When musing over the term ‘digital culture’, I thought naively it’s like culture but digital, which made me think what culture is. If culture is a set of assumptions, beliefs, symbols and behaviours typical of humans grouped in a society, is ‘digital culture’ the same but transplanted into the digital world? A kind of Human Circuitry?

Being a linguist and into a word play, I cannot help noticing that the root of the phrase in question is ‘culture’, which makes it carry the main meaning, the adjective ‘digital’ being just a modifying element. You could say then that the word ‘culture’ has a kind of hegemony over the phrase. Taking it further, you could say it is trying to colonise the phrase, imposing its values, customs and habits … Yes? Or am I taking it too far?

But why on our wallwisher wall, Sian complains about digital texts replicating analogous writing instead of coming up with new formulas or, on the course design module site, somebody rants about colleagues trying to use e-platforms to hand out PDF worksheets. Wouldn’t it be ‘culture’ invading and colonising the ‘digital’? Following Cousin’s argument from last term that often technology is perceived as a tool in the hand of a human and so pushed to a subservient role, it seems to me that the term ‘digital culture’ might be often and easily misconstrued, especially in popular beliefs. The terms ‘organic’ and ‘machinic’ might sound incongruous on the surface but as Jeremy points out below they do mingle smoothly in a metaphorist interplay. So perhaps the two could penetrate each other more persistently, blurring the boundaries and growing together into something novel (uncanny?) instead of invasive transplantation and transgression? The blurring would facilitate, in my view, the process of becoming, a space in-between the definite points, where things are less certain, experimented on, tried out and therefore exciting , a breeding ground for new seeds … Am I being overidealistic? Is it too much of utopia?