(Portugal, 2007) mentions that culture is the base and foundation of who we are. This exists in us from the moment we are born and is the moral and intellectual contribution of our parents at first and of our environment later.
It is important to know that the peoples of the world, from their foundation, are developing their culture, which is reflected in their ways of life, social organization, philosophy and spirituality; ethical and legal regulations; art, science and technology; economy and commerce, education; historical memory, language and literature among others.
Finally, the author María Portugal defines culture as everything, material or immaterial (beliefs, values, behaviors and concrete objects), that identifies a certain group of people, and they arise from their experiences in a certain reality. In other words, culture is the way in which human beings develop our life and build the world or the part where we live; therefore, culture is development, intellectual or artistic. It is civilization itself.
Next, two important definitions of the term “culture” will be mentioned from the point of view of different sciences:
For Sociology, culture is the set of environmental stimuli that generate the socialization of the individual.
For Philosophy, culture is the set of creative productions of man that transform the environment and this in turn affects modifying that.
On the other hand, we find that (Salazar, 2001), argues that culture is understood as a symbolic system of communication built by societies in a given time and space and in constant dynamism allows us to approach the contemporary world and make a reading of how Today's societies or groups are permanently building communication systems through various symbols, and that their cultural references are the product of a history of permanent changes, they are a memory of their lives. Through culture, each society defines its own way of being, of having its identity, but in the contemporary world and within a vision of the world system, intercultural processes occur with a certain frequency and diversity,allowing the permanent construction of new cultures or the rearticulation of existing ones.
Therefore, we can argue that the term "culture" is a system that is made up of all the experiences that surround us, both external and internal, and is reflected through our way of life, organization, social, identity, technology and economy, to name a few. However, currently, with the use of technology, borders and barriers that previously existed in the entire world have been eliminated, giving way to intercultural processes that, given their frequency and diversity, allow the construction of new " cultures ”, such as“ digital culture ”, which will be analyzed in this article.
DIGITAL AGE
(Marín, 2010) argues that, in the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution marked the evolution of man understood as a social and cultural entity. The arrival of the digital age and, with it, new technologies, has generated unprecedented technological growth, motivating people to speak of the Second Industrial Revolution in certain areas. This technological era has not only favored an improvement in the quality of services, but a spectacular increase in their diversity. Thus, the implementation of these new technologies is manifesting itself on what has been called an industrial society, giving rise to what we currently know as the information or knowledge society.
That the techniques implemented by this new digital stage constitute a set of technologies whose applications open up a wide range of possibilities for human communication. The synergistic nature of new technologies will mark the production and communication processes of our era worldwide, called the Digital Revolution. Thus, the telecommunications sectors lose their autonomous and independent character in favor of flexibility, and the old autonomous technological subdivisions dissolve, making multidisciplinary contacts and collaborations mandatory.
The influence exerted by the computer media in all the processes and phases of communication of the current media includes the recording, manipulation, storage and distribution of information, whether in the form of texts, still images or moving images, sound or space constructions. Consequently, just as energy was the engine of the Industrial Revolution, information is the axis on which this technological revolution revolves.
In this context (Marín, 2010) argues that in this context where technology and the mass media meet, a new economic, productive and social model is established that supposes the appearance of industries, professional profiles and economic models hitherto unknown.
So the technology industry and the media must rethink their role, always bearing in mind the need, and the mandatory nature, of intersectoral cooperation to reach the end user in the framework of new communication technologies.
Hence, the need arises to analyze the scope and magnitude of social changes, which are the result of the adoption and immersion of the aforementioned technologies.
Currently, we live in a context of technological innovation where we find a general transformation of the media, supports and information channels. The jump from analog to digital constitutes a new configuration of the media, as well as a change of mentality, in processes and modes.
The Digital Age opens new possibilities that were previously inconceivable, it can be seen how the coexistence of different technologies not only determines new technical advances, but they evolve into new forms and modes. With the implementation of digital systems and new information technologies, a redefinition of traditional media has taken place.
