Digital culture refers to the set of cultural practices and forms of expression shaped by computers and the internet. In this sense, digital technology is not only a tool but also a medium for critiquing and reconstructing society, politics, identity, and technology itself. Video games are a central example. In 21st-century media art and digital humanities, they are treated not as mere mass entertainment but as highly complex cultural artifacts. Their source code, ROM cartridges, platforms, developer records, and package art all contribute to social experience and the history of popular culture.
Digital culture is also closely tied to archives and databases. In digital art history research, there is a growing effort to analyze accumulated traces and artifacts through methods such as distant reading, data visualization, and pattern recognition. Another important development is the inclusion of AI art projects that take archives and databases as their subject matter, while also functioning as research methods. This creates a dual practice in which the database is treated both as an object of analysis and as a medium of expression.
At the same time, digital culture is not defined only by permanence and perfect preservation. It also includes fragility, error, disappearance, incomplete memory, and dead links. Users are not only efficient consumers; they can also generate friction, disrupt systems, and produce shared suffering. In 2010s web culture, platforms such as Tumblr and YouTube enabled users to publish their own content, while memes, GIFs, website-based works, and online sales experiments expanded digital art and internet culture. The movement of online-born culture beyond the internet into physical spaces is another key feature of digital culture.