Digital culture constitutes one of the most significant phenomena for understanding contemporary social transformations. Beyond the use of technologies or platforms, it refers to the set of practices, meanings, relationships and interactions that emerge from the convergence of digital technologies, communication networks and social actors. It moves beyond the mere use of devices or technological platforms to become a new cultural ecology. From this perspective, social media have consolidated spaces for communication, participation, identity construction and the circulation of information, shaping new forms of social interaction and cultural production in contemporary society.
We live in a network society (Castells, 1997) characterized by the organization of social relations around digital information networks. The Internet not only changed the ways power is exercised, but also the ways knowledge is produced and public life is participated in (Castells, 2009). It is therefore considered that digital technologies have gone from being tools to becoming structural elements of social life. From another perspective, participatory culture has made it possible to create and resignify content, where the boundaries between production and consumption are increasingly blurred (Jenkins et al., 2009). This participation has transformed the traditional vertical relationship among media, audiences, niches and communities, fostering processes of collaboration, collective creation and the circulation of narratives that cross multiple platforms and levels.
However, digital culture also poses important challenges. Van Dijck et al. (2018) warned that digital platforms are infrastructures that organize social life, not neutral spaces. Zuboff (2019), for her part, indicates that they are now ecosystems organized by algorithms and economic models that use data as a strategic resource, underpinned by a surveillance capitalism that turns human experience into free raw material to be converted into behavioral data, an aspect that has characterized the use of artificial intelligence from the outset. This opens debates about privacy, autonomy and the concentration of technological power.
Other phenomena specific to the digital context add to these transformations. The attention economy, the construction of online identities, digital activism, citizen participation and the growing influence of algorithms have altered the way opinions are formed, information circulates and public debates develop, and have fostered the emergence of information bubbles, echo chambers and processes of social polarization.
For these reasons, studying digital culture and social media represents today a priority challenge for the social sciences, where human beings remain at the center of these processes (Leo XIV, 2026). This is a space that seeks to analyze forms of interaction, participation, consumption, communication and the construction of meaning, and to debate how people use digital platforms, how power relations are configured, and how these phenomena can be understood from everyday life.
