Digital Information Culture: The Individual and Society in the Digital Age

Citation

Manžuch, Z. (2009), "Digital Information Culture: The Individual and Society in the Digital Age", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 65 No. 2, pp. 328-331. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410910937660

Digital Information Culture: The Individual and Society in the Digital Age is one of those books concerned with currently popular issue of interplay between culture and technology. As many other works on the topic it is interested in exploring how technology and culture influence each other. However, its distinct approach lies in an interpretivist view prompting that humans create particular opinions about culture, technology and their impact under particular social conditions. These interpretations are often treated as objective reflections of reality and thus influence of how impact of technologies is experienced.

The book contains two general parts: “Culture and technology”, and “Digital information culture”. The first part is dedicated to discussion of general issues: concept of culture, and representations of the impact of technology to human lives in fiction, films and scholarly work as well as explanation of possible roots of these ideas. The part “Culture and technology” sets a framework for making judgments on certain phenomena of digital culture in the second part. In the second part “Digital information culture” the author concentrates on certain its aspects affected by technological change such as textuality, authenticity, knowledge, power, identity and memory.

In the first chapter “The meaning of culture” the author emphasizes the complexity of the “culture” concept and discusses changing approaches ranging from highly selective elitist to all inclusive notions of culture that have aroused as a response to particular social context. The discussion of the first chapter results in the conclusion that “culture is not an idea, but an ongoing discourse about the nature of our social lives as social beings” (p. 18). Therefore, the author prefers not to provide a definition because “the complexity of culture is essential to its nature” and “to settle on one idea of culture is to reduce it to the concrete and the specific, which is in turn tacitly to valorise particular forms, values and traditions” (p. 18).

The second chapter “Representations of technology” highlights two dominating discourses of the interrelations between culture and technology. The first, basing on the materialistic approach to culture (i.e. culture as certain forms of expression) and technologically deterministic, and the second, isolating culture from any forms of expression, dominating in certain historical periods, thus making culture an idealistic category. Again, author prefers not to choose between approaches that inevitably reduce the complexity of the interplay between culture and technology, but to provide a broad panorama of views and underlying assumptions of their occurrence. Therefore, this chapter is a de‐construction of the views rather than search for definite answer to the question what the major influencer in the pair “culture‐technology” is (if such formulation of a question is possible at all). Notably, such de‐construction may provide more insight into the interrelationship of technology and culture than a search for a “dominant factor”. Discussion of pessimistic visions of the future of technological society is summarized by the following conclusion:

More than anything, these representations reveal the anxieties associated with technological change. That they retain their relevance long after the technologies to which they refer have become obsolete and the particular anxieties they express have subsided highlights how they tap into more fundamental qualities of experience. The persistent nature of certain core themes through very different kinds of discourse, applied to very different kinds of technology, suggests that they appertain not to particular experiences of change, but to general anxieties associated with technology and its effects. They expose the unfamiliarity of advancement and the fears that unfamiliarity brings (p. 38).

The third chapter “Narratives of technology and culture” turns to the question of how humans construct their representations of culture and technology. Here the concept of narrative as a mean of framing the overwhelming richness of our experiences into certain structures becomes crucial. The author argues that narrative logics that organizes our experiences into events, having temporal and spatial boundaries, linking certain “chunks” or reality with casual relations represents only mechanisms of our understanding but not reality itself. Narrative logic is the reason of those negative representations of technology and culture that were discussed in the previous chapters. The author traces similar approaches to any technology during its rise, while later when it is integrated into societies' practices it becomes transparent (or invisible). Thus, particular attitude to digital technology is a result of general human approach to change. This attitude is also strengthened by a tendency of human understanding to link past and present into one interconnected system, construction of which is also affected by narrative principles, and thus make future predictions of technology impact. Interestingly, the author focuses only on negative representations of technologies, but does not discuss positive representations (utopian views of those fascinated with technologies) that analogically should be a subject of particular narrative patterns. Such positive representations also have a great impact on the current understanding of what technology brings into the lives of societies.

In the fourth chapter, “Textuality”, opening the second part, the author focuses on the changing functions and understanding of texts as well as their creation, distribution and use. Like in many other works, this chapter turns to discussion of transformations happened due to introduction of different communication technologies. The eras of manuscripts, printing and finally digital age are in the scope of the chapter. The discussion results in conclusions that changes brought by communication technology are going gradually, and each epoch is still influenced by the views based on the values of preceding technologies. Thus, such collision of old approaches and values with new properties and uses of text is reflected in many current discussions.

