My view on digital cultures

To me, digital cultures are online communities, built around topics and common interests rather than geography (unless, of course, the topic itself is related to geography). I choose the words "built around" because digital cultures, as is the case with all cultures, expand and evolve over time and gain a life of their own, as it were.

I have a fair amount of personal experience dealing with various online communities, from multi-user dungeons (MUDs) and webrings to discussion forums, collaborative writing sites and, in the past few years, several massive multi-player online roleplaying games (MMORPGs). While these examples are different in many ways, they all (more or less) share the focus on users as contributors and social interaction as a primary selling point.

Discussion forums are something I find particularly interesting, since they so often tend to grow beyond the boundaries of their initial topics. In almost every forum I have frequented, the "General Discussion" section has eventually outgrown the more specific sections, and by far. Furthermore, as a forum grows bigger, it seems that many of its members begin to spend more and more time there, not only discussing but indeed "living" on the message boards. Users make friends and enemies on their forums, fall in love and... well, then they leave because of some ridiculous drama, but such is life in the world of Internet forums.

Similarly, MMORPGs offer a great deal of social interaction, but contrary to what one may think, most of it is (at least in my experience) completely unrelated to the actual gameplay. I tend to think of these games mainly as a single-player experience in a multi-player environment. In other words, my character in [Insert game title; right now it's World of Warcraft.] minds her own business, merrily massacring a multitude of mediocre monsters and making massive amounts of money while my chat box offers, for example, spontaneous opinions about the latest Hollywood film or "those fucking noobs in WSG." When I do bump into other players in the actual game, they usually just get in the way of my own ambitions.

To summarize, I believe that digital culture is the practice of allowing virtual spaces to be defined not by what they are, but by the user communities that surround them.

Links
AnimeLeague - http://www.animeleague.net/
Dyre MUD - telnet://dyremud.com:2424
World of Warcraft - http://www.wow-europe.com/