In this way, technological advance must always be linked to social progress, opening doors to new horizons of knowledge and guaranteeing the intellectual maturity of societies.
(Elgezabal, 2016) exposes that the Digital Age has brought us much more resources of knowledge about social realities than the analog age (era of the mass media and cultural industries with massive sales of books, records or audiovisuals) and in which relatively small and specialized elites managed knowledge and public opinion.
DIGITAL CULTURE
(Gómez, 2008) mentions that digital culture is an increasingly used name to refer to new cultural practices based on digital technology. The anthropological study on this topic began in the United States and Europe, when important cultural consequences began to be noticed, being one of the pioneering researchers Nicholas Negroponte, who published a key book to reflect on this phenomenon. This author has relaunched interest in reflecting on the impact of obstetrics on modern societies.
The concept of 'digital culture' is encompassing various themes and two aspects that have important differences are often mixed. The first aspect refers to the fact of incorporating digital instruments and tools into our lives. The other aspect, which we often integrate into the first, has to do with the culture derived from what we know as a knowledge society that stains social relations, knowledge generation models and production processes.
Another pioneering study was by Sherry Turkle (1997), who alerted us to how the internet impacted our senses of identity and privacy, including the consequences of anonymity. She studied how a very high percentage of people who entered the chat at that time lied about their sex, age, physical characteristics or income, and that this was not an isolated phenomenon.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, digital culture began to be considered an object of anthropological study, due to its effects on national, local and individual identities, in language, in addition to the social, political and legal consequences regarding to the use of new media.
The great contribution of anthropology in the immediate future must be directed towards the study and analysis of digital culture. The anthropologist will have to study and analyze the social and cultural values that are part of the digital world, that in the social inclusion plans of development cooperation, the social and cultural values of individuals and groups are taken into account so as not to provoke traumatic actions. And, secondly, in the digital world, which is beginning to take on a parallel existence, it is generating a whole system of specific relationships, structures, values and behaviors and it will be necessary to study them, both with the codes of the digital world itself and in the relationships that are establish with the real world and assess the influence and aspects that are established in these two systems.
Some characteristics that we want to propose to tackle the study of digital culture are:
- Digital culture develops in a global ecosystem. Globality is the first concept and this makes us adopt radically different attitudes, ties and social guidelines to those we know so far. This global ecosystem moves in a multicultural environment. The second characteristic to keep in mind is multiculturalism in a scenario that is not exempt from confrontation. Digital culture is generated on a specific technology that shortens broadcast-reception times and is interactive. Hence the success of dynamic portals versus static ones that maintain the same information. Digital culture becomes constructivist and with a strong participatory character. The products that move over the network are elaborated, defined, destroyed and rebuilt by the citizens and groups themselves.Digital culture unfolds in an accelerated change that has become one of its most defining signs of identity. What is worth today may be obsolete tomorrow. The products that are produced, therefore, will adapt to this characteristic. Let's not forget the great success of short videos on portals like YouTube. Society is not entirely permeable to digital culture, at least in these years, It requires a knowledge base and the acquisition of basic skills that limits its universalization. Therefore, it is necessary to generate those favorable environments that were previously discussed.Let's not forget the great success of short videos on portals like YouTube. Society is not entirely permeable to digital culture, at least in these years, It requires a knowledge base and the acquisition of basic skills that limits its universalization. Therefore, it is necessary to generate those favorable environments that were previously discussed.Let's not forget the great success of short videos on portals like YouTube. Society is not entirely permeable to digital culture, at least in these years, It requires a knowledge base and the acquisition of basic skills that limits its universalization. Therefore, it is necessary to generate those favorable environments that were previously discussed.
(Santamarina & Yurén, 2010) indicate that in some geographic spaces Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are part of the social and cultural environment of the subjects, while in other countries these tools are real novelties.
