Digital culture – a shared space for citizens-users-consumers Intercultural Dialogue and Digital Culture - Zagreb, November 2008 Aleksandra Uzelac, Institute for International Relations, Zagreb, Croatia

From Culture to Digital culture  digital culture  virtual culture  cyberculture  e-culture  internet culture  new media  convergence culture

Culture as information and communication  “words communication or information … refer to the essence of community and human relations” (Pasquali, 2003: 198).  information as a non-rival good - “its consumption by one person does not make it any less available for consumption by another” (Benkler, 2006)  “Information contents are cultural products” … “information is a part of a society’s cultural fabric”. (Hamelink, 2003: 124).  “ to communicate refers to a process of sharing, making common or creating a community” (Hamelink, 2003: 155).  the transmission view of communication - messages are transmitted and distributed in space; the ritual view of communication - the maintenance of society in time through the representation of shared beliefs within a community. (Carey, 1992)  “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).

Technology - enabler of (digital) culture  all technologies intervene in the human environment and modify it to a certain extent, thus changing the conditions of existence of different cultures. So it could be said that technology affects and reflects particular societal shifts.

Communication technologies – from tool to social ecology  Communication technologies have significant influence, for the way they are used can affect changes in the essence of our communicational and cultural patterns.  Technologies related to information and communication cannot be viewed as passive instruments, but rather as interactive systems that radically modify our cognitive capacities (Dascal, 2006).  Technology does not just linearly cause certain effects, but in combination with many other elements it “ creates conditions of possibility that suggest possible futures rather than determine them” (Hawk and Rieder, 2008: xvii).

Networked reality  the networked information economy - in which peer production and sharing have a significant role – it results in diversity of information and perspectives.  the networked public sphere - in which many more individuals can communicate their viewpoints and observations to many others “in a way that cannot be controlled by media owners and is not as easily corruptible by money as were the mass media”. (Benkler, 2006)

Engaging space  “Attention in the networked environment is more dependent on being interesting to an engaged group of people than it is in the mass-media environment, where moderate interest to large numbers of weakly engaged viewers is preferable” (Benkler, 2006: 13).

Participatory aspects of digital culture  participatory platforms – new ways of social and political engagement and quick, ad-hoc reactions to current issues  social, political and cultural (i.e. non- market) motivations prevail over market-based ones

Social production and cultural sector  Social production presents new sources of competition for cultural and media industries producing information goods. New context - cultural professionals are put in a situation in which they are (more or less) sharing control with users.  Users claim the right to use and re-use existing information and cultural expressions that are available in the digital environment

Opportunities for intercultural communication  Building shared spaces  Engaging users  Building knowledge resources that everyone can contribute to and share  Scripting different forms of solidarity into the mainstream system

Thank you for your attention! Aleksandra Uzelac Institute for International Relations Zagreb, Croatia