Digital Culture

140 character messages are part of political discourse and vlogs fashion youth culture. With the digital revolution, new media emerged which enabled more people to create cultural expressions for a wide audience. Technology and technological possibilities shape culture. But does culture also shape technology? Scholars in the humanities are equipped with the theoretical background and research skills to make sense of the dynamics between cultural and technological developments.

Showcase: Politicians and journalists in the tweetosphere

Politics and journalism used to be two sharply separated fields with distinctive aims, characteristics and behavioural patterns. With the advent of social media, dynamics between politicians, journalists and citizens changed. Professor Marcel Broersma investigates the online behaviour of these interacting groups. However, he will not read every tweet by himself. A so-called Twitter Crawler – built by the Centre for Information Technology (CIT) – automatically collects and analyses the endless stream of tweets of Dutch politicans and journalists. It can map the online behaviour of politicians and journalists and see how (much) these groups in the tweetosphere overlap and/or differ.