Digital Cultures

The term “digital cultures” indicates the life styles, practices, artifacts, production and consumption modes, and systems of communication and meaning that largely characterize our contemporary way of life, deeply influenced by digital and computer technology. The debate over digital cultures appears to revolve around some key questions: whether they represent a radical break with what has preceded them; whether they derive from and are determined by the very existence of digital technology (so called “technological determinism”); and the effects of virtuality on “self construal”. In any event, the “network society” seems to function as a magnifier, amplifying the cultural ambivalence and social contradictions that already characterized classic modernity.