ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the way information technology and especially communication formats influence the culture of electronic communication, popular culture, and the self, or the internal organization of how people define and make sense of themselves in an age of new forms of information technology. It aims to integrate culture and communication in order to explicate how the organization and meaning of one is joined to the other through mediation. Communication involves the interpreting, ordering, exchanging, and sharing of meaning. The sociology of knowledge informs us that the communication process is problematic, and that history, context, and interaction contribute to the social construction of meaningful information. Media provide the space for temporal ordering. Ideas about stability and change, order and conflict, peace and war often boil down to how such things look, and what the consequences and aftermath look like. Information is a cultural form today that transcends the content or specific bits of information.
