When thinking about the concept "digital cultures", I first think about the encounters of millions of people occurring online everyday. These meetings bring us together, but they also keep us apart. Time spent online is inevitably time spent in a greater or lesser degree of detachment from one's physical surroundings, including local others. Nowadays, almost everyone has decided that local detachment is all right, because we do it when reading, watching television, listening to music, and so forth. But there are still questions about how Internet use will impact on these other forms of detachment, for instance in reading less or, worse, less well. Nevertheless, the further we move into a society fully integrated with digital technology, the more we will witness a "static society". With static I mean a society where culture is mass consumed in a way that uniqueness or experiences do no longer exist.
Right now, we are in the middle of the web 2.0 era and We are quickly rushing toward the future where people will be even more integrated with technology, to a time when we no longer can be called humans, but "human 2.0". At this stage we are becoming more machine than man and I am afraid that we somewhere on the way to that era will program even our minds to be less human.
Today, various communities and games on the net open the way for spontanous conversations and contacts, virtually anywhere. Culture such as music and film has turned into small mp3 and divx files which easily can be spread all over the world within a few minutes. In turn, these art forms become less unique. Sure, one might say that it is good that art is available for all, but too much information being ploughed into our minds will make any culture superfluous.
The value of people as well as art will be forgotten and just a remote memory to some. Therefore, this static society will gradually emerge as long as digital cultures go hand in hand with mass consumtion. Nevertheless, this correspond to reading a book. There are several ways of doing it, but skimming and scanning when surveying is how most internet users operate. This also leaves out the very notion of semblance.
Introduction.
So, I suppose this is yet another blog of mine. This one is a bit different though, since I will use it for school purposes in the Digital Cultures course of BIT (Blekinge Institute of Technology).
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