DIGITAL CULTURE’S INFLUENCE ON THE INDIVIDUALS
DIGITAL CULTURE’S INFLUENCE ON THE INDIVIDUALS

Summary/Abstract: Public sphere in the Internet age is shaped by the change of traditional practices of information consumption. An online user is forced to act in order to participate. This is the active, information seeking media user model. World Wide Web is a gigantic external memory, able to store huge amounts of data that are allegedly available to anyone. Even if the use of books during five centuries made linear thinking the main reasoning manner, now it is gradually replaced by a multitask, nonlinear thinking, which is more rapid, more fluid and more superficial in the same time. Internet users who are relying on this external memory have a better data analysis capacity, but lack more and more the synthesis capacity. The gigantesque external memory favor citizens’ “source amnesia”: they know the information, but they forget its source (and consequently they don’t question the source’s credibility). These relations configure citizens’ both information consuming and producing practices in the virtual public space. This paper’s aim is to investigate how young educated adult cybercitizens consume and produce information in the virtual space.

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