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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
happening on the level of the social eco-system. The overall context started to
change, so it was difficult for a particular instance in the system not to be affected (at
least not in the long run). A new dimension/space/sphere has been created – virtual
space – that introduced new concepts and shifted some firm boundaries and we had to
learn how to approach it. We learned what new media 5 are and what being virtual 6
means.
Computer culture, virtual culture, cyberculture, e-culture, Internet culture, new
media, convergence culture, digital culture are all relatively new terms that are today
widely used in scientific and popular literature. Scholars from various disciplines
have examined the impact of this new media on various social aspects of virtual space
and its impact on the real sphere and they have changed their views on digital culture
many times over a relatively short period of time. When stand-alone PCs were in
focus the emphasis was on interface; when communication possibilities were added
emphasis had to be put on interaction, and ICTs were no longer seen as tools but we
started to think of their context as a space. Although interlinked, as they both frame
our experience, the virtual and real spheres were clearly delimited. As ICT further
progresses in its development towards miniaturization, the boundaries are no longer
clear. There is another shift taking place “from the virtual foreground to the material
background”, as pervasive computing focuses on embedding specific ICT-based
5 Lev Manovich identified some main differences between old and new media (Manovich,
2001). There are five main characteristics of the new media, according to Manovich: 1) the
numerical representation of the object, i.e. its digital code that enables algorithmic
manipulation of the digital object - media becomes programmable; 2) modularity of the
object - media elements (images, sounds...) are represented as collections of discrete
samples. These elements are assembled into larger-scale objects but they continue to
maintain their separate identity. These two, more material characteristics, enable 3)
automatization of many operations with new media, as well as 4) the possibility that many
different versions of the same “media object” exist, i.e. its variability, that have more deep
characteristics with far-reaching consequences. 5) Transcoding is the last characteristic that
Manovich describes - to transcode is to translate something into another format. Thus new
media becomes unrelated to a particular hardware and it also means that the computer layer
and its logic and cultural/content layer influence each other creating a new media logic that
cultural sectors must take into account. The described characteristics of the media and
cultural objects change our understanding of them.
6 For Pierre Lévy the concept “virtual” has at least three meanings: a technical meaning
associated with IT, a contemporary meaning and a philosophical meaning. In its
philosophical sense, the virtual is that which exists potentially rather than actually. As it is
currently employed, i.e. in its contemporary meaning, the word virtual often signifies
unreality - reality implying a tangible presence (as in virtual reality). In its technical
meaning, related with ICT, virtual means the possibility of generating information based on
existing digital data and users instructions. As Lévy says “within digital networks,
information is obviously physically present somewhere, on a given medium, but it is also
virtually present at each point of the network where it is requested” (Lévy, 2002: 29-32).
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