The new human context

Collaboration spéciale
Andrea Goldman, PHD U.S.

Dust off your anthro books. Professor Michael Wesch’s video about the cultural implications of the Web forces us to start questioning how we can better understand our rapidly evolving society.

The web is transforming the traditional components of society, not by content, but by form. From the beginning, the Internet existed as a separate entity for business, communication, and information—a real second and separate life. But it continued to proliferate, and now our world and the virtual world are no longer two separate spheres, but bleeding into one another so that the everyday tangible is a reaction to the virtual.

Is this the birth of a new digital society? It has all the components of one, including a separate and highly evolved language—html. Professor Wesch’s propensity to apply ethnography to the digital realm certainly suggests so. Digital ethnographers are tasked to move beyond geographic boundaries and explore what the virtual culture says about our society. Again evidence that the social center is shifting to the virtual world.

What does this mean for us?
As media professionals we are poised to be pioneers in this new and increasingly intangible territory. We are challenged to negotiate communication between these two worlds that are rapidly becoming one. Forced to question issues that are beyond dayparts or CPM, we face concerns, as suggested in the video, about ethics and identity. These concerns are bigger than just the media context; they innately have human context.