I came into this class knowing a good amount about digital
culture already. I had taken a course from Dr. Burton before in which he
emphasized academic blogging and using social networks for social discovery and
social proof. I had already been researching and writing about videogames as
art and literature for a while. However, what I really took away from this
class is a view of the truly digital world we’re now living in. That world is
open, complex, beautiful, even though in many ways not exactly new.
The new digital world I saw through this class is open in
more ways than I thought. It’s open access, open opportunity, and largely open-armed.
I learned a ton about copyright law and the complex issues of fair use and creative
commons that I hadn’t understood before as I saw just how much information
really is entirely open and free to be accessed through the internet, and how
much creative content is being made open source for anyone to use and add to or
adjust (the Linux operating system, for example, or Wikipedia). Our lectures on
crowdsourcing were especially eye-opening to me because I hadn’t understood just
how complex, powerful, and beautiful projects done asynchronously by people
from all over the world could turn out to be, like Eric Whitacare's virtual choir. I saw
also a wider range of opportunity provided by the internet as we talked about
the do-it-yourself movement and maker culture, as well as e-publishing, social
networks, and tinkering. This especially hit home to me in the video we watched
of a homemade space craft. I also saw how open-armed the digital culture really
can be as we talked about all the different opportunities to share undergraduate research, and how communities can and have formed around almost any topic somewhere
on the Internet. I especially felt these three aspects of digital culture—open access,
open opportunity, and open-armed—as I started my own blog to collect my
thoughts on videogames and ultimately published with one blog and am now in the works with two others. In gathering resources to put in my writing, in
collecting and forming my own thoughts, and in working with other people
through the internet to get my ideas out there and receiving feedback, I have
seen digital culture at work in all three of these meanings of the word “open.”
Two students who have
especially helped me take my understanding of digital culture even further as I’ve
gone throughout this course are, unsurprisingly, the other two students in my
blogging group, Greg Bayles and Aleesha Bass. Greg showed me how the three
meanings of open in the digital world can become the foundations for an
entirely new kind of civilization—how real human organizations can exist
entirely within the digital world, and how most physical organizations are
becoming increasingly digital as well. Aleesha helped me see how our digital
activity reflects our true identity in a clearer way than I ever had before. As
I went through the course, I understood more about how our online actions
express our identity, but as Aleesha looked specifically at Pinterest and we
talked about it together, even concluding that one could tell the personality
and major life events of a person based on their Pinterest boards alone,
something clicked in my brain and I saw just how our digital selves connect to
our real selves in a clearer way than I ever had before.
I’ve truly seen a whole new world throughout the course of
this class. Even though our readings of Moby
Dick have proven that the concepts, issues, and foundational ideas of the
digital world certainly aren’t new, new technologies are allowing us to take
those ideas and concepts and deal with those issues in bigger, faster, and
deeper ways than we ever have before. It truly is a brave new—digital—world.
