"Understanding Digital Culture - Introduction"

This is a draft of the introduction to V. Miller (2011) Understanding Digital Culture. London: Sage. Please to not reference or quote without permission. Introduction We live in a world where the Internet and the World Wide Web have, in the matter of only two decades, shifted from being at the forefront of a new frontier of communication technology, to being for most people an incredibly unremarkable part of our culture and daily life. Many once held an optimism that the Internet would for example revolutionize work and office life, create active, engaged citizens instead of the passive subjects of the broadcast media age (Poster, 1995), or lead to the creation of alternative communities, worlds and even identities free from the prejudices of offline society (Rheingold, 1993). However, as the Internet has become something used by the majority of the population in advanced economies, that population has brought with it all of the habits, inclinations and prejudices which are endemic to society as a whole. As a result, much of this early optimism that the Internet would radically change our culture in some sort of knowledge revolution has begun to fade in light of the realisation that our culture has perhaps transformed the Internet more than vice versa. The Internet has now become a major part of work, leisure, social and political life, for most people in advanced economic nations. It is no longer its novelty, uniqueness, or potential to transform life, but its mundane nature and pervasiveness which now gives the Internet its significance. Not in the sense that it has profoundly ‘changed’ the world, but in the sense that it has become enmeshed within the enduring structures of our society. As such, the online sphere is no longer a realm separate from the offline ‘real world’, but fully integrated into offline life. This integration has only been enhanced by the massive popularity of mobile technologies, particularly mobile phones, the latest generation of which allow almost perpetual contact to the World Wide Web, as well as to our friends, relatives, bosses and significant others. As a result, digital culture now involves more than merely sitting at a computer terminal, and studies of the information age are moving on from the preoccupation with ‘internet studies’ to consider the pervasive use of mobile phones and other wireless Information Communication Technologies. What this means practically is that this is not simply a book about ‘internet studies’, but a book that considers many wider forms of digital culture, including mobile communications technologies, gaming, and technological bodies (to name a few) within and beyond the Internet, to demonstrate how digital technology in a broad sense is used within the wider contexts of everyday life. Revolutionary Technologies? In 1975, roughly two decades after rise of television as a mass medium in Britain was ushered in by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 (the same time as ‘the golden age’ of television in the United States), acclaimed cultural theorist Raymond Williams wrote Television: Technology and Cultural Form, an investigation into the cultural influence of television as a form and practice in British and American cultural life. He begins by introducing a set of statements which were representative of how television was seen as ‘changing’ the world: “Television was invented as the result of scientific and technical research. Its power as a medium of news and entertainment was then so great that it altered all preceding media of news and entertainment. Television was invented as the result of scientific and technical research. Its power as a medium of social communication was then so great that it altered many of our institutions and forms of social relationships. Television was invented as the result of scientific and technical research. Its inherent properties as an electronic medium altered our basic perceptions of reality, and thence our relations with each other and with the world. Television was invented as the result of scientific and technical research. As a powerful medium of communication and entertainment it took its place with other factors – such as greatly increased physical mobility, itself the result of other newly invented technologies – in altering the scale and form of our societies. Television was invented as the result of scientific and technical research, and developed as a medium of entertainment and news. It then had unforeseen consequences, not only on other entertainment and news media, which id reduced in viability and importance, but on some of the central processes of family, cultural and social life. Television, discovered as a possibility by scientific and technical research, was selected for investment and development to meet the needs of a new kind of society, especially in the provision of centralised entertainment and in the centralised formation of opinions and styles of behaviour. Television, discovered as a possibility by scientific and technical research, was selected for investment and promotion as a new and profitable phase of a domestic consumer economy; it is then one of the characteristic ‘machines for the home’. Television became available as a result of scientific and technical research, and in its character and uses exploited and emphasised elements of a passivity, a cultural and psychological inadequacy, which had always been latent in people, but which television now organised and came to present. Television became available as a result of scientific and technical research, and