Digitized Lives

Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era

T.V. Reed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351388740
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

In chapters examining a broad range of issues—including sexuality, politics, education, race, gender relations, the environment and social protest movements—Digitized Lives argues that making sense of digitized culture means looking past the glossy surface of techno gear to ask deeper questions about how we can utilize technology to create a more socially, politically and economically just world. This second edition includes important updates on mobile and social media, examining how new platforms and devices have altered how we interact with digital technologies in an allegedly 'post-truth' era.

A companion website (culturalpolitics.net/index/digital_cultures) includes links to online articles and useful websites, as well as a bibliography of offline resources, and more.

1
How Do We Make Sense of Digitizing Cultures?

Some Ways of Thinking Through the Culture–Technology Matrix

Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.

(Leo Cherne, Discover America conference, Brussels, June 27, 1968)

The Internet includes an unimaginably vast sea of data that is profoundly changing the range and nature of human communication. Not only has it greatly decreased the cost of communication and enabled heretofore-impossible distances to be crossed instantaneously, but it is also increasingly subsuming all other media into itself. Mail, phoning, film, television, music, photography, radio—all have been translated into digital form and made available in far more accessible ways to the roughly 3.5 billion people (now redefined as “users”) around the world. No book can hope to fathom the immensity of the Net and other “new” information communication technologies (or ICTs, as they are known among professionals). But we can examine some of the key patterns of human social interaction made possible, fostered or transformed by these “new media.” Note that this is the second time I have put “new” in scare quotes. Why? Because one of the recurring questions in the fields upon which this book draws is: What aspects and impacts of digital media are truly new? Are our interpersonal relationships growing more open or becoming more superficial? Are we becoming more politically informed or more politically divided? Are we building a more equitable economy or leaving many people behind as robots take over work? Are we being entertained more richly or being drawn more and more into empty distraction? Overarching all these questions is a bigger one: Is the real world being overtaken by a digital one?

There is no doubt that the digitizing world is full of new things, but not all of the hyped newness is of equal significance. Not every new app or platform or device is as revolutionary as its promoters would have us believe. So, part of the task is to distinguish wider patterns of significance, important newness from superficial novelty. To get at those questions, this book draws from a wider array of academic fields that examine the social impacts of information and communication technologies: Anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, communication, rhetoric, ethnic and women’s studies, cultural studies and half a dozen other disciplines. The interdisciplinary field that most directly addresses the set of issues raised in this book looks at digital cultures—the social relationships that occur through immersion in the realm of the Internet, video games, smartphones and other high-tech platforms and devices. Studies of digital culture ask how communication technologies reflect the wider social world, how they create new cultural relations and how those new online experiences in turn reshape the offline world.

Culture is one of the most complicated words in the English language, but for our purposes we can simplify it to mean the values, beliefs and behaviors that are typical and defining of a group. In this sense, we are all involved in many cultures. We can think of cultures as like the Russian dolls that have smaller and smaller dolls inside. At the broadest level we can talk about global culture, at the next level national cultures, then perhaps ethnic cultures and so on down the line to the cultures of small groups (clubs, workplaces, etc.) in which we take part. In terms of digital cultures, we can think in terms of Twitter culture, or Facebook culture, digital classroom cultures, smartphone cultures, digital activist cultures, gamer cultures and so on, each of which could be divided into smaller groups (e.g., Grand Theft Auto 5 player or iPhone user cultures).

The analogy breaks down, however, in that Russian dolls are far more clearly demarcated than are cultures. Cultures are fluid, not neatly bounded entities. Recent anthropology theory argues that “cultures” should be seen as real fictions, as always artificial constructions of observers. The question of what typifies or is essential to a given cultural group is always subject to debate within that group. The boundaries or key characteristics of any imagined cultural group are always blurry, and often in process and changing. Cultural meanings are in fact never settled; they are always subject to contestation, both among outside observers and internal participants. This simply means that anything claimed about a given cultural group can be challenged, and that is a good thing. It keeps cultures from becoming static and keeps those who analyze cultures from becoming complacent or arrogantly sure of their interpretations.

