Culture and communication in contemporary digital worlds (2003-2023)

Twenty years later, much has changed. The emergence of the Third Age of the internet (Wellman, 2011), including Web 2.0 and social media, means that the digital is now woven through everyday life and work. Indeed, the term digital revolution is now sometimes used to mark a significant historical period, specifically the early 2000s, which ushered in a post-industrial digital age (Ochoa et al., 2020). As of October 2025, 6 billion people around the world had access to the internet–some 74% of the global population (Statista, 2025). Moreover, more than half of these users are in Asia, highlighting a shift away from the dominant Anglo-Western audience/user population (Duarte, 2025). With the rise of participatory platforms like blogs, social media, wikis, and user-generated video, the internet has ceased to be a place we “visit” and has instead become a space we inhabit. This is a shift towards “technologies of life”–whereby “a single technology or a group of technologies becomes an infrastructure to sustain (and therefore shape) a wide range of quotidian activities” (Gómez Cruz, 2022). The past two decades have seen the pluralization of voices in digital spaces, with users from across the globe contributing content, shaping culture, and building communities. Building on our 2004 conclusions, and recognizing the new sociotechnical reality, we wondered whether research and theory had emerged in the intervening twenty years that might offer new insights.

To discover the current state of research and theory in the field, we undertook a scoping review (Peters et al., 2020) as described below. Rather than attempting to develop a definitive review of our materials, our intention is to provide a high-level thematic overview that traces themes and trends. This review and associated online resource offers interested researchers a jumping off point for more focussed and detailed investigation.

This scoping review asks:

• How has the language of this interdisciplinary field changed over time?
• Have new definitions, enumerations, and observations of ‘culture’ arisen that may now allow us to effectively examine and make predictions about the complex interactions between culture and technology?
• Do we now have adequate theories of intercultural or transcultural communication in digital spaces?
• Which new trends and themes have arisen in the research literature as cultures and technologies have continued to co-evolve?

Finally, we close by situating these trajectories in what we call a Fourth Age of model-mediated communication.