Why digital culture?

I spend plenty of time at work and at play considering how people behave online. Over the last couple of years I've been considering the idea of the appearance of a digital culture, a change in mass behaviour triggered by digital technology, in particular communication technology.

And so many ideas got scrawled on so many bits of paper that writing a blog seemed the best way to structure them. So here's the blog.

But what about the thought. Well it starts something like this: Binary code is inherently flexible. And so anything in digital is like lego. It can be broken down into constituent parts (bits) and rebuilt into something different. I'm no technologist. I'm considering behaviour here. But the source of all this change is in the technology. So information became more portable and flexible. Lego structures, or clusters of ideas and information got passed around, deconstructed and rebuilt. And so over time they evolved. And here you see Richard Dawkins' 1976 idea of memes fitting in. Ideas change as they spread, depending on their popularity in context. Natural selection of the most interesting.

The evolution of ideas is not a new concept. But digital technology and the internet made ideas more portable. They put the evolutionary clock into hyperspeed. And suddenly everything started changing very fast. And almost everyone had the chance to play a part in the change. They transported and changed the ideas. We moved from web1.0 to 2.0 as the contribution of information became the behaviour of a majority within each community rather than a minority.

Then we move into ideas such as the hive mind being a sort of information market or the semantic web making the infomation even more flexible than previous formats. And everything is still accelerating.

And these are still minor changes in technology compared to the idea of the world's pockets constantly connected via the internet. What changes in behaviour will that bring?

It feels like we've moved into a world where information alone is worth little but the aggregation of it is very valuable; a world where everything is changing faster than in recent history; a time when many more are collaborating than ever before; a space where maps have suddenly grown in importance. Perhaps this is just the information age. And if so, how should one act in such an age? We surely haven't mastered the etiquette yet.

So it feels like this change in behaviour hasn't really got going yet. And so that's why I'm writing this. I want to watch it gather pace and watch the discovery of everything we know now to be right become wrong. And this site might be a lens to keep the flux in focus.

[image from udronotto]