Page 147 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

Post-digital is partly characterised by our having overcome that ability to marvel at digital.101Some say that the digital revolution is nolonger a revolution but merely a mainstream digital society. Actually we are still witnessing minor technological revolutions such as those described in connection with festivals, but the most signi cant are probably those that relate to attitude, the new behaviours we are seeing.For example, when the social media initially appeared some people were wary or indi erent towards them, whereas other people threw themselves into experimenting with new platforms of this kind like Myspace or Facebook. Nowadays the great majority of the Spanish population, for example, use at least one social media site once a week, whether to nd out how their contacts are and what they have shared, to check and clear their inbox, or simply see what other people are doing.Many of the people who enthused about them back then used to go on these sites fairly or very often to do many things such as chat, check out their friends’ statuses and links, or simply spend some time. In recent years some social media such as Facebook have witnessed a decreasein usage. There are more than a billion users all over the world, but some of those who usedto be very active are becoming less and less so.102 Others continue to go on the site very often, however. We are learning to use more specialised platforms for sharing images (such as visual social media like Instagram) or for sharing thoughts, opinions or knowledge (once again, blogs like Tumblr).We have also decided to cut down on these habits more: at rst it was exciting to discover that we could share everything we came across with our contacts and we accordingly shared links, news, events, etc., but we learned from the resulting overload of news, articles, recipes and photos not only that ‘less is more’ but also to focus what we shared more on our tastes andthose of the friends and colleagues who are our contacts.The youngest users, born in the late 1990s and at the beginning of the last decade, do not bother registering on these social media which are more populated and static in comparison to some of the newer ones with other game rules that they go on to interact, such as Snapchat (messages that are eliminated after ve seconds, very visual...), Tumblr, or videoblogging or messaging services like WhatsApp.A turning point in recent years was marked bythe Snowden case (2013), though it was not the only one to have triggered a major debate. Since then we have witnessed how the population is becoming increasingly aware of the importance of data in the new digital economy, and of some of the contexts in which data is gathered, especially on their online activity, such as when they visit a page, what they click on, their browsing history (user tracking) and the use of data verging onthe sort that can be directly linked to a person’s identity, be it a unique and unmistakeable pattern or ngerprint, or because this data is associated with other details that can identify the person (names, email addresses, geolocation...).The privacy ethic and acting in accordance with legislation such as the Spanish data privacy act (LOPD) and its European counterparts is not merely something that should be borne in mind; some users are now demanding that the process be transparent or that users be informed of what data will be collected from them and for what purposes, so that they can even decide whether or not to supply it.As a result, in 2014 the Spanish data protection agency compiled a law which requires that users be informed103 when a website is tracking them using cookies, in the form of a message that pops up in the upper or lower part of the screen when the website is accessed. They need to click on the message to con rm they have been informed if they want it to disappear.AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2016147Focus: Use of New Digital Technologies at Cultural Festivals