In the chapter “Authenticity” the author turns to the issue of shifting understanding of cultural artifacts due to application of digital technologies for their creation, distribution and use. According to L. Tredinnick, the impact of digital technologies has resulted in mutability and instability, de‐materialisation and de‐contextualisation of cultural objects. All these features of digital objects collide with traditional understanding of a work of art, when its authenticity is attributed to a material manifestation of individual creative act. Traditionally, cultural object as well as its material features and context served to communicate meaning; however, in the digital environment such clues lose their sense and an object is interpreted through its continuous re‐use. As a result of these changes the cultural artifact is given meaning through its use and permanent re‐contextualisation:

In each of these cases, digital technologies are shifting the value of the cultural artifact from the material object to the process of participation. The objects of culture are no longer secured behind glass cases, tied to the walls of museums and galleries or constrained by the control over publishing and broadcasting, but are created and recreated in the social process (p. 90).

The sixth chapter, “Knowledge”, discusses the current interpretation of knowledge and truth. Due to changes occurred to creation, dissemination and use of information the attitude to knowledge and truth is shifting as well. The author argues that the current massive information flows, higher involvement of consumer in the process of shaping of services (examples include personalization of TV and radio programmes, increased participation of users, the role of personal records in the news etc.), decline of control over information dissemination by certain institutions (e.g. publishers) result in increasing awareness of social origin of knowledge and plurality of truth. Consequently, contemporary individuals tend to abandon traditional collective sites of authority (e.g. religion) and create “personalised” truth. The author claims that a kind of “second‐order literacy”, referring to ability of individual to extract meaning from the environment of overwhelming information flows becomes crucial.

Drawing on the M. Foucalt theory of epistemes, prevailing structures of knowing and expression of knowledge in the certain socio‐historical settings, in the seventh chapter, “Power”, issues and pre‐conditions of dominant discourse are discussed. Three aspects of power are considered: access to the participative means of the discourse formation, the degree of impact of certain contributions to the dominant discourse and finally, the consequences that occur as a result of changes in power mode. The author argues that traditional development gaps (exemplified by the differences in access to and usage of digital technologies between the developed and developing countries) and social inequalities (education, financial status, age etc.) influence the ability to take part in discourse formation practices, thus undermining a democratising effect of digital networks propagated by some authors. However, even participation in creating, disseminating and sharing information does not itself a sufficient basis for an equal impact of different messages:

The ability to participate in digital culture on something like an equal footing is dependent on not only access to digital technologies but also an understanding of the rules and conventions of participation (p. 129).

Shifting modes of power and control in modern societies have also resulted in different practices to retain the power such as incorporation of emerging forms of culture into existing dominant forms to extend (contrary to traditional mode of suppressing anything new and different to maintain the power) them and fears such as global terrorism or international criminal networks.

The emergence of the current fears and anxieties of the totally controlled society is discussed in the chapter “Identity”. According to the author, shifts in the current understanding of identity result from several trends in identity construction, such as sedimentation – a process of total recording of our identity as a consequence of the use of digital technology; virtualisation – an increasing opportunity to manipulate personal identity in the digital space, and fragmentation – a total detachment of identity from a real person, when recorded traces become an independent being influencing our rights and access to services. All these trends undermine privacy in a modern age; however, the threat of total control emerges not only from state structures (as it is often described in fiction) but increasingly from commercial entities and criminals that may manipulate identities for their own purposes.

And finally, in the last chapter, “Memory”, the author reveals the origin of current fears about preserving the digital cultural record of the present. This anxiety emerges from the conflict between the huge capacity of digital technology to document almost every single action and the short lifecycle and mutability of these digital traces. However, the roots of this conflict, according to the author, lie in modernist approach to the history (as a discipline of knowing the past) as an objective knowledge that can be derived from the documentary records of the past. This view excludes the fact that documentary records are only one part of all richness of the lived experience which marginalise other manifestations of the past. In this sense, the problem is not in the inability to preserve the cultural record of the present but in the approach to preservation:

In this chapter it will be argued that the anxiety of digital preservation reflects a conflict of narratives that converge on the continuing role of the archive in securing the preservation of the artifacts of digital culture. The idea of the archive, as an ideal and not an institution, becomes less secure in an age when the stability and fixedness of recorded information are themselves placed under question. But the idea of the archive perhaps also reflects the values of an age when knowledge was invested in only a very few sites of creation and transmission (p. 154).

The author argues that the persistency of the past is not achieved by “total” preservation efforts, but resides in social practices of re‐use of a cultural record that reflects natural mechanisms of memory – memorising and forgetting.

The book, intending to capture some tendencies but not struggling to present universal models, will be of interest to those who do not search for immediate answers but turns to analysing how the questions are constructed. The main value of the book is in uncovering complex contexts in which our expectations to digital technology are situated and in responding the need for reflection on such approaches. Discussion is enriched by the multiple examples of approaches and fears emerging in fiction and films. Notably, the author concentrates on the perceived negative impacts of digital technologies and consequent fears; however, the work would be enriched by the analysis of “positive” utopias of digital technologies that draw a bright future of the world of ambient intelligent technologies.