Does Internet Culture Reflect Real-Life Culture?

MC7019: Week 7 Blog

Credit: It's an internet meme... there is no credit 🥴

The first question that Dr. Porter asked us at the start of the semester was, "Is life online real?" This question is constantly asked by mass communication scholars and students like us in seminar classes at universities. We talked about how social media to an extent is real life, but users tend to portray the best of themselves on platforms rather than their offline, candid selves. Our class concluded that our online selves are just a part of us, but not all of us. But even beyond thinking about the online v. offline lives of users, Dr. Porter's question makes me wonder to what extend does internet culture reflect real-life culture. Is internet culture an authentic reflection, extension or representation of our society's culture? Do we want scholars hundreds of years from now to analyze our Twitter memes and think, "Mmm yes, this is how people living in 2020 thought about COVID-19." Maybe to some extent those tweets are a true reflection of how we as a society thought about the pandemic (especially how we make light of the situation). However, as we have discussed before, only a few users actually lead and shape conversations online. How applicable is cultural data analytics to "real-life" culture?

Scholar Katrin Tiidenberg discusses the difficulty in defining cultural data analytics as a research term. Culture itself is defined in numerous ways, referring to a way of life, beliefs, ideas, artifacts, language, symbols, traditions and so much more. Scholars want to study both practices and texts, but sometimes that is difficult to do when the society you're studying existed thousands of years ago. Data is also difficult to define, as it is usually referred to as either a natural force to be controlled or as a resource to be consumed. Cultural data, therefore, is best defined as the "process and outcomes of the datafication of culture," according to Tiidenberg. With this definition, online data such as likes, follows and retweets demonstrate the values of our culture today. That data are tangible numbers that can be put into context of the conversation, image, meme, etc. that is being circulated. However, Tiidenberg points out that mega-million dollar corporations such as Google and Facebook own this data and use it for political economy. Consequently, the data that these companies collect is what holds value to them to increase their profits rather than what may hold value to us, the users. In short, online culture is governed by corporations' interests and agendas more than our personal, cultural values.

For example, internet memes are often talked about as a taste of culture online. Although many viral memes are created by independent users, media companies and professional meme-makers also flood social media with strategically created memes. The latter set the agenda for what jokes and videos are going to be talked about the most, not just users. This phenomenon goes back to the idea that corporations shape and define the appearance of culture online more than individual users. The buzz isn't real - it was strategically crafted to appear genuine. As professional meme-maker Ka5sh says,

"...[companies] want everyone to think that that [topic] has a lot of buzz around them and other people making memes about them, but it's really just me making a whole bunch of them and they're being dispersed throughout different accounts."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9PmA5j3EXg

As a result, I believe that cultural data analytics cannot and should not be taken as a completely accurate and reliable representation of "real-life" culture. Not only do corporations and media companies help shape the value of the data that's being extracted, but also only a small number individuals actually lead the conversations online. Many people are not on social media or, if they are, aren't very active on social media. I may have misinterpreted her words, but Tiidenberg made it seem like culture is only found in data. I do agree that researchers need to study social media and online behaviors - memes really do tell us a lot about hot topics - but we must realize that the data is not completely representative of everyone in society and our culture. Many people who participate in cultural practices in the real world don't participate in them online. We can't miss out on their participation just because we think the internet holds the most tangible way for us to study culture.