Digitised Culture

Quoted in November's issue of Wired UK, Zeynep Tufekci a sociologist at the University of Maryland, makes an increasingly relevant statement:

"As we leave behind the 20th century, it is almost as if we have come full circle back to the village where everyone potentially knows your business."

This is something that we've been talking about for quite a while in the office, in fact it's one of the first things we say when we introduce social media newbies to the art of digital communication - the media we are using to communicate may be 'new' but the actual way we communicating is pretty age-old. The Wired UK article states that social networks hark back to the days of village life, but I would argue that other aspects of social media, such as crowdsourcing and memes (as we now know them) could be much older still.

To illustrate this, let's go way back to the times of the ancient Greeks. Scholars of the ancient Greek oral tradition have long asserted that one of the most important pieces of literature in history started as a 'crowdsourced story'. Though attributed to 'Homer', The Iliad (or the story of the Trojan War) was shaped by the people who told it before it was finally scribed in hard copy format; the most popular additions to the story survived the test of time, less popular ones are now forgotten.

Although we aren't creating epics en-masse in today's world, what we are doing is shaping cultural trends and brands. mystarbucksidea.com (client) is a great example of this - those who have an interest in shaping Starbucks to their own designs can do so by participating. Like with The Iliad, the most popular ideas survive and are built into the company's strategy and those that are less popular do not usually see the light of day.

The Iliad was a meme of its time - numerous different storytellers in different places telling a very similar tale repeatedly over a period of time. In its day, one person heard the story from someone else and then went and told it to their own friends, who then told their other friends etc. It became the story everyone was telling and talking about and, as such, became viral.

This sounds remarkably similar to what we call memes in today's digital world, doesn't it? Remember when Rickrolling appeared everywhere? Or when LOLcats was at its height of popularity? Friends tell friends who tell more friends, just like how stories were relayed in the ancient oral tradition. These 'stories' tend to be shorter in length and longevity these days, but the way they are communicated are fundamentally the same.

What I'm trying to say here is that we shouldn't be claiming that digital communication provides us with a 'new way to communicate', but that recent technology developments enable us to return to an older - and probably more natural - way of communicating.