i.      Sociocultural and political impacts

Over the past two decades, scholars have continued to show that digital technologies are reshaping core dimensions of social, cultural, and political life across national and cultural boundaries (see for example Averbeck-Lietz, 2011; Block, 2013; Frost, 2013; Halstead, 2021; Liebermann, 2021; Mihelj & Jiménez‐Martínez, 2021; Pathak-Shelat & Bhatia, 2019; Petrus, 2016; Shields, 2014). Arguably, these transformations are increasingly organised through large technology companies whose platforms mediate communication, visibility, and participation, giving rise to what has been described as “platform society” and “digital cultural politics” (Dennis & Clancy, 2022; Valtysson, 2020). In this view, digital infrastructures are not only technical systems but cultural and political actors: they shape how culture is produced, governed, circulated, and experienced.

Work in this area highlights several interconnected domains: digital cultural politics; well-being; participatory culture and digital literacy; convergence culture; and narrative and identity formation. Digital cultural politics refers to the entanglement of cultural, media, and communication policy with platform governance and technological infrastructure. By participatory culture we mean cultures in which audiences not only consume but also produce, remix, and circulate cultural content within communities and networks. Convergence culture refers to the cross-media flow of content, capital, and practices across platforms and institutions, often blurring boundaries between producers and audiences. As cultural activity migrates to digital environments, control over infrastructures (e.g., algorithms, moderation systems, data access) becomes a form of cultural regulation in itself, influencing who is represented, what is amplified, and which practices are made legitimate or marginal (Valtysson, 2020). Scholars argue that this reconfigures cultural policy: instead of states alone setting the conditions for cultural production and circulation, platforms increasingly do so, often according to commercial priorities rather than cultural or democratic ones (Dennis & Clancy, 2022; Valtysson, 2020).

Nevertheless, digital spaces are positioned as sites of participatory culture, where users can develop social, cultural, and intellectual competencies through creation, remix, peer assessment, and collaborative problem-solving. Participation in these environments is frequently linked to the development of digital literacy and to forms of informal learning, particularly among young people (Young & Asino, 2020).. However, this is complicated by what Jenkins (2014) terms convergence culture: the blending of media industries, user participation, and networked circulation of content. Convergence culture raises political and economic questions about who actually benefits from participation, and whether “participatory culture” genuinely captures the uneven, sometimes exploitative, conditions under which people create and circulate media online. In other words, participation is celebrated rhetorically but is also structured by platform logics, labour expectations, and differential visibility.

Researchers have also drawn attention to questions of well-being and identity under these conditions (Dennis & Clancy, 2022). Digital environments are not simply channels for expression; they are affective and relational spaces in which people negotiate belonging, recognition, and harm. This ties the politics of platforms to questions of emotional life, safety, and flourishing online (Dennis & Clancy, 2022).

Finally, digital technologies play a constitutive role in narrative formation and identity work. Platforms mediate crime stories, local histories, and everyday accounts of place, and in doing so create spaces where individuals from different ethnic, social, and political backgrounds encounter one another, exchange interpretations, and contest meaning. Such translocal exchanges allow memory, identity, and place to be narrated collectively, rather than solely through institutional channels (Halstead, 2021; Stratton, 2019). This underscores that culture online is not only consumed but continually made–through storytelling, circulation, and response.

Taken together, this body of work positions digital technologies as infrastructures of cultural life: they govern circulation and visibility (platform society), organize conditions for participation and literacy (participatory and convergence cultures), shape emotional experience and well-being, and provide arenas in which identities and collective narratives are produced, contested, and anchored in place.

ii.      Globalization, power and digital culture

Work included in this subsection examines how globalization, power relations, and digital culture intersect, with particular attention to digital cultures and politics (see for example Block, 2013; Brüggemann & Wessler, 2014; Ess, 2008; Gautam & Singh, 2021; Hepp & Couldry, 2009; Mihelj & Jiménez‐Martínez, 2021; Petrus, 2016; Tsagarousianou & Retis, 2019; Valtysson, 2020). An important contributor in this areas is Goggin (2016), who argues that digital cultures are inherently global–rooted in transnational infrastructures, supply chains, and platform corporations with international user-producer networks–yet they are simultaneously locally embedded, shaped by specific cultural, social, and political contexts. He also highlights asymmetric power in knowledge production: Anglophone scholarship often overlooks non-Anglophone research on digital cultures, not accidentally but through unequal structures of validation and circulation. Addressing this imbalance requires intentional integration of non-Western perspectives, he argues.

