Fast Culture, Slow Change: The Paradox of Digital Society
While it can seem like culture is changing super fast, it isn’t. A framework to understand cultural change in the Digital Age.
From TikTok dance trends to memes that seem to upend what we’re thinking, when stock prices can shoot up or crash a company in a matter of hours based on a single social media post or store shelves can empty of a product by the afternoon based on a viral social media message, sure seems like culture can change on a dime these days. Not really.
It’s a sort of mantra in the business world that things are changing faster than ever, especially for marketers. Many a media outlet declares that culture today is changing faster than ever before, or those prognostications around how Artificial Intelligence is or is about to, change our entire world.
If your dopamine receptors and neurons feel like they’re on fire all the time, here’s a bit of a reality check for you. Actual, meaningful cultural change, despite our hyperconnected societies isn’t actually change that fast.
As one who, through my work, spends a lot of time researching and analysing digital cultures, the impacts of technology on our sociocultural systems and the intersection of humans and technology, I’ve come to evolve what I call Cultural Velocity Networks to help understand just how culture evolves in the Digital Age.
In this article, I’m distilling a complex framework into a more simplified version so bear with me. There’s so much to be unpacked.
There are four layers to understand cultural shifts and changes from the surface to the much deeper and most meaningful of changes. It’s important too that I frame what I mean by culture, one our species most complex words.
In this sense I mean culture as our “operating system” if you will, for surviving as a species. It includes political and economic systems, militaries, religious beliefs, kinship systems and the aesthetics such as art, literature, music, fashion and architecture and how we govern and structure our societies.
The four categories of cultural change as shown in the diagram below are the framework on which to look at events happening in the warp and woof of our digital networks today. As most of the world’s population is connected today, it essentially works across our global sociocultural systems. At the end of the day, no matter our race, creed, beliefs, we are all human. We are all the same species.
Digital platforms are undergoing significant changes right now. Consumers and citizens are moving their more meaningful conversations to more private networks like WhatsApp, Telegram or Discord where they don’t feel as watched over by marketers and always being sold to. It is why most of what we see on more public social media platforms is performative and just surface expression.
While it may seem like a popular social media trend is changing culture, it isn’t really. Not in deeper, more meaningful ways. Can you recall a single social media trends that upended your own culture’s more structural elements such as weddings, funerals, annual events and traditional foods? That kind of change takes many months years and sometimes even generations.
People are increasingly disgruntled with how social media platforms are behaving in society. This is why we see countries like Australia banning social media use for those under 16. Or so many organisations and governments bringing law-suits and anti-trust claims against tech giants.
Yet significant sociocultural changes are underway. Much of it has to do with the ease of cultural transmission today. Such as how we see mashups of Western musical styles with Indian or Asian musical styles. Most of which are quite lovely.
I call them Cultural Velocity Networks (CVN) because all cultures are essentially networks of the people within and around them and all that happens via our digital lives is through networks
If we understand Cultural Velocity Networks better and can see them with a more critical and curious eye, then we can better understand when change is likely to actually be meaningful and better gauge potential impacts. So take a deep breath next time you see a crazy meme or social media trend and realise that no, they’re not changing the entire world overnight.