Networked cultural processes. Perspectives for a digital cultural policy
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The issue of culture in the context of web 2.0 has become a cliché that is pitted against various obstacles.
The first of these obstacles is tautological, given the intrinsically cultural dimension of the web 2.0 concept. Discussions on the phenomenon – in its favour or against it, revolutionary or opportunistic, marketing strategy or new paradigm – often base their arguments on technical issues that debate the characteristics of the tools that make them possible. Second-generation applications that are user-friendly, interactive, etc and which, in short, have allowed the average Internet user to take an active part in something that has accompanied digital culture since its origins: collaboration and the decentralised exchange of knowledge.
The second obstacle is the idea of culture from which the question is addressed: culture as a finished product or, on the contrary, as a process in constant evolution. Digital culture is often identified with the set of digital cultural assets, i.e. with cultural content and digital media, as if both of the latter - media and content - were autonomous dimensions. Process-based approaches, on the contrary, insist that culture as a phenomenon occurs in a socially dynamic context in which media, contents, agents and uses permanently negotiate links of meaning that can never be considered to be finished.
rom this perspective, the problem is not if web 2.0 is intrinsically different, but to what extent the new possibilities for interaction – indicated by this particularly successful meme – can alter our behavioural habits, both on and offline. In other words, how they can create culture.