Digital Culture
von Thomas Oberender
In his book Kultur der Digitalität (published in English under the title: The Digital Condition), Felix Stalder describes how shortly after Conchita Wurst won the Eurovision Song Contest, Facebook increased the number of gender identity options its users were able to choose between from two to 60. For Felix Stalder, it is not the apparently immaterial nature of the datasphere nor the perfection or virtuality of its products that characterises digital culture, but rather its vast multiplication of cultural possibilities. These processes began back in the 19th century, and since the 60s of the 20th century, according to Stalder, they have accelerated enormously, which has led to more and more people participating in cultural processes. “The number of competing cultural projects, works, reference points and reference systems has been growing rapidly. This, in turn, has caused an escalating crisis for the established forms and institutions of culture, which are poorly equipped to deal with such an inundation of new claims to meaning.” (Felix Stalder: Kultur der Digitalität, Suhrkamp Verlag 2016, p. 11)1 Many of these processes are embedded in complex technologies and around the year 2000 they combined to form something that in Stalder’s words...