The existing ICT gaps contribute to deepening inequalities and leaving out of the benefits of technological globalization to a large number of people in the world. Given that ICTs are not just means or tools, since their diversified uses have a strong impact on the culture and on the very life of the subjects: on their projects, their ways of seeing the world, their ways of interact and, in short, in their identity.
It is known that the way to install and navigate the Internet (cyberspace) configures different ways of interacting, processing and disseminating information, and even constructing knowledge. Cyberspace expands and complexes while cyberculture is configured. However, the appropriation of digital culture is not homogeneous as it depends on the different uses that are given to the tool and the way in which it is interrelated with local culture.
(Santamarina & Yurén, 2010) describe the term “digital culture” as the peculiar form that cyberculture acquires in a given population.
If a group lags behind in the use of ICTs, its digital culture is poor and this places its members at a disadvantage in relation to the non-laggards.
In Mexico, digital modernization has been delayed in relation to other countries. The personal computer in our country appeared in the mid-eighties and around that time the first Mexican connection to an international network called Bitnet was also registered. In 1986, the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) was directly connected to this network through an institution in the State of Texas. Soon after, the National Autonomous University of Mexico did the same through the ITESM node. In 2008, 23.6% of the population of Mexico is an Internet I and II user, and there are 31 million computers in the country. Virtually all universities are connected to the Internet and other networks, as well as companies and public bodies.
(Santamarina & Yurén, 2010) mentions that the term “cyberculture” is described as: The set of techniques (material and intellectual), practices, attitudes, ways of thinking and values that are developed together in the growth of cyberspace.
This definition cannot be understood without its referent: cyberspace, which in Santamarina's article is defined as follows: Cyberspace (which we will also call the “network”) is the new means of communication that emerges from the global interconnection of The computers. The term designates not only the material infrastructure of numerical communication, but also the oceanic universe of information it contains, as well as the human beings who navigate it and feed it.
(Lévy, 2007) mentions that digital culture is understood as the totality of networks that have emerged and have been decisively configured by the impacts of new digital ICTs, therefore, we understand that digital culture goes beyond systems, practices, environments and symbolic cultural media (such as those directly related to information, communication, knowledge or education) and it extends to practically all areas of the digital society.
Graphically, digital culture can be seen as the intersection of:
- Cyberculture; The uses and modes of appropriation of ICTs, and Cultural capital and economic capital.
Digital Culture and its determining factors. Source: (Santamarina & Yurén, 2010)
(Fossatti & Gemetto, 2012) explain that digital culture is based on the possibility of working with these digital objects that can be transformed and shared using technological tools.
Next, it will be shown in a comparative table of (Elgezabal, 2016), which will compare Analog Culture and Digital Culture with their respective trends and type of communication with each other.
| Culture and Communication
Analog |
Culture and Communication
Digital |
Trends | |||
| The communication media managed the agenda and the
public opinion |
Multiple agendas are added that restructure the information system. | Omnipresence of networks, ephemeral trend topics but empowerments from some areas. | |||
| Separate industries of materials, programming and content. | Convergence,
multimedia with interactivity from the internet. |
Different nature of the network itself: commercial and, in parallel, social media and collaborative environments. | |||
| Conventional media, and are the editors / programmers / and intellectual property. | Lords of global networks: service providers (Amazon, Apple), platforms (Facebook, YouTube), search engines
(Google), apparatus (Microsoft, Samsung). |
New distributors appropriate and manage the content. There is vulnerability as guarded societies. | |||
| Hierarchy between creator and user and rules of taste.
Culture past criticism. Specific expressions and formats. |
Liquid, associative culture. Flexibility and abundance of amateur production and productive consumption. They all communicate. Expressive mix. | Lustration and modernity redefined.
Multibidirectional hypercommunications. |
|||
| Cultural and communicative gap. | Digital democratization but added gap in payment accesses. | Access opportunity. | |||
| Conventional communities.
