Artists and digital culture: (the strain of) self-promotion in social media

Abstract

The topic of digital identity is gaining greater academic attention with the increasing popularity of user created Internet content (referred to as Web 2.0) and social media networks. A seismic technological and cultural shift occurred with the rise of digital culture, where perceived relevance and meaning shifted from something that solely existed in the corporal, or real, world to the increasing importance or perceived relevance of information found on the Internet. These emerging forms of communication and social interaction have placed media theorists in new frontiers of interdisciplinary research to understand and explain the phenomena. In our technologically determinist culture, we increasingly depend on digital media for validating offline information, which places us in a paradigmatic shift where the offline (real) loses importance while the online (virtual) gains meaning. It can be argued that virtual existence via digital identity has become exponentially popular because of a culture that associates technology with progress, while largely ignoring the social ramifications and the effects on the individual, in our new media ecology. This study merges theoretical sources on the discussion of digital identity in such fields as: media ecology, virtual ethnography, narrative identity theory and the philosophy of technology with qualitative research on how artists associated with the Estonian Academy of Arts or the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, utilize social media networks like Facebook to negotiate a professional and social reputation.