Inculture Media Insight

Mobile phones and laptops are today the everyday essentials we do not want to leave home without. Compressing time and space has become an un-reflected act. The resulting transparency and accessibility dissolves the boundaries between public and private domains and constantly integrates new realms of discourse. A workspace is no longer necessarily a designated place in an office, a school or at a university but a comfortable sofa at home, a table in a café or a bench in a park. Airplanes and trains are equipped to allow us to work and be connected while travelling. We pass through landscapes and fly over mountains and cities but perceive and navigate the world through our technological devices rather than our senses. Our social relationships are increasingly sustained and nourished by our digitally extended selves rather than by personal encounters. Social media platforms allow virtual but dynamic social structures to overlap corresponding real life structures and arrangements. These structures are reciprocally influenced and influence. Social life becomes hence increasingly virtual, accessible and updated. Social media platforms also make the creation of a virtual self possible by manifesting a chosen identity through the pictures we post and the stories we write about our lives, including social as well as personal experiences. Inculture Media Insight is an ethnographic project which aims to increase the understanding of how we view the world and our social relationships through the lens of digital technology: to extend our knowledge about the impact of continued, advanced and refined digitalization on functional, social and symbolic values and concepts like time, space, distance, identity, friendship, social intimacy, education and learning.