in its character and used both served and exploited the needs of a new kind of large-scale and complex but atomised society.” (Williams, 1990 [1975]: 11-12). The reason I have quoted this passage at length is because I find it fairly striking how all of the characterisations of the effects of television on society Williams lists (apart from perhaps point viii) are today levelled at the Internet, two decades after it was popularised through the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1991. In fact, many of these statements speak directly to the content of some chapters within this book. This highlights the point that perhaps we have been here before, many times. New technologies always breed anxiety about their consequences, and certainly the Internet and mobile phones have bred both anxiety and optimism in their potential to shape the future. However, like television (but perhaps more so) it is important to realise that the Internet, the Web, and mobile digital technologies are more than just ‘technologies’, they are a set of social relations which incorporate the use of technologies with various results. Determinisms It is almost inevitable that any significant new technology will be predicted to transform society, or at least to embody the potential to transform society, for better or worse. It is often said, especially in the initial stages of the adoption of a particular technology, that the technology will generate social change based upon the implicit values, virtues, or vices possessed by that technology. This line of thinking is often referred to as ‘technological determinism’, and in this respect, the development of networked ICTs is no exception. Raymond Williams (1990[1975]) defined technological determinism as the view that new technologies set the conditions for social change and progress. In such a view, technology is seen as a law unto itself in the sense that technological innovations are seen as the drivers in the ‘progress’ (or sometimes ‘decline’) of society and culture. When Time Magazine produces a headline such as ‘How twitter will change the way we live’ (Johnson, 2009), they are engaging in a form of technological determinism which suggests that, in the relationship between technology and culture, culture is the passive agent and technology the active one: culture and society ‘react’ to technological developments in a cause-and-effect manner. Implicit in this view is the vision of technology as something separate and independent of society. Inventions can merely ‘happen’, and then society has to deal with the consequences of that happening and the new ways of life which follow. Or, one can see science and technology as following some sort of inevitable path or autonomous logic (what Bimber (1990) refers to as a ‘logical sequence’) in which new technologies are part of a process which not only directly effects change on society, but also sets in motion the direction for future technological changes, as well as the necessary altering social forms and organisation. So the invention of the incandescent electric light bulb by Thomas Edison in 1879 can be seen as the inevitable next stage in development from the gas lamp, and both inventions created fundamentally new ways of being to which people, businesses, and governments had to organise themselves around. On the surface, technological determinism seems to make sense, and indeed as Mackenzie and Wajcman (1999) (from whom I borrow the light bulb analogy) suggest, it contains a partial truth. No one would argue that the invention of the light bulb was not a significant event in terms of the following consequences: extending our days; influencing the design and structure of buildings; revolutionising transportation; shaping the development of entire cities to sizes never thought possible; changing our work patterns; and leading on to further innovations in lighting and electricity more generally. Within the context of digital culture, technological determinism has been rife, especially in the early days of internet studies (Bingham, 1996). Many authors that are seen as central in this book, including Karl Marx, Marshall Macluhan, Manuel Castells and Mark Poster have been accused, rightly or wrongly, as following this logic. For example, in Chapter One, Poster is quoted: “Electronic culture promotes the individual as an unstable identity in a continuous process of multiple identity formation” (Poster 1995: 59) Poster here is promoting an anti-essentialist view of identity, but in doing so, could also be accused of technological determinism by insinuating that identity formations are directly linked to technological developments in ‘electronic culture’ encourage the formation of multiple identities, or a certain kind of person. It is important for the reader to be critically aware of such logic when it is at work. The social determination of technology Putting Edison’s invention of the light bulb into a social context reveals another view of the relationship between technology, society and culture which might be called social or economic determinism. Extreme ends of this view would characterise technology as the passive partner in the culture – technology relationship, and is referred to as ‘symptomatic technology’ by Williams (1990[1975]). This refers to a form of determinism in which social conditions create environments in which technologies are seen as either necessary by-products of social processes, or as early sociologist of technology William Ogburn argued, were inevitable given a set of social conditions (Mackenzie and Wajcman 1999:8). From this perspective, new technologies become necessary at certain points of cultural development. So in the case of the light bulb, the invention of the light bulb becomes a symptom of wider social changes. Given what was going on in society at a particular time and the general march of ‘progress’, the light bulb had to happen. This view is not particularly prevalent in contemporary popular or academic writing, but it arguably does make an appearance on some of the arguments of extropian posthumanism (see Chapter Nine). Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil often make evolutionary-style predictions about the advancement of society more generally. In his book The Singularity is Near (2005) he suggests that an evolutionary jump in human society, the singularity, is an inevitable future occurrence (this is a point in the evolution of humanity in which technological advancements occur so rapidly, that humans themselves will not be able to keep pace and will be out-evolved by machines that are more intelligent than humans. Ultimately in the 2040’s, the singularity will spell the end of ‘human’ history (as humans will no longer exist outside machine-human hybrids), and the eventual transformation of the universe into a giant computational body. While in one sense this smacks of technological determinism, these transformations are seen by Kurzweil as inevitable epochal stages in human history. Such evolutionary discussions of course are problematic. If inventions are basically inevitable, this gives very little agency to the inventions or the inventors themselves, and also little agency towards society itself or the people that make up society. Both are passive in the face of some sort of predetermined narrative of ‘progress’ or ‘decline’. In Kurzweil’s view of the future, it doesn’t really matter what inventors of new technologies or businesses, governments and individuals want to happen, what will happen is going to happen. Technological enablement In Williams (1990[1975]) view, both technological determinism and symptomatic technology approaches are as bad as each other in that they depend on the isolation of technology from society either by viewing technology creating new ways of life on its own, or as simply providing materials for new ways of life already in formation. When considering the light bulb example above (or even ‘the singularity’), one major piece of the puzzle which is missing is the notion of intention. As Williams suggests, new technologies are looked for and developed with purposes and practices in mind. These purposes are intended to change things and have influences on society: that is their point. In general, one can suggest new technologies are developed to: Fulfil a need or solve a problem. Bring about a certain condition in the future. Create a profit or some sort of personal gain. All of these are inter-related, but all of these are motivating factors that have their basis in social circumstances, and the desire to change those circumstances. Edison was trying to solve a problem (safe lighting), but his motivations, and the resources he was able to muster, were the results of a particular social context (capitalism) which values profit and makes profit possible. He also undoubtedly had a vision of how his invention could shape the future, but likely had no idea what myriad of uses eventually would develop out of his creation. Thus technologies can be seen to set up a system of enablements with two potential outcomes: ‘preferred’, conventional or intended uses, as well as unexpected applications and novel cultural forms (Hayward, 1990). The Edison example speaks specifically to the role of economic contexts within the technology – culture relationship, which naturally leads on to a discussion of Karl Marx. There is considerable debate as to whether Marx was a technological determinist or the opposite (see Resnik and Wolff, 1982, and Shaw, 1979) for good examples of either side). Bimber (1990) provides a thorough commentary which suggests that Marx viewed technology as an enabling factor within economic structures. While technological application is dependent on the material conditions of production (economic systems and labour relations), the presence of science and technology helps to enable these particular systems and relations, through firstly, the accumulation of capital by the bourgeoisie, and secondly, through the creation or alteration of labour markets. This is well illustrated by Marx’s phrase: “When capital enlists science into her service, the refractory hand of labour will always be taught docility” (Marx, 1990 [1867]: 564) Within the contexts of capitalism, new technology is most often created with the implicit (and sometimes explicit) intention of creating wealth, or adapted for such ambitions. Thomas Edison did not just happen to invent the electric light - he planned to invent it. He wanted to find a way to sell electricity and provide light to people in order to make money for himself (Mackenzie and Wajcman, 1999). His research was funded by businesses who also intended to profit from his innovations. Edison was an entrepreneur, and was operating within the social environment of capitalism. This environment provided him with the means to develop a technology, and the motivation for him to sell that technology in a competitive market which already included gas lights, oil lanterns, and candles. The market helped to determine the nature of his invention (it had to be cheaper and safer than gas), and helped to steer the course of its eventual use in society. Far from a separate world of science and technology, Edison’s