Vincent Miller - Understanding digital culture

• Vincent Miller

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We live in a world where the internet and the world wide web have, in the matter of only three decades, shifted from being at the forefront of a new frontier of communication technology to being for most people an incredibly unremarkable part of our culture and daily life. Many once held an optimism that the internet would, for example, revolutionise work and office life, and create active, engaged citizens instead of the passive subjects of the broadcast media age (Poster, 1995), or lead to the creation of alternative communities, worlds and even identities free from the prejudices of offline society (Rheingold, 1993).

However, as the internet has become something used by the majority of the population in advanced economies, that population has brought with it all of the habits, inclinations and prejudices that are endemic to society as a whole. As a result, much of this early optimism that the internet would radically change our culture in some sort of knowledge revolution has begun to fade in light of the realisation that our culture has perhaps transformed the internet more than vice versa.

The internet has now become a major part of work, leisure, social and political life for most people in advanced economic nations. It is no longer its novelty, uniqueness or potential to transform life, but its mundane nature and pervasiveness that now gives the internet its significance. Not in the sense that it has profoundly changed the world, but in the sense that it has become enmeshed within the enduring structures of our society. As such, the online sphere is no longer a realm separate from the offline real world, but is fully integrated into offline life.

This integration has only been enhanced by the massive popularity of mobile technologies, particularly mobile phones, the latest generation of which allows almost perpetual contact with the world wide web, as well as with our friends, relatives, bosses and significant others. As a result, digital culture now involves more than merely sitting at a computer terminal, and studies of the information age have moved on from the preoccupation with internet studies to consider the pervasive use of mobile phones, the Internet of Things, and other wireless information communication technologies (ICTs). What this means practically is that this is not simply a book about internet studies, but a book that considers many wider forms of digital culture, including mobile communications technologies, surveillance, algorithms, ambient intelligence, gaming, big data and technological bodies (to name a few) within and beyond the internet, to demonstrate how digital technology in a broad sense is used within the wider contexts of everyday life.