Challenging an overly simplistic cultural-imperialism thesis, Barendregt (2012) documents reverse and South-South flows–for example, Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) movements in South Africa and Brazil and initiatives such as Grameen’s Village Pay Phone in Bangladesh–alongside the continuing influence of Western tools (e.g., how Microsoft Word affects vernacular languages). Drawing on superdiversity, he underscores the growing complexity of linguistic, religious, ethnic, and cultural resources and argues for recognising plural digital worlds rather than treating digital culture as an exclusively Western project.

Taken together, this work calls for a rigorous, genuinely global account of digital culture: one that moves beyond Western-centric frames, assesses where infrastructures and policy regimes concentrate power, and analyzes cultural exchange as reciprocal yet locally situated (Barendregt, 2012; Goggin, 2016). Future research should explore how digital development and international cultural communication and cooperation can be fostered through nuanced appreciation of diverse digital worlds, integrating perspectives that capture both transnational circulation and local embedding (Žuvela-Bušnja et al., 2008).

iii.      An intercultural digital ethics

Pre-2004 scholarship raised ethical issues at the intersection of culture and digital technologies, focussing on power, cultural imposition, and access. Authors warned of cultural imperialism–the privileging and export of Western (especially U.S.) values and technomeritocratic ideals via the internet–and questioned the unreflective promotion of norms such as free speech and individualism where they may conflict with local preferences. The dominance of English was seen to marginalize non-English speakers and broadcast particular cultural norms. Claims that technology is culturally or morally neutral were scrutinized, and technological determinism–the assumption that digital progress naturally aligns with democracy and free speech–was deemed reductive. Scholars also anticipated reinforcement of existing social and economic hierarchies (e.g., a “destructive mass market” removing cultural ownership from ethnic groups), alongside an uneven distribution of access and the appropriation of technologies by powerful actors. Additional concerns included online identity fluidity (deception, “virtual crime”) and the possibility that digital engagement could weaken commitments to local communities, erecting new barriers to participation. In short, the pre-2004 literature mapped ethical dilemmas around cultural dominance, unequal access, online identity, and the export of Western values–particularly in education.

As of 2025, research on culture and digital technologies remains a focussed but steady field (see for example Clancy, 2021; Ess & Sudweeks, 2006; Gautam & Singh, 2021). Some have proposed an Intercultural Digital Ethics (IDE) framework (Dennis & Clancy, 2022)(sometimes referred to as intercultural information ethics (IIE) (Capurro, 2008)) for addressing persistent concerns while framing new ones. A central challenge is devising a global ethical framework that supports universal norms yet accommodates local identities, traditions, and practices. Contemporary systems often embed a culturally skewed value set rooted in Western philosophy (Dennis & Clancy, 2022). In education, Western-centric platforms and reliance on English-language content risk cultural disconnects and limit meaningful engagement (Young & Asino, 2020). The prospect of computer-mediated colonization intensifies these questions, requiring attention to the practical consequences of digital design and implementation, not only their theoretical justification (Ess, 2020).

Several proposals aim to guide ethical practice. Variations on the IDE theme seek to advance pluralist approaches that deliberately integrate multiple cultural perspectives into the design and diffusion of ICTs (Ess, 2020). Dennis and Clancy (2022) argue that ethical judgments in IDE–especially around digital well-being–can be grounded in intuitive responses informed by empirical research in cultural and moral psychology.

Future work, various authors argue, should be inclusive and contextual, examining technologies and the social conditions that necessitate their use; it should also probe cultural disconnects associated with Western bias in educational technologies (Young & Asino, 2020). Methodologically, IDE would benefit from three complementary strands: (1) empirical studies that test how specified principles (e.g., data sovereignty, linguistic justice) change behaviour and well-being in practice; (2) normative work that articulates and operationalizes those principles into concrete design and governance criteria; and (3) case studies that document implementations, trade-offs, and outcomes in situated contexts (Dennis & Clancy, 2022). Across all three, researchers should audit for “computer-mediated colonization”–i.e., technologies or research practices that impose external value systems, erase local epistemologies, or extract data and control–so that proposed solutions do not reproduce the very harms they seek to remedy (Ess, 2020).