What Does Digital Media Allow Us to “Do” to One Another?: Economic Significance of Content and Connection

Succinct Overview Of The Research

We begin with an integrative review of theory and research on the role of digital media in contemporary society’s global economy. Definitions of digital media, contemporary society, and global economy are best formulated as systems within systems. For example, in Nick Couldry’s (2012)Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Practice, he lays the foundation for a new sociology of digital media as a means of dealing with the complexities of living in a 21^st century media-saturated world that extends beyond the social to include the economics of production and consumption. Amid unceasing calls for education, policy, social practice, and civic engagement to “keep up” with digital media, Couldry asks a moral question that holds a key, we argue, to understanding the nested economic impact of systems within systems. What does digital media allow us to “do” to one another?

The term digital media defies attempts to reach consensus on its meaning. We review literature on the construction of digital media as content (print and nonprint) that has been digitized and thus potentially ready for dissemination on the Internet. We echo the insistence from various fields of research on digital media that digital media content is a kind of tip of the iceberg for the ways digital media is reorganizing and managing our actual and metaphorical households and villages. Starting with content serves as a starting point for discussing digital media’s broader impact on our lives in the broad sense that Couldry intends.

Below, we pursue three arguments we identified from a review of the literature that broadly define the economic force of digital media content in contemporary society. We then contextualize the arguments about digital media content in terms of relevant social, political, and economic factors that mediate the production of digital content. This approach makes it possible to assess economic impact of digital media in ways that are unreached by instrumental means of measuring economic activity (e.g., Boggs, this volume; Chambers, 2013). We seek to capture the essence of how digital media affects the “management of the household or village” (Author C’s interpretation of etymology of Greek oikonomia).