes people construct their understanding of their environment
and create shared (thus common) meanings. James Carey also differentiates between
two views of communication: the first one he calls “the transmission view of
communication” whereby messages are transmitted and distributed in space for the
control of distance and people; the other is “the ritual view of communication” i.e.
representation of shared beliefs within a community. The transmission view is
commonly defined by terms such as sending, transmitting or giving information to
others, while the ritual view is directed not towards the extension of messages in
space but towards the maintenance of society in time through the representation of
shared beliefs (Carey, 1992). Communication as transmission represents the building
blocks upon which communication as a ritual is based.
So, when we talk about culture, communication is implicit. As Foresta tells us,
“each society constantly recreates itself through communication by constantly
redefining its collective reality, its culture” and “culture is a memory, collective
memory, dependent on communication for its creation, extension, evolution and
preservation” (Foresta, Mergier, Serexhe, 1995: 19). Knowledge has always been
communicated and embedded (thus preserved) through our cultural communication
structures and available technologies have always been an important element that
enabled and facilitated these processes of creating, sharing and preserving our
cultural memory.
Digital culture - new social ecology
The claim that technology impacts different aspects of our culture is over-simplified
and too deterministic, but it is not completely wrong. We are aware of the changes
that happened in present-day societies that are related to introducing ICT into our
lives in the same way as electricity in the past. We could say that all technologies
intervene in the human environment and modify it to a certain extent, thus changing
the conditions of existence of different cultures (in a more or less radical way). They
make certain practices obsolete while some previously difficult and impractical
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