Cultural challenges of the Internet

Evgeniy G. Tsurkan
Lomonosov Moscow State Uni­ver­si­ty

Cul­tur­al chal­lenges of the Inter­net

Abstract. This arti­cle ana­lyzes the cul­tur­al chal­lenges, which are con­se­quent to the emer­gence of a new infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy – the Inter­net. The pro­to­col struc­ture of the Inter­net has its own log­ic, which defines cer­tain forms of cre­ative activ­i­ty that net­work users can imple­ment. Clar­i­fi­ca­tion of the his­tor­i­cal con­text of cre­ation of the Inter­net pro­to­cols is the key to an ade­quate descrip­tion of the pro­to­col orga­ni­za­tion. While some forms of cre­ative activ­i­ty are encour­aged by net­work users, oth­ers have become illiq­uid in the net­work space and are going to the periph­ery of the net­work. This arti­cle aims to ana­lyze the cul­tur­al chal­lenges that the log­ic of net­work com­mu­ni­ca­tion bears. The author pur­sues the fol­low­ing tasks: to clar­i­fy the his­tor­i­cal con­text of cre­at­ing the fun­da­men­tal Inter­net pro­to­cols; to dis­cov­er and demon­strate the inter­con­nec­tion between the pro­to­col orga­ni­za­tion of the net­work and forms of the net­work com­mu­ni­ca­tion; to study the dom­i­nant cul­tur­al forms spe­cif­ic to the dig­i­tal space. The cur­rent prob­lem­at­ic and sta­ble net­work trends are the fol­low­ing: the free and open access to the infor­ma­tion; inabil­i­ty to enforce copy­right; dis­sem­i­na­tion of quan­ti­ta­tive cri­te­ria used to eval­u­ate the qual­i­ty of con­tent; replace­ment of the expert com­mu­ni­ty by the «wis­dom of the crowds»; destruc­tion of the estab­lished cul­tur­al hier­ar­chy, as well as the con­stant accel­er­a­tion of infor­ma­tion exchange. The arti­cle also aims to describe the inter­de­pen­dence between these phe­nom­e­na. The method­olog­i­cal basis of the research includes the dig­i­tal method of ana­lyz­ing the cul­ture of soft­ware cre­ation and usage, as well as the con­tent analy­sis and the media analy­sis.

Key­words: Inter­net, soft­ware, pro­to­col orga­ni­za­tion, copy­right, nobrow, wis­dom of crowds.

DOI: 10.5840/dspl20181450

Acknowl­edge­ments

The pub­li­ca­tion was pre­pared with the sup­port of the Russ­ian Foun-dation for Basic Research No. 18–011-00980 «“Social evo­lu­tion” and “progress” as cat­e­gories of nomo­thetic cog­ni­tion».

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