invention emerged and was constituted by a set of social and economic arrangements. This enabling view within many Marxist approaches becomes clearly evident with regard to information technologies in Chapter Two, where the influential work of two Marxists, Manuel Castells and David Harvey are discussed in relation to the economic foundations of the information age. Harvey (1989) proposed that capitalist enterprises continually look to increase profit through the opening up of new markets of (cheaper) raw materials, (cheaper) labour, or new consumers. For Harvey, these are inherently spatial concerns as such operations involve the increasing of spatial scales of practice, and this is seen in contemporary times in the process of globalization. The problem of increasing spatial scales is distance, and the time it takes to travel long distances (the friction of distance). Increasing this time cuts into profit by increasing ‘turnover time’ (the time it takes to turn raw materials into sellable commodities and ultimately receive the profits from these goods sold to consumers). Thus, capitalist enterprises are always looking for ways to reduce the friction of distance: to metaphorically pull the locations of raw materials, labour markets and consumer markets closer together in time, while being able to increase their distance apart in space. New communications technologies allow this to happen by speeding up communications and transfers of money, as well as providing global access to certain types of labour and new consumers through time-space compression (Harvey, 1989). Castells (1996) refers to this overcoming of distance and the resultant ability to communicate in real time on a global scale as the space of flows (see Chapter Two). Base, superstructure, infrastructure. What can be gained from the discussion of time-space compression and the space of flows is the further consideration that digital communication technologies have importance as a system of infrastructure which enables certain practices and social relations. Infrastructure refers to the underlying framework or basic foundation of an organisation or system. Infrastructures are the basic facilities that enable something to function. Marxists would suggest that, in the context of capitalism, the functions that are enabled are primarily intended for the practice of economic enterprise. Infrastructure can be seen as contributing to the economic base of society (the relations of production) upon which the superstructure of society (culture) is built, thus enabling both economic relations and ways of life. Marx himself illustrates this in his popular writing ‘The future results of British rule in India’ published in The New York Daily Tribune in 1853, where he proposed that the British exploitation of India as an economic enterprise will revolve around the creation of a ‘modern’ infrastructure of railways and communications: “The millocracy have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance to them, and, to that end, it is necessary above all to gift her with the means of irrigation and internal communication. They intend now drawing a net of railroads over India. And they will do it. The results must be inappreciable.” (Marx, 1977 [1853]: 333) Once the infrastructural base was laid, Marx predicted that the introduction of new infrastructures would enable new forms of work and labour markets: “The railway system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry. This is the more certain as the Hindu’s are allowed by British authorities themselves to possess particular aptitude for accommodating themselves to entirely new labour, and acquiring the requisite knowledge of machinery.” (Marx, 1977 [1853]: 335) In a more contemporary context, Graham and Marvin (1996; 2001) have recently re-inserted infrastructure back into the consideration of social scientists by brilliantly examining the changing form and constitution of cities within the wake of economic globalization and the new configuration of telecommunications infrastructure which enables that process. As discussed in Chapter Two, the infrastructures of digital communications were not only developed to enable a particular set of economic initiatives (the need to globalize in search of profit), but also encouraged those initiatives at the same time. In turn, this infrastructural base provides a framework under which new forms of organisation, relationship and experience (culture, including virtual cultures) can emerge. In Chapter Four, the significance of infrastructure is perhaps most apparent in the discussion of digital divides and the role that mobile phone infrastructures are playing in the African context. The creation of mobile communications technologies and infrastructures which support mobility has become a significant and increasing factor of contemporary life (Urry, 2000). Indeed, demands for mobility in many respects have been put forward as a primary impetus in the development of ITC’s, and their subsequent adoption and use. This is the case both in terms of production, with a demand for a more flexible, efficent and productive labour force (see Chapter Two), and in consumption, with increasing access to consumers and ease with which consumers can purchase and use (especially media) goods (see Chapter Three). We all experience the increasing mobility of and through information technology in our use of an array of digital devices: mobile phones; PDA’s; WiFi-enabled laptops and notebook computers; iPod’s and many others. The most popular of these devices, mobile phones, have evolved through a series of generations