All the EDC blog posts

Here it is. Thanks everyone for an interesting hour’s chat.

The first week of getting my Lifestream going has been challenging both in terms of getting to grips with the technology of the blog and conceiving a way of having a Lifestream that is not too random a collection of tweets, links and so on. Or perhaps a Lifestream should be random if one thinks in terms of how we often access digital culture. Nevertheless I hope to develop my Lifestream so that it reflects what is going on in the texts and activities of the week. In the first week my getting to grips with the technology and the ideology of a Lifestream was limited in its success. On the technological side I want to introduce more streams to make the Lifestream a little more interesting, and on the ideological side I want to have a more focused approach, weaving in the themes of the week more clearly.

However, this week there were two issues that were, in particular, raised for me in terms of the film festival and the reading. Firstly, I was particularly interested in Hand’s description of the utopian/dystopian views of digital culture. On the Utopian side, the notion that digital culture can have a democratizing function was interesting from the point of view of recent uses of Web 2.0 in social/political events over the last 6 months. The use of Facebook in communication during the ‘revolution’ in Egypt was well documented although this is not to say that the use of digital technology is inherently democratizing. Hand discusses governmental uses of digital culture, for instance in encouraging public participation in policy, presented by politicians as democratizing. However, in the case of the Arab Spring, we have also seen how besieged governments also seek to use the internet to their advantage and there can be few of us who do not greet government web consultation with a degree of cynicism.  And if we are to see digital culture as a means to empower citizens in the face of larger political organization both national and international, then what do we make of the use of Web 2.0 in the organization of the London riots, and police and politicians averred intentions for counter-use in the future. It might seem somewhat ironic that ‘in governmental circles, it is thought that digitization will help overcome the fragmentation, dislocation and anomie of contemporary civic life’ (Hand 2008, 23) given that digitzation may have led to (and the jury is out on this one) a greater organization of an expression of that very dislocation.

Trying to decide whether digital culture empowers or disempowers is a bit like deciding whether charity works: on a larger, geopolitical scale, it would be easy to be cynical, but on an ad hoc basis, as one hears of successes, the uses of the internet seem to have positive political effect, as in the story on social media giving Iranian women a voice from the Guardian this week – http://t.co/dbA98hkr.

‘Bendito Machine’ inspired the second issue that struck me this week. The people in the short film were portrayed as unsophisticated natives with the technological devices being almost godlike. This fitted well with Hand’s concern over how global digital culture might disrupt or even destroy local ‘authentic culture’ (Hand 2008, 18). I think there is something to be explored about digital culture in terms of colonialism and post-colonial theory. I am particularly interested in Hand’s talk of the ‘”info-rich” or “info-poor”’ (34). One might agree that a lack of material access as well as a lack of ability to use digital technologies would leave some parts of society, some countries, parts of countries or cultures behind. And yet, given Hand’s caveat on the possibility of digital culture disrupting ‘authentic culture’ (and it would be worth thinking about the implications of the difference further), I cant help but be reminded of programmes such as ‘Tribe’ that showed us peoples whose ways of life were being destroyed by the encroachment of modern industry, all being highlighted by the use of modern media. I think there is a danger of some kind of colonial notion, not necessarily geographical, that digital culture is the preserve of the enlightened with the automatic assumption that means it is desirable – ‘in other words, those with existing social and cultural capital may be best placed to take advantage of these new resources’  (Hand) – and ultimately should be desirable to all.