Culture, Transmission, Emotions and Human Experience in a Networked World
Read this article in French:
Le marcheur du réseau — Traverser la culture mondiale à l’ère algorithmique
A Global Networked Culture
We are already living within a global networked culture.
In the evening, somewhere in a house, an apartment or a bedroom, someone listens to music from another country while the glow of a screen softly lights the room. A few minutes later, that same person watches a Chinese film, discovers a photograph taken on the other side of the world, consults an old archive, reads a poem translated into another language, watches a video explaining an artistic technique or exchanges with an artificial intelligence.
All of this can now happen during a single ordinary evening.
Today, culture circulates through a vast global environment made up of archives, platforms, search engines, communities, videos, recommendations and systems of transmission that continuously connect artworks, knowledge, images, emotions and human memories.
The question is no longer technological.
It is human, cultural and civilizational.
We already inhabit this continuous global culture.
From a Culture of Places to a Culture of Circulation
For a long time, I knew another cultural reality.
To experience certain works, one had to travel to a museum, a gallery, a library or a cinema. Books circulated more slowly. Discoveries took time. Knowledge was often connected to physical places, institutions, teachers and clearly identifiable cultural mediators.
I have been observing this cultural transformation since the early days of the web in the 1990s. For more than twenty years, I have personally published images, artworks and texts within the network. Over time, I have watched global culture gradually become a continuous environment of circulation, transmission and learning.
Then, progressively, computing, the web, digital archives, search engines and networks transformed the circulation of culture on a global scale.
This transformation did not happen abruptly.
It slowly settled into our daily habits.
Today, millions of people learn music, drawing, photography, video editing, writing, philosophy or craft techniques directly through the network. Films, songs, texts, visual works and knowledge continuously cross borders, languages and generations.
Culture is no longer simply a place we visit.
It becomes an environment in which we live.
We are gradually entering a post-digital culture where networks, archives, systems of transmission and global cultural circulation have become part of everyday life.
The Network Walker
Within this new cultural condition, we gradually become Network Walkers.
We continuously move through global cultural flows.
We move from one work to another, from one language to another, from one memory to another. We discover unknown artists, forgotten archives, ancient music and images from elsewhere. We learn through videos, communities, exchanges and global systems of transmission that would have seemed almost unimaginable only a few decades ago.
The Network Walker is not merely a user of technologies.
It is a human presence inhabiting a global cultural space in continuous circulation.
Memory and Visibility in Cultural Flows
This transformation profoundly changes our relationship to memory.
In the past, archives often remained difficult to access and tied to specific locations. Today, a vast part of human cultural memory circulates through networks. An old photograph suddenly reappears on a screen after years of oblivion. Forgotten films resurface. Music crosses decades. Texts continue to be read long after their original publication.
Memory becomes more accessible, but also more fragile.
What circulates remains visible.
What stops circulating risks slowly disappearing within the constant noise of global cultural flows.
We are therefore entering an era in which visibility directly influences cultural memory.
Learning Within a Continuous Global Culture
This global culture also transforms the way we learn.
Learning becomes increasingly horizontal, mobile and continuous.
Today, a person can learn a Japanese painting technique through a video produced in another country, listen to African music, discover a Québécois poet, watch a European documentary and speak with an artificial intelligence within the same day.
Knowledge now circulates at an unprecedented speed and scale.
But this abundance also creates new tensions.
We live in a world where access to works and knowledge has probably never been so vast, while at the same time confronting a permanent overload of information, images and stimuli.
Global culture brings people closer together while sometimes producing a strange form of solitude.
We are connected to immense flows, yet we continue searching for spaces of real presence, attention and depth.
Human Time Within Contemporary Flows
Within this continuous culture, human time itself becomes an important issue.
Networks accelerate cultural circulation, but human emotions remain slow.
Learning takes time.
Memory takes time.
Grief, creation, reflection and transmission take time.
Even in a world crossed by instantaneous flows, human experience continues moving at a rhythm profoundly different from that of the systems now organizing global cultural circulation.
This may be one of the most important tensions of our time.
A New Global Cultural Condition
Yet despite the risks of uniformity, saturation and permanent distraction, this global culture also opens an immense space for human encounters.
People living in different countries can now share works, learn together, transmit knowledge, discover common sensitivities and build new forms of cultural exchange.
Global culture therefore becomes not only a space of circulation, but also a space of transmission and human recognition.
The Network Walker continues its journey through this global cultural environment.
It moves through works, knowledge, emotions, archives, languages, memories and imaginaries continuously circulating around it.
It becomes at once:
• witness;
• learner;
• transmitter;
• human presence within contemporary cultural flows.
We may be entering a new global cultural condition where culture no longer exists merely as a collection of objects or institutions, but as a living environment progressively transforming the way we learn, transmit, feel, communicate and inhabit the world.
And the Network Walker continues moving forward, traveling, wandering and visiting.
🔷 CONTINUE THE JOURNEY
→ The Use of AI in Art: Beyond Creation, the Algorithms Organizing Global Culture
→ From Humanist Digital Art to the Algorithmic Artwork-Site
→ Algorithmic Artwork-Site — Inhabiting the Network as Artistic Space
→ Digital Poetry and Post-Digital Practice: Toward a Humanist Reading of Contemporary Forms
→ Humanist Digital Art — Theoretical Corpus and Developments
→ Everyone Uses AI — Art, Culture and Everyday Life in a Networked World
→ Human Traces in Global Culture
→ Inhabiting the Network — A New Human Condition in Global Culture
→ Global Culture as a Moving Mosaic
🌍Thinking About Culture
I invite you to explore Understanding Today’s Culture, a series of micro-essays devoted to human experience, contemporary culture, and our networked world.
→ Explore the Understanding Today’s Culture series
© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor
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