At the broadest level, digital communication technologies have played a very significant role in our current international configuration of economics, politics and culture, the period of the last several decades that is generally referred to as neoliberal or “free market” globalization. Globalization is not a new phenomenon in history. There have been many forms and periods of significant global interaction for hundreds of years. Precisely what is new about our current era is up for debate, but among the new features of this particular phase of globalization is the spread of digital communication networks. Most scholars agree that our current brand of globalization would be impossible without the rapid movement of money, data, knowledge and non-material commodities across national borders via the Internet and other digital technologies.

To address some of the human-to-human issues surrounding our digitizing world, we need to get beneath the glossy surface of ever-cooler new tech devices to ask questions about what these devices are doing to us, and what we can do with them to make our lives and the lives of others better or worse. My aim is to avoid both the pro-tech hype driven by profit-hungry electronics corporations, and the equally dubious tech haters driven more by fear of the new than by clear thinking about some of the downsides of high-tech cultures. Instead this book tries to provide some useful ways to think through the many and varied social impacts of digital cultures, and hopefully provides some tools to help readers play a stronger role in shaping new technologies in ways that improve the world.

Few of the questions this book addresses have simple answers. One reason there are no easy answers about what new technologies are doing to us is that the subject is incredibly vast, and changing at a phenomenal rate. Though no one really knows how to count them with complete accuracy, halfway through the second decade of the twenty-first century there were close to 5 billion individual Web pages indexed by Google (and millions more unindexed). Moreover, between the time I wrote that sentence and the time you are reading it, millions more were created. If Facebook were a country, it would be the most populous one on Earth. YouTube broadcasts more in a day than all major TV networks have broadcast in their entire history. In the history of the world, counting every language, there have been about a hundred billion printed books; the amount of information contained in that number of volumes is uploaded onto the Web every month. How could anyone claim to know what is going on across all those sites and in all the other arenas that make up digital cultures? Trying to understand digital cultures is a little like trying to interpret the lyrics to a song that adds new verses every day. Sometimes the new verses seem to continue the song’s main themes, but at other times the new verses go off in totally unexpected directions because the song has more than 3 billion co-authors.

As a result of the rapidly changing nature of new communication networks, the question of what new technologies are doing to us covers a territory that is riddled with contradictory evidence. Are they helping create a more just world, bringing down dictators and opening up societies, or are they giving hate-mongers a new, safely anonymous space to recruit? Are they giving women, ethnic and sexual minorities new platforms to be heard, or new ways to be vilified and marginalized? Are they offering new spaces for smaller cultural and linguistic groups to have a voice, or allowing dominant cultures (and the English language) to overwhelm everyone else? Are we creating a new “(digital) generation gap,” or finding new ways for parents and children to communicate across differences and distances? Is the Web truly worldwide in terms of who can use it, or are we creating a world of digital haves and have-nots? Is the Web a space of free and open public discourse, or one controlled by governments and huge corporations? Is the Web creating new transnational, person-to-person understandings, or amplifying existing cultural misunderstandings? Is the Web a space where physically disabled people can enjoy the freedom of virtual mobility, or a space biased toward the able-bodied, leaving the disabled to struggle for full access? Is online sexual content destroying relationships and degrading morals, or offering liberating knowledge and new forms of intimacy? Are video games turning users into mindless virtual killers, or teaching valuable life skills? Is the Internet making us more knowledgeable, or just drowning us in a sea of trivia? Is the digital world one where we are more “connected,” or one that stunts the face-to-face interactions that alone can carry true human connection? Are we becoming more liberated as individuals with many more social options, or being turned by government surveillance, politically biased “fake news” and corporate data mining into programmed human robots?

Clearly, a case can be made for each extreme side of each of these questions. But that doesn’t mean that the truth is somewhere in the middle. It means that the “truth” of digital cultures is a set of ongoing processes, and will depend on the thinking and acting users do now, including decisions we make as citizens and as consumers about the further development and use of new technologies in the near future. It will depend on the personal decisions we make, on the collective political work we do to shape social policy about technology and on the lives we choose to pursue as participants in a rapidly digitizing age that is upon us, whether we like it or not.

