Digital Culture

Content

Objective

This course examines digital culture from the perspectives of anthropology and symbolic interactionism, focusing on contemporary communication strategies, advertising, and branding processes. It explores how digital technologies transform social relationships, cultural practices, identities, and consumption patterns, while examining the implications of these transformations for brand communication, advertising narratives, consumer engagement, and digital marketing strategies. Culture is approached as a dynamic process through which individuals and communities produce, share, and renegotiate meanings through social interaction. The course investigates how symbols, narratives, identities, and forms of belonging emerge through social media, digital communities, platform cultures, and everyday digital practices. Drawing on digital ethnography and sensory ethnography, it explores the relationships between online and offline experiences. The course aims to equip students with the ability to critically examine digital cultural contexts from an anthropological perspective and apply their insights to the development of advertising, brand management, and communication strategies.

Course Content

The course covers culture and symbolic interaction, everyday life and meaning-making, self-presentation and digital identity, online communities and belonging, digital rituals, social media practices, platform cultures, digital spaces and social interaction, digital audiovisual practices, sensory experience and the digital body, and the relationships between online and offline cultural practices. From an anthropological perspective, students examine how digital environments transform cultural contexts and how symbols, images, sounds, narratives, and forms of interaction acquire meaning in everyday life.

As part of the practical component, students investigate specific digital communities, platforms, forms of interaction, and cultural practices using digital ethnographic and sensory research methods. Through ethnographic observation, digital participant observation, audiovisual documentation, digital diaries, and the analysis of online cultural content, students explore different dimensions of digital culture. The findings are then evaluated in relation to communication strategies, brand culture, advertising practices, and consumer relationships.

Course Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

Define culture through anthropological and symbolic interactionist approaches.

Explain how symbols, meanings, and identities emerge through everyday interactions.

Analyze digital environments as contexts in which cultural practices and social relationships take place.

Examine digital identity, self-presentation, belonging, and online communities from an anthropological perspective.

Apply the fundamental principles of digital ethnography and sensory ethnography.

Investigate the relationships between online and offline cultural practices.

Interpret ethnographic research findings in relation to communication strategies, advertising practices, and brand culture.

Teaching and Learning Methods

The course employs lectures, discussions of ethnographic texts and case studies, digital participant observation, analysis of online cultural practices, sensory ethnography exercises, audiovisual documentation and analysis, digital diaries, fieldwork, and individual or group-based research projects.

References

Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. University of California Press.

Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday.

Hine, C. (2015). Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday. Bloomsbury Academic.

Pink, S. (2015). Doing Sensory Ethnography (2nd ed.). SAGE.

Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., & Tacchi, J. (2016). Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. SAGE.

Weekly Contents

Assessment System

Relation of Proficiency

ECTS