Culture is a combination of human knowledge, beliefs, and norms of behavior that people adopt and then pass on to future generations. It is a critical socializing factor that regulates various spheres of human interaction – from everyday communication to the functioning of the global economy. Conventionality is a characteristic feature of everything related to culture. This is especially evident in the Internet environment when abstract rules of communication between users and symbols exist to a large extent only in this setting.
For Internet culture, it is pretty typical when the ways people interact on the Internet are reflected in their everyday lives. Suppose someone found out that there is a women’s movement against online trolling, which was discussed in this module, and the number of participants in this movement is growing significantly. In this case, it can be assumed that this person will be more likely to speak out against harassment in real life. In addition, some of the modern social movements have emerged on the Internet, such as #MeToo. Moreover, due to the Internet and social media, there is a change in the way people talk, as Garance Franke-Ruta’s article mentioned (2017). Culture does not stagnate but, on the contrary, is integrated into the Internet environment and adapts to it.
On the one hand, culture is the experience accumulated by humanity, and on the other hand, it is a method of transferring this experience. In turn, the Internet as a way of collecting and transmitting information is included in the structure of modern culture as its most crucial element. However, it is not just another way of storing experiences alongside, for example, patterns or values.
The current trend is that it also makes a significant change in the culture itself, in its content. The sources analyzed during this module indicate the existence of mutual influence between the two phenomena.
References
Franke-Ruta, G. (2017). Too close for comfort: How social media changed how we talk to (and about) each other in America. Yahoo News. Web.