So, digital cultures are very much in progress, and no one really knows what the more than 7.5 billion of us stranded on the third rock from the sun we call Earth will eventually make of this still relatively new set of technologies. We are dealing with two ongoing processes, the: The human development of digitizing technologies and the human use of those technologies. They are not the same thing because humans do unexpected things with the tools we create. And that is what a technology is, a tool. The roots of the word technology are in the Greek name for practical things that extend our human capacities. Some of our more famous technologies, the wheel, the printing press, have changed the world and human identities in unimaginably diverse ways. So too will our digital tools, with an emphasis on the unimaginable part. The tools will only be as good as the imaginations of the people who put them to use.

While we are still learning to make sense of the new media explosion, there is little doubt that it represents a major transformation in human culture, what one scholar has called a “fourth revolution in the means of production of knowledge” (Harnad 1991), following the three prior revolutions of language, writing and print. As with each of these previous “revolutions,” much consternation has been generated by the arrival of the digital age. The Greeks worried that the invention of writing would fundamentally undermine the key human capacity of memory. The arrival of the printing press was viewed by some as a dangerous degradation of human communication. And so too have many lamented that digital media will bring the “end of world as we know it.” The end of the world has been predicted since the beginning of homo sapiens, and this latest prediction is no doubt as wrong as all the others. But some things in the world certainly are changing. And the “as we know it” part of the phrase is undeniable. New media will not bring an end to the world, but they are deeply changing the way “we know it.” New media (like the printing press) in the past have not brought an end to the world, but they do bring an end to certain ways of knowing, while adding new ways of knowing and new identities. And that is surely what is happening now; we are experiencing a (digital) revolution in how we come to know the world and ourselves.

Having raised the issue of knowledge, let me say a word about my approach to knowing about digital cultures. Objectivity is one of the great inventions of the modern world. It is a worthy ideal of the natural sciences and much scholarship in the social and human sciences. But, like all ideals, it is never fully attained. The idea of information and analysis presented without personal, cultural or political bias is a wonderful thing to strive for, because no one benefits from distorted information. Some think the way to achieve objectivity is to pretend to be a person without biases. Instead, I agree with scholars who argue that such a position just hides biases that all of us have. So my approach will not be to pretend to be neutral on all issues raised in this book (I will not, for example, give white supremacists equal credence with folks fighting racism online). Rather, I’ll make my own positions (read biases, if you wish) explicit when I have a strong point of view and trust that readers will factor my position into their responses. Having said that this is a book with more questions than answers, I will also share my ambivalences and uncertainties along the way.

I believe all knowledge is situated knowledge, that it is produced and interpreted by humans always embedded in cultures, always able to see some things better, some things less well, from their particular place in the world (Haraway 2003 [1984]). This is not relativism—the claim that all cultural viewpoints are of equal value and validity. Situated knowledge (Haraway 1988) begins in the recognition that each of us has insights and blind spots based upon our background and our current location in various economic and cultural hierarchies. This position acknowledges the unequal power available to different individuals, and seeks to bring awareness of that inequality into the cultural conversation. It includes a search for a deeper level of analysis that more closely approaches objectivity by acknowledging our inability to fully transcend cultural perspectives. But an inability to completely leave aside our cultural viewpoints does not mean all viewpoints are equal. When we are called to jury duty, we are asked by the court if we can put aside biases that may prejudge the case. And if we do not do so, other jurors may challenge us. At the same time, the best judges and lawyers will seek to bring a variety of situated knowledges into the jury room in order to most fairly weigh evidence. Though things outside of a courtroom are far messier, a healthy democratic society functions in much the same way, through careful weighing of the facts, wise use of our differing respective knowledge bases, careful introspection into our limiting biases and a check upon us by our questioning fellow citizens. Facts matter, and not all attempts to account for the facts are equally valid. And the fact of unequal power and differing degrees of self-interest must be factored into the search for political truth and cultural understanding. That is what I have tried to do in this book, though I am sure I have done so imperfectly, as is inevitable among humans (and for that matter, among Artificially Intelligent entities, so far—see Chapter 5).

