Week 9: Culture of Connectivity

Week 9: Culture of Connectivity

Van Dijck uses the world's largest photo sharing website Flickr as an example to demonstrate the 'Culture of Connectivity' - a post-broadcast, networked culture where social interactions and cultural products are inseparably entangled in technological systems.
It is stated that social media platforms such as Flickr are promoted as a 'collective effort' where users form relationships and establish communal experiences, leading to collective memories. 

There is the notion that sharing photos leads to collective perspectives, experiences and memory.

Hoskins’s three concepts

1) The notion of a technological unconscious

Hoskins suggests that there is a technological unconscious that leads to a co-evolution of memory and technology. This technological unconscious involves powerful digital environments that are operated without the knowledge of those who use these environments and those affected by them.

Flickr’s metadata and statistical analyses can track users’ preferences AND stimulate users into engaging in particular group behavior or group formation

→ We are in a way controlled by the social media platforms. We unconsciously upload pictures to social media sites and link up to others, which leads to contributing to the data that interpret our patterns of judgment and shared perspectives.

2) Connectivity vs Collectivity

He thinks about the notion of the ‘collective’ in an anthropological perspective; he states that collective memory is the result of individual minds meeting one way or another. On the contrast, networked memory requires a new understanding of agency where minds and technics are intertwined (3). Thus, Hoskins believes the end of collective memory because of the transformation of the very basis of future memory. And he proposes the term ‘connectivity’ as the meaning of memory has been reinvented by connectivity and intertwining shared memories.

3) The continuous present of mediatized memory

Hoskins states that as memories are mediated and thus constructed by networked technologies, we cannot create a boundary between present and past; instead, there will be a constant connectivity of people and digital networks, which constitutes memory’s condition. 

As outlined by Hoskins, connections are made and social media sites such as Flickr allow these connections to be constructed. It was interesting to learn that such social media platforms are embedded in a culture of connectivity where social networking sites are involved in our daily lives, where we may share photos or exchange memories or stories of the past. I agreed with the fact that "individuals articulate their identities as social beings by uploading photographs to document their lives; they appear to become part of a social community through photographic exchanges and this, in turn, shapes how they watch the world" (2).