Subject Formations and Digital Culture

Along with information and communication technologies new techno-medial arenas are emerging for performing socio-cultural practices like working, communicating, learning, playing, creating, and thinking. The esodic question of the hereby proposed research project is the following: In how far are the afore mentioned socio-cultural practices the bases for new subject formations which designate yet unknown dimensions of human existence as intrinsic elements of a digital culture? This question is to be explored in the techno-medial performative arenas of web-based occupation, communicative publics in cyberspace, and learning by interacting with technical artifacts. In order to be able to precisely determine the status of the empirically analyzed subject formations, they are to be compared with theoretical discourses on the subject in the past and present. These discourses will be explored and discussed in one of the four part projects of which the study consists of. The aforementioned socio-cultural practices represent the range of research perspectives to identify the subject formations of youths and young adults from the age of 15 to 30. They will at first be identified in separate performative arenas and then in an overall virtual performative arena such as Second Life or Lively (Google). It is being assumed that subjects constitute themselves in and by sociocultural practices in the sense of Hannah Ahrendt, who wrote that we integrate ourselves into the world by talking and acting and that, by doing so, we do not only create something, but that we always create ourselves as well (cf. Ahrendt 1960, 174 ff.). The reason why socio-cultural practices of adolescents and young adults are at the center of this study is that they belong to the first generation whose members are highly likely to have grown up with digital media, who use the internet surpassingly, and who therefore are the crucial meaning bearers of present and future society. The approach of this study is insofar innovative as the socio-cultural practices in the various techno-medial performative arenas as well as their inherent subject formations are being thought of, analyzed, and characterized in relation to each other. So far the aforementioned socio-cultural practices have only been partially explored in various scattered studies. As for the consequences of these practices for subject formation and the quality of potentially new subject formations hardly any findings are available at all. The objective of this study is the development of a panorama of digitally endorsed subject formations, which especially provides society with information on the areas of work, communication, and education and as to which subject formations it has to expect and be prepared for in the future.

The research questions in this bi-national research project on "Subject Constructions and Digital Culture" were which socio-cultural practices are developed by individuals when using digital media and which subject constructions emerge in these practices. These issues were investigated in the fields of work, communication and education; the part of the project carried out in Klagenfurt, entitled "Communicative Publics in Cyberspace", focused on the field of communication in digital networks. Although the public debate on individual aspects of the research question is quite intensive, the project itself entered relatively unknown territory in research terms. The Klagenfurt project was international in nature: postings were analysed and network actors were interviewed from six European countries, four Arab countries and the United States. Seven socio-cultural practices could be identified which the network actors, both male and female, deployed in digital networks, namely practices of change and transformation, self-staging, interconnectedness, boundary management, transgressing limits, selling and negotiating as well as fun and games. These practices are not unique to virtual reality, but they are evoked and fostered in special ways under the conditions of digital technology with its network structures, multimediality, interactivity and hybridity. Complementing the analyses of digital networks, the second phase of empirical research in the project was concerned with case studies in so-called FabLabs. Here new technical developments came to the fore: in FabLabs, high-tech workshops for everybody, people use computer-aided manufacturing tools like 3D printers. The part of the project based in Klagenfurt investigated children's workshops in the Happylab in Vienna. In an extension of digitally supported communication between people as covered in the first project phase, the focus of analysis in the FabLab was on communication with digital technology, which was also analysed from the perspective of its importance for subject construction. To sum up our findings, the social practices which were identified in both the digital networks and in the Happylab in Vienna are associated with an active, communicative subject interested in participation and co-creation, striving for acknowledgement and affiliation but also for autonomy, both in relation to others and in relation to technology, a subject which is repositioning itself in the digital world in socio-cultural terms.