Digital Cultures

  • Milad Doueihi
Harvard Univ. Press: 2011. 175 pp. £14.95/$19.95 9780674055247 | ISBN: 978-0-6740-5524-7

Respected intellectual historian Milad Doueihi describes himself as an “accidental digitician” — by his own admission more a user of information technology than a creator of it. Such people, he argues in Digital Cultures, are forging a new global culture. The impact of computers on our minds, bodies and societies is already far-reaching. Whether we like it or not, digital culture is permanently entrenched.

Doueihi, an expert on literacy, points out that the voices of historians have largely been missing from discussions of the Internet. By showing how modes of communication and human relationships have changed since its rise, he makes a persuasive case that digital culture has broken free from print culture, which extends from the Gutenberg Bible of the 1450s to the present. Instant response, brevity, minimal spelling and grammar, novel syntax and different modes of composition have created new forms of literacy.

As a consequence, the way we view our identity, citizenship and political selfhood has changed. Doueihi sees blogging as “one of the greatest success stories”. With the rise of online forums, everyone can communicate freely without publishers' intervention. As a result, we are more dedicated to the Internet than to any other civic cause, or even to our everyday work. As well as rich and poor, there is now another great social divide: between those with and without access to these web conversations.

In our online interactions, a new civility has emerged, along with the uncivilized behaviour — 'trollism' — that results from online anonymity. Urban dwellers blog more than those outside cities, and have created parallel cities in the blogosphere. And podcasts have reinvigorated the voice.

A blogger (left) for an Internet radio station in Egypt that fights intolerance towards divorced women. Credit: V. HAZOU/AFP/GETTY

Doueihi's argument for a culture shift rests on three components of the online world. One is its creation of an anthology. The digital culture, rather than creating long, sustained narratives, assembles fragments of material — but not into logical wholes. We invest everything in e-mail responses rather than saving up our thoughts for long letters or books. All these snippets can then be assembled by different readers in different ways.

Doueihi also briefly cites religion as a central aspect of any new culture, although he never explains what he means by the word 'religion'. He passes quickly on to the third component — group identity, arguing that we seem to have a greater craving for belonging than previous generations.

Digital group identity, says Doueihi, differs from previous print-based concepts in several ways: speed of communication, multiple numbers of readers instantly reached, and the assumption that everyone who receives your digital message is interested in what you say. But it has a downside. Someone who paid two shillings for a book in the eighteenth century worked a week to buy that book and wanted to own it. With so much to choose from, readers of blogs may never find an account of such value to them.

The new types of 'group belonging' arising on the Internet, through which people achieve personal popularity and find safety, are creating a new emotional comfort zone. This begs for a broader discussion of emotional, moral and other types of literacy, which Doueihi does not address. I also craved more knowledge about the interior world, especially the affective and emotional resonances of web users, many of whom are young.

Doueihi has sensitive antennae for the legal ramifications of the new digital culture, as his debates on intellectual property rights, security and related issues show; and he may be right that at the root of these controversies is the annihilation of the old conception of what it is to be an author. In the print culture, the author controls the material that is read; in the new culture the reader is empowered to contribute, as in the shared editing of Wikipedia.

Many historians will counter that aspects of print culture — such as sustained narrative and religions organized by ethnic and national identity — are not defunct. We may spend our time in global digital cities, but our passports are not yet shredded. Doueihi might reply that this is a matter of degree: some civic forms have changed more rapidly than others. Our expectation of what a book is remains the same.

Although Doueihi bypasses the scientific community as a specific case, the new digital literacy must have altered what it means to be a scientist, especially in terms of identity and group belonging. Celebrity culture among scientists has undeniably become more frenzied in recent decades. Yet the effect of the Internet on the process of doing science is more elusive. With thousands of electronic messages traversing a typical laboratory each day, it will be increasingly difficult for sociologists to disentangle how networks of people manufacture scientific facts, in comparison with earlier accounts such as Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's Laboratory Life (1979).

Written in the 'old' discursive format, Digital Cultures includes much to think about. The pace of change is fast, but Doueihi's insight is fresh.