It took tens of thousands of years for writing to emerge after humans spoke their first words. It took thousands more before the printing press, and a few hundred again before the telegraph. Each new medium triggered a profound cultural shift by reshaping how people could communicate across time and space.

Today, a new medium emerges every time somebody creates a new web application. A Flickr here, a Twitter there, and a new way of relating to others emerges. Each application introduces new ways of interacting, new kinds of groups, and new ways of sharing, trading, and collaborating. This is not simply an “information revolution.” This is a cultural revolution.

Like the proverbial fish who will never discover water, we swim through the tumultuous currents of this cultural revolution, rarely catching a glimpse of its overall form and impact. Gaining perspective requires us to take a great leap outside, at least for a moment, before jumping back in. I found my own perspective in some of those rare places on earth where the World Wide Web does not yet reach: remote villages in the rain forests of central New Guinea.

For the past eight years I have made my second home there, studying the impacts of new media on local culture. In central New Guinea, “new media” does not refer to wikis, blogs, tags, and trackbacks, but books: Bibles, census registries, law books, maps, and school texts. I have watched how these media are transforming remote cultures in ways no one could have predicted. For example, villages have been completely re-organized quite literally “by the book,” rebuilt along numbered grids to match the map and census. Disputes that had once been settled in the village commons were moved indoors to a closed court where defendants now stand trial in front of a studious officer, who meticulously manages all aspects of the proceedings by a book of court procedures he keeps open by his side. And identities that were fluid and relational have become increasingly fixed and categorical through the use of printed identity cards and personal records.

Sitting in front of my computer in Kansas right now, I see similarly powerful and yet very different transformations all around me. We are in the midst of continuous cultural revolution, driven by the continuous emergence of new “new media.”

We often underestimate the effects of media because we think of it as something that exists apart from us, something to talk about and criticize, something that we can turn off or put away. Distracted by the information the medium carries, we overlook the fact that a new medium can facilitate profound change because it serves as the form through which all aspects of culture are expressed, experienced, and practiced.

In our attention to the sheer quantity of information being created (40 billion gigabytes of unique information in 2007, according to IDC) and to the modes of information delivery, we often forget that digital media are mediating human relationships in ways they have never been mediated before. This is why wikis, blogs, trackbacks, tagging, social networking, and other developments that fall under the “Web 2.0” buzz strike us as revolutionary. They connect us in ways we have never been connected.

I started the Digital Ethnography Working Group at Kansas State University in hopes that we could develop research methods to help us grasp what is going on in this ever-changing digital world. In general, we have found that the changes are too complex for simple surveys, interviews, and focus groups. Understanding the complexities of cultural revolution requires total immersion in the subject.

So our primary method is ethnography, a method that requires us to participate in the phenomena we study, to understand it from the inside while maintaining an outside perspective as well. To study YouTube, we become YouTubers. To study the blogosphere, we become bloggers. It is the same method that anthropologists have been using for over a century to study foreign cultures, living like the natives and participating in their way of life. It seems appropriate. Future culture is foreign culture, and it comes upon us more quickly than ever before.

Our group is also dedicated to finding ways of spreading our insights to a broad audience, to getting our ideas out to those who can truly help shape this world. In this we have been enormously successful, creating videos about our research viewed by over six million people in 2007. Our work asks for continuous reflection on the impacts of digital technology.

At the core of this reflection is a simple question that demands complex answers: Are we using this technology, or is it using us? The reality is that we have long been inseparable from technology. The structures and forms of digital media we humans create in turn create how we can create, and perhaps more importantly, how we communicate and relate to one another. Each time we create a new tool we are not only remaking technology, we are remaking ourselves.