How I (Kayla) Have Come to Understand Digital Culture

As a 21-year-old college student, it's easy to think that I was just born digital (and therefore don't need to make a focused study of digital culture). But while I may be a technology native in some ways, some of the main concepts of our study of digital culture have been new to me, or at least my conscious mind, this semester. I think everything can be tied back to interactivity and Web 2.0.

Now, things on the Internet are a lot less passive. We don't just consume, we also create and connect. My own project on citizen journalism grew out of this concept in a way. Since anyone can create content, I started to wonder how the crowd assigns value. It depends on the way we connect. Does an article shared through a social media platform have more value than one you find through an established news source? Sometimes, it does. You can see this series of blog posts to see the evolution of my thoughts from wondering about how we assign value to considering the pros and cons of assigning high value to citizen journalism to creating my guide to best practices in citizen journalism.

My project wasn't the only one that deals with creating and connecting in digital culture, however. In fact, it's hard to find a project that doesn't do that. In the beginnings of Kelsey's project, she realized how important metadata was and how applying tags really helped in searches. If creators are aware of their connections and users when they make their content, everything ends up being a lot more helpful for everyone. Amber created a blog of Moby Dick that took the static content of Moby Dick (think Web 1.0) and reformed it into something completely different (and with some elements of interactivity at that).

Even topics we highlighted in class all come back to the ideas of Web 2.0. We talked about LDS General Conference and the different ways people connected over the content. The hashtag #ldsconf trended around the world and people collaboratively shared notes in real time. Exploring these new ways of sharing gets people really excited. I remember when I first saw this video on the launch of a homemade spacecraft. My dad showed me and said, "Look, Kayla! You can see the curvature of the earth!" Things that excite people inspire them to create instead of simply consume. They see that even amateurs can make a device that can view the curvature of the earth.

As my fellow classmates and others in the digital world today have noticed, content gets better when more people contribute to it. There really is a wisdom to the crowd. Things that would have been impossibly large before become manageable when crowdsourced.

Web 2.0, besides being the basis for many of the digital culture concepts we covered during the semester, has also led to the improvement of the way the Internet serves us. There is so much we can learn from each other, and online interactivity lets everyone share their expertise (even for free!). Sometimes we criticize new technology and the media, but we shouldn't--if anything, now we are only criticizing ourselves.