There are scholars such as Lievrouw and Livinstone (2002) who argue that as people are surrounded by new media their communication becomes empowered and extended. Deuze (2006) objects that such „new media“ approaches are based on the assumption that humans and machines are implicated in one another rather than influencing each other, and further claims that popularity, commercialization and penetration of those technologies into our work and even private space should be rather seen as an emergence of digital culture. In his theory he sees digital culture as a culture where individuals interact in the context of ever-increasing computerization and digitalization of society.
Such a culture thus has implications on a shared social level, online as well as offline, and is characterized by three general features; remediation as a remix of old and new media, bricolage as a highly personalized and autonomous mediated reality, and participation as a necessary feature for maintaining human agency in this social context. Deuze (2006) adds that it does not mean that complex social networks did not exist before, but recent technological developments 20 have afforded their emergence as a dominant form of social organization, and concludes that blogs, online publishing and other forms of online journalism must be seen as an expression of this recently emerge phenomena (p. 66).
