Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

In the last 40 years, the use of Internet has penetrated our daily life to the point that we take it for granted. New Media (the means of communication that the Information Technology-IT-has provided us) affects not only the way that we operate, but also our economic, political and social personalities. Within this framework, a whole new culture has been created, the digital culture. This led to a point that digital culture could affect not only the individuals, but also global events in a smaller or larger scale. To support this argument, this paper examines and analyses 3 case studies, which exemplify the way that new media and digital culture affected economic, political and social affairs respectively. The first of our case studies is Reddit, where users of Reddit managed to cause confusion in the stock market. Secondly, I will further refer to the Cambridge Analytica case study, where Cambridge Analytica, a british political consulting firm affected the results of 2016 US elections through the Facebook data scandal. Τhirdly, I will talk about Tumblr, the platform in which awareness was firstly widely raised in the matter of political correctness and also the term "social justice warrior" was introduced. This research in these 3 cases allows for an interesting discussion on the role that new media and digital culture play on the global stage and whether that subsequent implications can be considered as negative or positive. New media are not only the medium that communicate the world events, but a variable that could deeply affect them,and should be studied in the contemporary historiography and in the observation and analysis of global events.