Sarah Wingfield

^{Digital Media Issues post #4 – Digital Culture}

A play on metaverse, or the popular, imaginary multiverse of the Marvel cannon, “anthropoverse” is meant to encapsulate the idea of a digital/human crossover space where we both exist, morph, and exchange cultural impact in the digital realm and IRL.

If we hop into the DeLorean and go way back to the birth of the internet with ARPAnet connecting university computers, the culture was utilitarian–non-existent…

In just a few short decades since going public, it’s exploded into a bustling, decentralized, overloaded noise machine…

….so how’d it get like that?

In an echo-chamber of technical determinism and diffusion of innovation, we have seen the rise of digital culture, and we have also lived long enough to see digital culture affect IRL culture, and back and forth likely until the end of time–this Pandora’s Box is open, and shutting it will take an act of sheer omnipotence.

Let’s fast forward to 2008, where my entry to the internet was still somewhat in its infancy…

In this era of the internet and digital spaces, platforms began to really revolutionize the accessibility of content creation and cultural connection within cyberspace (as we used to call it). Tarleton Gillespie initially described these platforms as “curators of public discourse” or “content-hosting intermediaries” in their article The politics of ‘platforms,’ prior to examining the progressive role they would play in co-creating the digital noise of today – noting “It is the broad connotations…– open, neutral, egalitarian and progressive support for activity – that make this term [platform] so compelling for intermediaries like YouTube as a way to appeal to users, especially in contrast to traditional mass media. YouTube and its competitors claim to empower the individual to speak – lifting us all up, evenly.”

This era was a relatively quiet time in the history of digital culture, one where individuals were just beginning to develop a sense of digital identity via blogging, post sharing, video creation, etc. This is not inherently different from the types of media we see created today, yet identity formation was less focused (keyword: less, it certainly was still focused) on high view counts in social media spaces. It was the emergence of “real-time [user-generated] content-sharing.” This timeframe was a heuristic timeframe for all internet users: platforms, advertisers, individuals, governments, and corporations alike. Thus this digital play space was, for the average individual user, to share relatively accurate, relatively timely content at their leisure.

Gillespie finds that “platforms” positioned themselves as neutral or flat, yet their design was such that its natural use-case ultimately began “shaping the contours of public discourse online (p.358).” Once people realized that their digital content, and thus digital identity could generate widespread attention, things began to shift.

We also saw during this time the rise of the digital “third space” in places like chatrooms, forums, and multi-user domains (MUDs). These spaces began to help shape the way digital identities were formed, and how the individuals and digital spaces exchanged symbiotic impact: “As players participate, they become authors not only of text but of themselves, constructing new selves through social interaction. One player says, ‘You are the character and you are not the character, both at the same time.’ Another says, ‘You are who you pretend to be.’ MUDs provide worlds for anonymous social interaction in which one can play a role as close to or as far away from one’s “real self’ as one chooses (Turkle, 1997, p.12).”

This symbiosis of human, digital space, and culture both IRL and virtual gave way to the capitalistic, monetized, content creation, influencer digital culture where attention is the commodity…

We see now both this explosion of digital content, and a merging of digital presence with a sense of self-hood that is folded into daily life almost seamlessly. Some users, myself included, may experience this convergence of physical persona and digital persona melding together to create a more full or rounded identity.

Beyond the Proteus Effect within avatar creation, our digital presence is, in effect, an extension of self and performance of selfhood–either by stepping into, or out of, our physical and day-to-day identities. The seemingly infinite volume of platforms opens possibilities for pluralistic expressions of self in the digital realm, a way to explore internal identity in an external space. The relative anonymity some digital spaces provide can support “safe” exploration of self and identity crafting, while others serve to expose behavioral missteps warping any carefully crafted sense of identity into a public dialogue.

In short: Digital identity and digital culture is so rich and pluralistic it cannot be captured or fully explored in a single blog post.

Turkle, S. (1997). Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet. Simon & Schuster.

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