which have seen them move from instruments of purely voice communication, to ones that include SMS text, as well as image production and consumption, to their current state (typified by the iPhone) of embodying a full set of multi-media technologies, and full-blown access to the Web. These mobile technologies help to support certain ways of living which were intended by their inventors. However, this relationship is far from straightforward. No one would have intended, nor expected, that the telecommunication structure of global capitalism would be used to buy and sell virtual clothing and sexual aids for avatars in the virtual world Second Life (Meadows, 2008), and no one would have expected the mobile phone infrastructure of the Philippines to be used as a way to send text messaged to God (Roman, 2009). Still, the notion of ICT’s as an enabling (and now, thanks to mobile technologies, ubiquitous for many) infrastructure is something that readers should consider throughout this book. In some ways, it’s difficult to imagine how digital culture can become much more ‘mobile’, but it can. In another example, recent innovations in computing infrastructure in the form of cloud computing have the potential to greatly increase mobility by unburdening computational devices from the need to maintain their own locally-installed software and storage capabilities. Cloud computing is a fundamental shift in how networked computers operate. At the moment, most networked computing uses an extremely decentralised infrastructural model. People are in the possession of powerful devices (such as PC’s) which have their own individual sets of software installed on them, and have large amounts of storage capability to be able to run software as well as store data for the individual. In the cloud computing model, data storage, software provision, server provision and the maintenance of all these is centralised to a provider which has as its business the maintenance and provision of these infrastructures. The provider then allows individual customers to use them, much in the same was an electrical utility company allows individuals access to a centralised power supply (Carr 2008). What this means practically is that individuals and organisations are freed from the costs and responsibility of buying software that may or may not be used very much, and the maintenance and security of that software, as well as the need to replace computers and devices which go out of date two years after their purchase. Organisations are also potentially freed from the burden of having to buy and maintain server systems. What the means conceptually is that individual devices have the freedom to be less powerful because there are fewer demands on storage and computing power. Devices instead become more reliant on strong network connections to be able to use and access centralised software and data, but these devices have the potential to be smaller, cheaper, easier to use, and perhaps most importantly, more compact and mobile. Cloud computing, may have the potential to enable new ways of living, but how, when, and in what matter this is realised is a matter for culture to decide. The Structure of the Book In order to fully understand the emerging information age, it is important to examine not only the economic and social impacts of an ‘information society’, but to examine these alongside the shifting and emerging cultural forms that are already playing an increasing part in mainstream consumer and media cultures. Thus, this text strives to integrate, and make explicit the link between the more economically-based ‘information society’ literature and literature emerging from cultural studies which focuses on the production, use, and consumption of digital media and multimedia. Overall, the aims of this book are to: Provide a balanced, yet critical account of the economic, social and cultural dimensions of the information society. Situate these developments within wider sociological debates around globalisation, individualisation, and consumerism. Emphasize and contextualise the increasing importance of mobile, wireless and converged media technologies and forms in everyday life activities. Examine the ways in which the rise of the information society has posed new challenges and transformations of older socio-cultural topics such as inequality, power, identity, community and belonging. Map the transformations of cultural forms associated with the rise of new media and its consumption. Illustrate the above through a series of contemporary case studies of digital culture. This book can be informally divided into three sections. The first section (The first three chapters) articulates the base-superstructure-infrastructure argument by examining the technological and economic contexts from which the innovative elements of digital culture emerge. The second section (Chapters Four to Six) then goes on to examine the sociological questions of inequality, politics, privacy and how these are problematized in the information age. The third section (Chapters Seven to Eleven) will focus on ‘culture’ in the information society and will examine, identity, community, and the body in the information. Interspersed among several chapters are with four contemporary case studies of digital culture, illustrating how the issues raised in the previous sections manifest themselves within everyday life, ‘digital culture’ contexts. More specifically: Chapter One in many respects is the foundation for the book, and sets the ambitious task of reviewing the key elements of digital media. Through discussion of such authors