What is "digital" culture?

A new and intriguing idea known as “digital” culture is something that can be difficult to define. This new mode of reading and writing, publishing and distributing, and production and consumption though cannot be defined without the arguments of certain essay writers such as John Locke, Karl Marx, David Hume, Mark Poster, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, and Mark Amerika. Out of all of these writers, the oldest essay, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” written in 1690 by John Locke is one of the most important because it lays out the beginning beliefs for specifically Enlightenment thinkers, but all other thinkers as well. Locke challenges previous beliefs and ideas by producing revolutionary ideas, and proves himself and his ideas worthy at the time.

During Locke’s time, there was an assumed belief that everyone is born into the world already having a full knowledge. Locke worried about the thought that we never asked the question, “why?” Locke was an intelligent man who presented the idea that our ideas actually come from experience. This idea was quite revolutionary at the time, be he provided evidence to show the fact that human beings do acquire ideas, and Locke shows us how in his essay.

According to Locke, experience can be broken down into two parts; sensation and reflection. In Locke’s essay, he believes the first part of experience is sensation. Sensation can be defined as the qualities that the five senses take in. Sensations are interactions with the world, and they are based on a relationship with an objective world. The sensation creates an immediate reaction for the human beings, and it affects the second part of experience which is reflection.

As the second part of experience, reflection is when a human being steps back to make sense of our sensations. A reflection would follow after a sensation and act as a learning encounter and an event which one might write about. As a sensation acts as a result of our senses, the reflection acts as a result of our minds. After a human being goes through a sensation and reflection, they then have had an experience. The outcome of an experience leads us to believe that what we know, we know is because of what we learned and experience.

John Locke was one of the first to challenge the belief that “men have native ideas and original characters stamped upon their minds in their very first being,” which he quoted in his essay. Locke, now, has proved that experience is the way that we acquire out ideas. Locke’s idea created and laid a foundation for other essay writers such as Marx and Poster to help the world define and understand the “digital” culture.