Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture

Within media theory the worldwide shift from a 19th-century print culture via a 20th-century electronic culture to a 21st-century digital culture is well documented. In this essay the emergence of a digital culture as amplified and accelerated by the popularity of networked computers, multiple-user software, and Internet is in-vestigated in terms of its principal components. A digital culture as an underdetermined praxis is conceptualized as consisting of participation, remediation, and bricolage. Using the literature on presumably “typical ” Internet phenomena such as the worldwide proliferation of independent media centers (indymedia) linked with (radical) online journalism practices and the popularity of…