as Lev Manovich, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard, This chapter lays out an understanding of digital media based on three themes which, in combination present digital media as innovative as compared to media of the past: technical processes, cultural form and immersive experience. It then examines the case of video games as cultural products which are uniquely created through contemporary digital media technologies and thus defy traditional cultural categorization. Chapter Two discusses the economic foundations of the information age. It reviews the concepts of post-industrialism, the information society, post-Fordism, globalization, and the network society as economic conceptions through discussion of the work of Kondratieff, Schumpeter, Bell, Castells and others. This leads onto a discussion of ‘weightless economies’, intellectual property, and a consideration of the consequences of weightless economies. Chapter Three examines the issue of media convergence by looking at the changing structure of the media industry (media industry convergence) in the face of technological innovation (technological convergence) and neo-liberal globalisation (regulatory convergence). It will then present a discussion converged media experience by focussing on Henry Jenkins notion of ‘convergence culture’ and participatory media practices, as well as Axel Bruns’ concept of ‘produsage’. It ends with a close look at the music industry under the auspices of convergence culture. Chapter Four looks at the more sociological question if inequality through the concepts of domestic and digital divides. It will make the point that inequality is not merely a question of economic and infrastructural access, but also a socio-cultural question of use, and finish with a discussion about the potential of mobile phones to help overcome economic and infrastructural barriers in the developing world. Chapter Five looks at the concept of privacy and how contemporary technology is challenging modern Western conceptions of privacy and the right to a private life. In keeping with the theme of the first half of the book, its focus is largely on how commercial imperatives, particularly practices of personal data collection for use in marketing, is driving changes in contemporary notions of privacy. Chapter Six provides a general discussion of how protest, politics and warfare are conducted in a networked digital age. First, a general discussion of identity politics and new social movements will preface the topic of ‘cyber politics and protest’ where the tactics, ideology and organisation of ICT-based social protests will be examined. The emphasis here will be on the concept of networked decentralisation. This concept will then provide the backdrop for the additional discussions of cyberwarfare. Chapter Seven considers the theme of ‘identity’ as it has been presented in discussions of digital media thus far. It presents a narrative of how identity has been discussed as it related to cyberculture since Sherry Turkel’s early work on Multi-User Domains (MUD’s), through to personal web pages, blogging, social networking, and finally to avatar use in online worlds and Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG’s). It then considers the phenomenon of ‘cybersex’ as a case of contemporary identity processes at work in digital contexts. Chapter Eight looks at the concept of community in the digital age. It approaches this subject within a wider discussion of the role of ‘space’ in the formation of relationships and social organisation, and how such relationships can be transformed when space becomes less of a determining factor through the use of communication technologies. The notion of ‘community’ is discussed alongside considerations of ‘mobility’ and ‘individualism’ and ultimately contrasted with ‘network’. The conclusion being that it is perhaps best to view both online and offline forms contemporary belonging in terms of increasingly a-spatial ‘networks’, rather than ‘communities’. This chapter ends with a case study discussion on the value of social networking and microblogging in establishing and maintaining ‘presence’ in a network society. Chapter Nine considers the relationship between technology and the body, and how technology is helping to reshape conceptions about what it is to be ‘human’. More specifically, it investigates several varieties of posthumanism which can be considered within the context of digital culture: cyborg relationships; extropianism and disembodiment; and technological embodiment. The last two in particular critically examine the idea that humanness (as a ‘mind’, or as a ‘body’) is reducible to information that can be manipulated and altered. The chapter then looks at technological embodiment, as an approach which suggests that the use of technology is a part of humanness itself, and, using the examples of mobile phones and ‘ambient intelligence’, demonstrates how the use of new technologies allow us to alter our embodied relationship to the world around. While broad ranging in scope, the subject matter dealt with in this book is not completely exhaustive. Since more focussed treatment is given to ‘culture’ this book will focus less on topics such as ‘legislation’, ‘crime’, ‘distance education’ and ‘e-commerce’ than books with a similar subject matter, although all of these do make cameo appearances at various points. Hopefully, it will provide a useful and considered account of not only digital culture as a description of contemporary society, but also the economic and social processes that have got us to where we are now. PAGE 1