This study aims to reveal the cultural aspects of digital society by discussing the views of scholars in the field. In liberal digital culture debates, digital platforms are regarded as alternative meeting places and democratic user-friendly spaces. As it is known, cutural materials can be deployed easily, instantly, and globally through digital technologies. People build online communities and share photos, videos, images, opinions with others by using social networks. Critical digital culture studies pointed out that the digital platform companies dominate the digital culture industry. Digital culture is shaped by the capitalist accumulation, so the functions of digital platforms are limited. In this study, digital culture is defined to build common meanings, values, experiences, and practices via digital platforms. In addition, a dialectic model is developed to comprehend the digital culture together with the political economic structure that transform it.
TopIntroduction
Digital technologies enable users to access information easily and diminish the cost of participation in cultural fields. In digital culture, people are both consumers and producers of cultural artifacts produced on digital platforms. Digital platforms are the new spaces of culture and allow the distribution of cultural artifacts, contents, and expressions.
The period when digital culture began to form in our daily lifes can be traced back to the 1980s after the invention of personal computers which are used in homes. As David C. Mowery and Timothy Simcoe cite that researches on computer networking began in the early 1960s, rougly 15 years after the invention of computer. Use of the Internet was primarly limited to researchers, computer scientists, and networking engineers through at least 1985. The commercial exploitation of the Internet that began in the 1990s after the Cold War era (Mowery and Simcoe, 2002: 1371-1385). It can be said that with the entrance of networks into commercial use in 1990s, digital culture has become established on a global level.
The framework of this study is based on digital culture debates in the past few decades. Digital culture studies can be gathered under two main approaches. First, liberal digital culture studies mention that technology has a binding effect on the culture and transforms the whole society. Technological determinists take part in liberal digital cultural studies.
According to Thomas V. Reed, technological determinists suggest that technologies are the most important force driving human history and society. Technological determinism ignores the fact that technologies emerge from various social and cultural groups. Culture creates technologies (Reed, 2019: 10).
The other main approach in digital culture studies is the critical view. As Reed says, critical digital culture analysis has a rejection of technological determinism. They argue that technologies and cultures never be neatly separated, since technical innovations are always created by individuals and groups shaped by cultural assumptions and biases, and technologies are always used in particular cultural contexts that reshape them even as they partly reshape the cultural contexts (Reed, 2019: 12).
Besides, there is a need for critical digital culture studies to investigate how political economy structures influence the field of digital culture. Digital culture studies generally neglect the activity of huge companies that dominate the digital culture platforms. Whereas cultural products, content creativity, and information flow are raised in a cyber habitat controlled by conglomerates.
There is a relationship between technological developments and the political economy of media, marketing, and entertainment fields. For instance, marketing firms are using digital technologies to assemble databases about consumers and to target campaigns based on information through their surveillance (Klinenberg and Benzecry, 2005: 9). New communication technologies have reduced the price of entry into a cultural field. Digital networks and infrastructure systems allow cultural producers to instantaneously transmit enormous amounts of information across the globe (Klinenberg and Benzecry, 2005: 8-11). Information flow in digital platforms is controlled by market forces. The field of digital culture has been shaped by concentrations in ownership. The largest media companies remain in possession of the market and cultural production. In this context, it is important to comprehend the cultural field in terms of the political and economic system.
Eric Klinenberg and Claudio Benzecry identify three organizing schools while explaining the character of cultural changes driven by digital technologies: digital revolutionaries, the cyber-skeptics, the cultural evolutionists (Klinenberg and Benzecry, 2005: 13). Digital revolutionaries (such as N. Negroponte, W. Mitchell, D. Haraway, and M. Castells) argued that new technologies have caused structural changes in cultural production. Cyber-skeptics (such as J. Turow, P. Howard, and Frankfurt School representatives) see digitization as a mechanism through which culture industries advance larger projects, thereby threatening the integrity of creative fields or the relative autonomy of artists and intellectuals. According to these scholars, technology is an effect of investments driven by economic, political, or cultural interests and not a basic force of change. Cultural evolutionists (such as P. Hirsch, R. Peterson, D. Berger, and C. Kadushin) emphasized the organizational and institutional change between periods of technological development (Klinenberg and Benzecry, 2005: 13-15).