What is "Digital" Culture?

“Digital” culture refers to the movement of information and the written word from a “print” era to a “post-print” era. This means that information is no longer fixed in one place at one time, only available to the person that has the book or newspaper in their hands, but it is available simultaneously across the globe to all people at all times whether it’s a newspaper, a novel or a magazine. To be a “digital” culture not only refers to the switch from a printed, physical page to a digital one (analogue to digital) but there is also a shift in the way that information becomes published, transferred, interacted with and stored across multiple languages, continents and servers. This is best described by Mark Poster, author of “Authors Analogue and Digital” who says that “the change from print to computer writing requires a material change in the trace, in the way writing enters the world, circuits through it, and is stored in it” (78).

Information was long printed in analogue form, meaning it was a physical thing, able to be touched and handled by people. It also meant that the information stored on those pages was only available at one time to the person holding the book or magazine. No matter how many copies were printed of that specific piece of literature, the only person who could access it at one time was the person holding it in their hands. “There is no escape from this characteristic, one that drastically limits the inscription of print in time and space” (81). Switching to become a “digital” culture means that information is no longer available in such a fixed and limited form. The information is suddenly transcribed into binary and sent around the world to be accessed by people in all parts of the world, all of whom, if they wished, could read and absorb the information simultaneously rather than waiting to check out a book or borrow it from the person in front of them.

But not only is information made completely accessible world-wide, it is also made available to people who wish to interact with the texts. Websites allow anyone to post news or blogs to their pages, people can jump in and edit such informational sites as Wikipedia.com, and text can be revised by its authors indefinitely, rather than existing in one, unchangeable analogue form. Poster describes this interaction as one that “…loses the assurance of their spatial continuity. Pages of digital text have the stability of liquid” (92). This means that texts found on the internet or in digital form can be repeatedly and endlessly edited, giving no assurance that a text will truly ever be finished.

However, this fluidity that Poster mentions, is another result of the switch from analogue to digital. Authors are suddenly springing up everywhere, posting stories to such sites as Fictionpress.com, Fanfiction.net, Blogger.com and others. Suddenly becoming a published author is no longer a painstaking process of mailing out manuscripts, waiting for rejection or acceptance and then if accepted, the costly print fees with no guarantee that the book will even make money. Instead, anyone can post their stories anywhere, with no cost to them and instantly knowing that their stories could reach a global audience, as it is available to one the moment one puts it on a website. This also highlights the problem of authorship. What is there to stop a person from “copying and pasting” another person’s words into their story and claiming it as their own? What happens when two similar stories are published at the same time under no copyright laws?

Though digital culture does allow infinite access to multiple levels of information, it also has to deal with a few issues, such as re-writing copyright laws, the problem of authorship and the fluidity and ever-changing nature of digital texts.