About | Culture and communication in digital worlds

This project – a scoping review and associated open online resource – builds on two decades of our scholarship investigating what happens when people from different cultural backgrounds communicate using digital technologies.

We trace how research and theory have evolved from early work on “cyberspace” to contemporary studies of digital worlds, and we look ahead to emerging questions in an era of AI-mediated communication.

Literature of the Second Age: ‘Culture and communication in cyberspace’ (2004)

In 2004, we surveyed the available literature on culture and communication in online environments (“cyberspace”) and attempted to delineate the extent and boundaries of this newly emerging field. We reviewed research and theory from multiple disciplines, including cultural studies, intercultural studies, linguistics, sociology, education, human–computer interaction, distance learning, learning technologies, and philosophy.

Using the language and terminology of the era, we wrote about culture in cyberspace, cyberlanguage, cybercultures, and even cybereducation, to signal identities and practices shaped by digital, networked interactions and to capture the sense of novel, futuristic, digital and virtual meanings.

Our findings were published as:

Macfadyen, L. P., Roche, J. & Doff, S. (2004).
Communicating across cultures in cyberspace. A bibliographical review of online intercultural communication. Lit-Verlag.

Literature of the Third Age: Culture and communication in digital worlds (2003-2023)

Twenty years later, the landscape has shifted. In what Wellman (2011) calls the Third Age of the internet, participatory platforms such as blogs, social media, wikis, and user-generated video have transformed the internet from a place we “visit” into a space we inhabit. This signals a shift towards “technologies of life,” in which “a single technology or a group of technologies becomes an infrastructure to sustain (and therefore shape) a wide range of quotidian activities” (Gómez Cruz, 2022).

Between 2003 and 2023, we see a pluralization of voices in digital spaces, with users across the globe contributing content, shaping culture, and building communities. Building on our 2004 conclusions and recognizing this new sociotechnical reality, we asked whether research and theory emerging in the intervening years might offer new insights. We compiled relevant work from this era and reviewed its dominant themes, asking:

How has the language of this interdisciplinary field changed over time?
Have new definitions, enumerations, and observations of ‘culture’ arisen that may now allow us to effectively examine and make predictions about the complex interactions between culture and technology?
Do we now have adequate theories of intercultural or transcultural communication in digital spaces?
Which new trends and themes have arisen in the research literature as cultures and technologies have continued to co-evolve?

These questions guide our 2025 review of work published between 2003 and 2023.

Anticipating the Fourth Age of internet research

We suggest that 2023 marks a watershed for digital culture and internet research, catalysed by the release of ChatGPT in November 2022 (OpenAI, 2022, November 30; Stokel-Walker, 2022, December 9). In what we call the Fourth Age, model-mediated communication is becoming routine, and AI and algorithmic cultures are emerging and shaping our digital worlds and encultured lives.

Generative models (text, image, audio, video) are increasingly co-authors, translators, stylisers, curators, and interlocutors in everyday interaction, reshaping ideas of authorship, creativity, and identity. Content is now not only curated by algorithms but increasingly produced by them (see Box 2 in our review).

Continuing earlier discussions of “computer-mediated colonisation” (Ess, 2002), we must now also ask:

Who creates knowledge?
Who is represented in training data?
Whose values shape AI-generated communication?

Language dominance, cultural references, and communicative norms are increasingly shaped by training corpora and platform values. These developments raise urgent questions for culture, communication, and digital worlds.