Geography with compartmentalisation between local, national and international. |
Virtual communities overlap. Globality with geographies. | Basic identities and multiple sub-identities. Globality and proximity are compatible. | |||
| Home-castle-private domestic space | Interconnected, interfered with and emitting cyber-home. | Non-political public space, but technologically gifted political actors emerge. | |||
| Economies of scale with stable business models. | Crisis of the models. | Network, club, service, gift and experience economies. | |||
| Historical commons and | Immense common | Analog mindsets | |||
| appropriation. | threatened too. | and | cost effectiveness | restricting digital. | opportunities |
Source: (Elgezabal, 2016)
IMPLICATIONS OF DIGITAL CULTURE
(Fossatti & Gemetto, 2012) argue that one of the most evident manifestations of digital culture is the transformation of everyday language. Dozens of terms have already been installed in our discourse practices that reveal how far digital culture has gotten into our daily lives: Internet, email, web pages, modem, file formats, connection speed, server, webcam, interface, scanner, compression, distribution lists, access providers, boolean operators, printer port, discussion forums, chats, cyber communities, virtual media, hypertexts, portals, etc.
(Elgezabal, 2016) explains that digital culture expands the communication system in a qualitative way, with new axes of non-geographic space and non-chronological time, but it does not bury culture and communication typical of the analog era, but remodels them. That explosion of communication even occurs in some conventional media such as TV, which remains the most successful medium, along with digitized media and network communications. On the other hand, the conventional written press and radio have financial difficulties in the era of "all communicated".
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND THESIS THEME
I thank God for all his blessings, also for the opportunity to work in the process of improving myself. I thank my parents for supporting me at all times in this new adventure, the National Council of Science and Technology for their support in my postgraduate studies, the Orizaba Technological Institute, the Master of Administrative Engineering, as well as the subject of Fundamentals of Administrative Engineering, for providing me with the necessary bases to be better as a professional and human being.
Topic: Implementation of Digital Culture Tools to Increase Productivity in the Sales Area in Organization "x"
Objective: Implement ICT tools in the Sales Department in Organization "x" to increase productivity.
CONSULTED REFERENCES
- Elgezabal, RZ (2016). Trends in communication: digital culture and power. Editorial GEDISA.Fossatti, M., & Gemetto, J. (2012). Young art and digital culture. Arctic. Recovered from http: // www. articaonline. com / download-the-e-book-young-art-and-digital-culture. Retrieved from http://fcbosque.org/phocadownloadpap/arte%20joven%20y%20cultura%20digital.pdfGómez, P. (2008, December). The digital divide, social divide. Human resources in development and training through digital learning ('elearning'). Retrieved on April 21, 2017, from http://www.ugr.es/~pwlac/G24_45Pedro_Maya_Alvarez.htmlLévy, P. (2007). Cyberculture: report to the Council of Europe. Anthropos Editorial.Marín, J. Á. J. (2010). THE DIGITAL ERA: NEW MEDIA, NEW USERS AND NEW PROFESSIONALS. Reason and Word. Film studios:theoretical reviews and analysis, (71). Retrieved from http://www.razonypalabra.orgwww.razonypalabra.org.mx/N/N71/VARIA/29%20JODAR_REVISADO.pdfPortugal, MG (2007). Culture concept. Retrieved on April 20, 2017, from https://www.promonegocios.net/mercadotecnia/cultura-concept.htmlSalazar, RD (2001). Food and culture: Identity and meaning in the contemporary world. Asia and Africa Studies, 83–108.Santamarina, D., & Yurén, T. (2010). Digital Culture in University Students. First Phase of Case Study. Euro-Ibero-American Congress on Media Literacy and Digital Cultures Seville: University of Seville. Retrieved from https://idus.us.es/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11441/56791/cultura_digital_en_estudiantes_univ ersitarios._primera_fase_de_un_estudio_de_caso.pdf? Sequence = 1 & isAllowed = yisAllowed = y