Before moving too deeply into this revolutionary world of digitized cultures, it is important to note who is not part of those cultures, i.e., most of the people on earth. Of the roughly 7.5 billion people on this planet, about half, 50 percent of us, have no access to the digital world at all. And millions of others have severely limited access compared with the taken-for-granted fast broadband access enjoyed by those of us with economic or social privilege. These digital divides in turn rest upon growing economic and social inequality in almost every country around the globe, and vast disparities of wealth between countries. In broad statistical terms, there are clearly great digital divides between the Global North and the Global South, as represented by these percentages across continents: 95 percent of North Americans have access, 85 percent of Europeans, 64 percent of Middle Easterners, 6 percent of Latin Americans, 49 percent of Asians and only 36 percent of Africans (Internet World Stats, www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm). Access varies by country within continents of course, and by class, since even the poorest countries have economic elites. In the many countries with a dominant ethnic group and other minority ethnicities, minority ethnic groups almost invariably have poorer access, usually due to having lower incomes and fewer cultural benefits compared with the dominant ethnicity.

Why does this matter so much? Consider these statistics:

• 80 percent of people live in countries where the income gap is widening.
• The richest 20 percent of the population controls 75 percent of world wealth.
• 25,000 children die each day from poverty.
• Seven in a hundred people have a college education.
• A billion people in the world are illiterate.
• One in five people on earth has no clean drinking water.
• One in five owns a digital device.

(Statistic Brain n.d.; UNESCO Institute for Statistics n.d.)

While statistics at the global level are subject to considerable variation depending on methods of measurement, a general pattern of profound poverty alongside great concentrations of wealth is undeniable. And, with some local exceptions, it is clear that economic and social inequalities in the world are currently being replicated, and often exacerbated, by parallel inequalities in access to the Internet’s resources; this in turn means that the economic, political, social and cultural benefits provided by digital access are distributed in extremely unequal ways.

Scholars also recognize that digital divides are about more than access to devices and software. There are also divides centering on language and culture (which languages and traditions are prominently and fairly represented on the Web, and which are not), techno-literacy (who does and who doesn’t receive culturally relevant education in using digital devices and resources), and censorship/openness (who does and who does not have their access significantly limited by governmental or corporate forces). All these various digital divides are crucial to keep in mind if we are to approach a realistic appraisal of what is going on in the online (and offline) worlds. (For more on digital divides, see Chapter 9.)

With these issues of huge scale and widely varying contexts in mind, let me be clear that I will not pretend to deal with all aspects of new communications technologies. My focus will be on cultural and social questions, on asking what can be done to make digital communication technologies serve the cause of richer representation for groups currently on the cultural margins, and how digital communication technology can be used to further economic and social justice for all. Thus, the three keywords in my subtitle—culture, power and social change. An emphasis on digital culture means focusing less on the gadgets, more on the human interactive dimensions of digital phenomena (though, as we will see, there is no way to fully separate the technical and the cultural). Focusing on power means centering questions about who currently benefits from digital cultures and who doesn’t. It means asking to what extent and in what ways the digitization of a large chunk of life on planet Earth has helped lessen or has deepened economic, social, political and cultural inequality. Focusing on social change means suggesting how these new media could be used to further progressive change. These are issues upon which the very survival of the planet itself may depend. Such a focus, however, does not mean that other issues about the impact of digital cultures will be ignored. Any book on the vast arena of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: Why Buy this Book?
• Acknowledgments
• 1 How Do We Make Sense of Digitizing Cultures? Some Ways of Thinking Through the Culture–Technology Matrix
• 2 How Is the Digital World Made? The Designer/Worker/User Production Cycle
• 3 What’s New about Digitized Identities? Mobile Bodies, Online Disguise, Cyberbullying and Virtual Communities
• 4 Has Digital Culture Killed Privacy? Social Media, Governments and Digitized Surveillance
• 5 Is Everybody Equal Online? Digitizing Gender, Ethnicity, Dis/Ability and Sexual Orientation
• 6 Sexploration and/or Sexploitation? Digitizing Desire
• 7 Tools for Democracy or Authoritarianism? Digitized Politics and the Post-Truth Era
• 8 Are Digital Games Making Us Violent, or Will They Save the World? Virtual Play, Real Impact
• 9 Are Students Getting Dumber as Their Phones Get Smarter? E-Learning, Edutainment and the Future of Knowledge Sharing
• 10 Who in the World Is Online? Digital Inclusions and Exclusions
• 11 Conclusion: Will Robots and AIs Take Over the World? Hope, Hype and Possible Digitized Futures
• Bibliography
• Glossary
• Index