I'm trying to organise my thoughts on "digital culture" - this is not helped by the fact that Don Tapscott makes my skin crawl; the only immediately apparent difference between him and Jimmy Swaggart is the accent. He oozes salesmanship, in the least attractive sense of that word. Oh well.
There are two ways of looking at this digital culture that I can't settle in my own mind; when I ask myself "what is digital culture" I ask myself what digital culture is that other culture isn't. But most of what I've been reading is kind of ethnography - what is the culture of people who use digital tools, particularly, what is the culture of people under 30 who use digital tools.
I'm inclined to read stuff like Mizuko & think "So what?". "Hanging around"/"Messing Around"/"Geeking out", nice work from the marketing department in choosing catchy labels, but exactly the same 3 behaviours could be seen, in I suspect the same proportions, with the breakthrough technologies of the 1950's & 1960's, radio and TV - most particularly with the portable radio, adopted overwhelmingly by "young people". Maybe I could extend the idea to tertiary studies; everyone does a BA because you sort of have to, all your mates are; a smaller subset go on to do an MA; a very small number geek out and do the PhD. It's beginning to look a like a series of tropes - dividing things in three is a bit of an (Western?) obsession; the 80:19:1 division feels like something intuitively attractive as well. Not that I have even the remotest empirical basis for that ratio.
Still, discourse-constructed reality, you'd expect to find a few tropes lying around.
The thing is, I'm wrong to want to dismiss this kind of work. Actually, it's essential, and also, there is no absolute need to compare digital culture to other cultures. It certainly can be described in its own right, and there is plenty of analysis to do without looking outside the culture. In fact, there are ethnographic reasons NOT to compare cultures, because that usually ends up in the more powerful culture belittling the lesser (although I don't see that as inevitable, nonetheless you only have to look at pre-20th century ethnography - and not just ethnography, Jespersen on why English is a superior language to the effeminate French is a very interesting text in linguistics, especially given that he was Norwegian - to see how it works).
From Mizuko, then, what I mainly take is the pervasiveness & presence of communication. The nature of the tools enabling this (which is why this culture is called digital) is in some way irrelevant, except perhaps as a signifier of membership (note, signifiers of membership are actually very important). Prensky seems like another cheerleader; he is possibly persuasive of the fact that we are talking about cultural difference when we talk about the digital/non-digital, but he grossly exaggerates the difficulties of being an immigrant, and the advantages of being a native. Prenksy is the first place that I have seen claims that digital culture is producing new brains; he even manages to adduce evidence, in the sense of a voice of authority, which is more than Tapscott does making the same claim.
Tapscott claims, as do other writers, that the digital culture, through tools like the wiki, is creating a new kind of knowledge. Since he has introduced the comparison, I feel free to dispute it. A wiki does not create a new kind of knowledge; it is a tool which foregrounds the discourse basis of knowledge, rather than either actively seeking to conceal it, or rendering it unpopular/unfashionable. Knowledge has always been a product of discourse(s), but it hasn't always been so easy to participate in them, or see them. Going back to Aristotle we can find the idea that knowledge is based on the axioms of your reasoning - axioms which much be selected through a rhetorical (that is, discourse-entrenched) process. Epistemology is the unsuccessful struggle to eliminate the discourse-contingency from knowledge.
Putting these pieces together, I'm beginning to feel that the "digital culture" is one in which rhetoric will play a huge part; a rhetoric that may have to be re-imagined for the always-on world, but rhetoric nonetheless.
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the thing with TV's and radios back in times before I was born, I suspect was to do with early adoptors starting things out... and in that sense, maybe you are right to compare these things?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that it's a new kind of knowledge being created... maybe just a new way of creating shared knowledge, a way that is helping to democratise it. Shared knowledge has been around since almost the beginning of time I think, so maybe we are just going back to our roots?
I think so, or at least, I am beginning to think so. I would have been much more inclined to say we were doing something new a month ago before I started reading upon what that newness entailed. Now, thinking about "knowledge as discourse" I can see more changes in the mechanism of discourse.
ReplyDeleteOne of the big things about transistor radios was their portability; so music (which underwent a revolution by becoming accessible on vinyl rather than concert hall in the 1920's) underwent another revolution by being available not just at home, but on the street, in the mall (not that malls were any part of Australian life in the 60's, but the Yanks had them), and AT SCHOOL. So teachers now worry about whether students are texting or paying attention; teachers then worried about whether kids were smuggling radios into class and listening to them. It has a familiarity about it.