1. Digital culture – a shared space for citizens-users-consumers Intercultural Dialogue and Digital Culture - Zagreb, 20-21 November 2008 Aleksandra Uzelac, Institute for International Relations,Zagreb, Croatia

2. From Culture to Digital culture • digital culture • virtual culture • cyberculture • e-culture • internet culture • new media • convergence culture

3. “words communication or information … refer to the essence of community and human relations” (Pasquali, 2003: 198). information as a non-rival good - “its consumption by one person does not make it any less available for consumption by another” (Benkler, 2006) “Information contents are cultural products” … “information is a part of a society’s cultural fabric”. (Hamelink, 2003: 124). “ to communicate refers to a process of sharing, making common or creating a community” (Hamelink, 2003: 155). the transmission view of communication- messages are transmitted and distributed in space; the ritual view of communication -the maintenance of society in time through the representation of shared beliefs within a community . (Carey, 1992) “each society constantly recreates itself through communication by constantly redefining its collective reality, its culture” and “culture is a memory, collective memory, dependent on communication for its creation, extension, evolution and preservation” (Foresta, Mergier, Serexhe, 1995: 19). Culture as information and communication

4. Technology - enabler of (digital) culture • all technologies intervene in the human environment and modify it to a certain extent, thus changing the conditions of existence of different cultures. So it could be said that technology affects and reflects particular societal shifts.

5. Communication technologieshave significantinfluence, for the way they are used can affect changes in the essence of our communicational and cultural patterns. Technologies related to information and communication cannot be viewed as passive instruments, but rather as interactive systems that radically modify our cognitive capacities (Dascal, 2006). Technology does not just linearly cause certain effects, but in combination with many other elements it “ creates conditions of possibility that suggest possible futures rather than determine them” (Hawk and Rieder, 2008: xvii). Communication technologies – from tool to social ecology

6. Networked reality • the networked information economy - in which peer production and sharing have a significant role – it results in diversity of information and perspectives. • the networked public sphere- in which many more individuals can communicate their viewpoints and observations to many others “in a way that cannot be controlled by media owners and is not as easily corruptible by money as were the mass media”. (Benkler, 2006)

7. Engaging space • “Attention in the networked environment is more dependent on being interesting to an engaged group of people than it is in the mass-media environment, where moderate interest to large numbers of weakly engaged viewers is preferable” (Benkler, 2006: 13).

8. Participatory aspects of digital culture • participatory platforms – newways of social and political engagement and quick, ad-hoc reactions to current issues • social, political and cultural (i.e. non-market) motivations prevail over market-based ones

9. Social production and cultural sector • Social production presents new sources of competition for cultural and media industries producing information goods. • New context - cultural professionals are put in a situation in which they are (more or less) sharing control with users. • Users claim the right to use and re-use existing information and cultural expressions that are available in the digital environment

10. Opportunities for intercultural communication • Building shared spaces • Engaging users • Building knowledge resources that everyone can contribute to and share • Scripting different forms of solidarity into the mainstream system

11. Thank you for your attention! Aleksandra Uzelac Institute for International Relations Zagreb, Croatia auzelac@irmo.hr