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In this revised and expanded second edition, taking account of new developments such as Facebook and the iPhone, Charlie Gere charts in detail the history of digital culture, as marked by responses to digital technology in art, music, design, film, literature and other areas

In light of the existing copyright system and the latest developments of the law of the European Union (with a special focus on the authors' home country, Hungary) and the United States, the article tries to answer whether and how the phenomena of Web 2.0 and P2P ("peer-to-peer" filesharing), the digitization for cultural preservation, and several other special technologies affect the culture of our age. This article argues that the several different usages influence the culture in three main ways: it can improve, preserve or deteriorate the culture. Naturally, it is hard to determine, if a use is either right or wrong. For example, P2P filesharing services are generally used for illegal purposes, despite the fact that the technology has several positive effects. Vice versa: one example of Web 2.0, YouTube, collects millions of home videos created by "average users". However, episodes of copyrighted TV shows or sports events are also accessible on the YouTube servers. Similarly, the Google Books Project impressively aims to preserve and provide access to millions of books in digital form. However, the original plan to execute the project raised legitimate copyright and competition law concerns, and so it sheds another light on Google. To sum up: only time will tell, whether a technological innovation or use will result in the improvement of culture or contribute to the deterioration of it. Due to the technological revolution almost all areas of life have undergone a major transformation in the past few decades. Digital technologies earned a vital role in this reform, since they made time, space and energy saving activities possible through replacing analogue technologies.2 Digital technology heavily affected intellectual creative activity as well. The spread of digital technologies have had at least two important consequences: first, intellectual creations may be copied and changed without limitation and without changing the quality.3 Second, due to the evolution of digital networks the distribution of, access to, and the forming of an opinion on accessible works has changed too: it has become easier, faster and more effective – both in time and in place. The traditional forms of human communication have been generally changed as well. Nowadays, people cannot imagine their life without digital technologies. Social networking sites, chat rooms, blogs, podcasts, e-newspapers, or streaming of TV or radio programs are great examples. The evolution of an entirely new digital culture is apparent. Intellectual creative activity has become something of a norm in our everyday lives. It would appear that besides the traditional copyright paradigm a new copyright conception emerges, where the user-generated content earns great importance.4 Due to the mass creation of works of literature, musical and audiovisual works, and photographs the respect of copyright law and intellectual creativity has partially disappeared. The young digital generations – by lack of a better example – may feel that easier, faster and cheaper accessible materials do not have any monetary value. The article starts with an introduction that introduces three separate effects of digital technologies upon the improvement, preservation, and deterioration of digital culture. Part two discusses the phenomena of Web 2.0, i.e. the way internet users communicate via the World Wide Web and contribute to culture at the same time. This part makes it clear that the present copyright rules are capable of solving the legal controversies raised by Web 2.0. Part three reflects upon the controversial question of file sharing. The article concludes that though file sharing may have several positive effects, it is clear that it the application is generally used for illegal activities, and therefore has a remarkable negative effect upon the entertainment industry and culture. Part four introduces the topic of digitization of already existing works, and emphasizes that there are several major differences between the existing copyright regimes of the European Union, the United Kingdom, Hungary and the United States. The author proposes consideration on whether it is necessary to broaden current statutory rules on digitization by libraries, in order to allow for the much broader preservation and making available of the valuable cultural heritage of our world. Based upon this logical line of events the article will continue to introduce the main effects of digital technologies upon the culture: the improvement, the deterioration and the preservation of culture.

"In December 2012, the exuberant video 'Gangnam Style' became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video: 'Mitt Romney Style, ' 'NASA Johnson Style, ' 'Egyptian Style, ' and many others. 'Gangnam Style' (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the Web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, the author investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture. She discusses a series of well-known Internet memes, including 'Leave Britney Alone, ' the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's 'We Are the 99 Percent.' She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization. Memes, the author argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book the author makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously."--Provided by publisher.

This dissertation is a theoretical study of the role of virality/virulence as a predominant technological term in the reproduction of social and cultural information in the digital age. I argue that viral media are not new phenomena, only the name is new. Media have always behaved as viruses; it is only when they become hyper-intensified in digital technology that their virulent function surfaces in language and culture. The project examines processes of self-replication and evolution undergone by various new media phenomena as they relate back to the global profusion of social networks, data centers, and cybernetic practices. Drawing from several contributions in media theory, political and social theory, and critical media studies, I argue that digital media have a hyper-intensifying effect on whatever objects, subjects, or realities they mediate or represent; thus networked societies are virulently swarmed by their own signs and images in information. Through an examination of three primary categories of digital proliferationlanguage, visuality, and sexualityI situate digital culture in a framework of virulence, arguing that the digital may be best understood as an effect of cultural hyper-saturation and implosion. I argue that virulent media networking processes come to constitute a powerful cybernetic system, which renders the human subject a mere function in its global operations. Lastly, I begin to develop a political critique of cybernetics, claiming that the proliferation of information, digital media, and communicative/representational technologies in the contemporary world emerges through an intensified ideological, economic, social, cultural, and metaphysical framework of productivism. This intensification engenders a system, or series of communicational circuits, whereby all techno-subjective activities are strategically stimulated, networked, recorded, and algorithmically appropriated to strengthen and reproduce 1) a global productivist system of cybernetics; 2) The material and ideological conditions for such a system to exist and thrive; 3) limitless virtual and digital production. ; Ph. D.

Geographies of digital culture: an introduction / Tilo Felgenhauer and Karsten Gäbler -- Telegraphy and global space / Roland Wenzlhuemer -- Using social media as big data source for research : the example of ambient geospatial information (AGI) in tourism geography / Michael Bauder -- Regionalization revisited : mediatization of translocal social practices and the spatial reconfiguration of life in rural-urban Bangladesh / Harald Sterly -- The everyday reality of a digitalizing world : driving and geocaching / Mike Duggan -- The emerging hegemony of cybernetic class n realities : the non-place of Generation Z / Paul Montuoro and Margaret Robertson -- From map-reading to geobrowsing : methodological reconsiderations for geomedia / Pablo Abend -- Digital divides in the 21st century United States / Barney Warf -- The diffusion of information technologies in the Brazilian banking system and the indebtedness of low-income population / Fabio Bertioli Contel -- Digital health mapping : big data utilization and user involvement in public health surveillance / Annika Richterich.