Digital Culture and Social Media

Our ways of communicating have transformed drastically coming from house phones to being able to have 'FaceTime' with people across the world.  'FaceTime' meaning being able to talk to someone while being able to see their face through video all on your cell phone.  Perhaps the most important thing about these technologies and forms of communication is changing, we must be able to change and adapt to these new forms or we will be left behind in the previous era of technology that is more than likely to diminish. 

As the technology of our new media products change and transform, so do our relationships and how we use those forms of media.  Digital media is so easily transferable anywhere one wants to send it.  Our communication patterns and abilities have completely changed from 20, 10, even 3 years ago.  It is forever changing and if we don't want to be left behind we must adapt and be able to learn to use these new forms of 'new media'. 

Some of the ways digital culture appear in my life is definitely through school and research.  With so many classes in college, i must do research in order to gain more knowledge about the topic we are discussing or the paper i am writing.  In today's media world and new technologies, i am able to research through computers and data bases to find the answers or knowledge quickly rather than the traditional way of the library research.  Other uses of technology include: Televisions (HDTV), DVD (now transforming into Blu-Ray), CD (which everything is now available on my iPhone).  As you can see transformations in technology are continually changing.  A few years ago the flat screen television came out, then it was HDTV, and now they have came out with a 3D TV.  And not too long ago was the VHS player which evolved into the DVD player which movies could suddenly play on discs, now movies are evolving into what we call Blu-Rays (high definition movie players and discs that allow us to see a higher quality picture).  And of course, the Internet.  The Internet is the ultimate network that allows everyday people to research and communicate. 

In Glen Creeber and Royston Martin's Introduction and first chapter of their book, they compare 'old media' to modernism and 'New Media' to postmodernism.  Modernism being associated with the early phase of the industrial revolution and postmodernism being dealt with the changes along the way after the industrial revolution.  The context of modernism gives us a theoretical insight into the way in which the media was understood and the ideological impulses which influenced critical theories.  Roland Barthes famously used structuralism and semiotics to analyze mass culture.  He stated that even though structuralism helped further legitimate the study of mass culture and the media, his conclusions still suggested that the audiences were powerless to resist its hidden meanings.  Meaning that all the things the media was doing during the era of the industrial revolution, the people had no idea what forms the media and mass culture would evolve into.

We are still in the postmodernism era with digital culture and social media.  Everything tends to be recreated and transformed but made better.  Competitors in the business world takes the idea of someone else's product and essentially tries to recreate it and make it look better and the next new thing.  These new found forms of  digital culture and social media have sparked more competition throughout the business wold.