Abstract
Digital trends are signs of imminent social changes that appear linked to the use of digital technologies. It is believed that digital media, due to its decentralized structure, induces more radical differences than centralized analog media. The aim of this research is to assess the potential for social differentiation implied in the dissemination of trends by digital media. To achieve this end, the research analyzed a corpus of 1,700 digital trends mapped on graph visualizations. Interpreting the results through Henri Lefebvre's materialist-dialectical differentialism, this research came to the conclusion that digital trends produce minimal differences, that is, they tend to maintain the status quo instead of questioning it, contradicting their association with phenomena such as revolution, disruption and innovation. In addition to investigating this specific issue, this research points towards possible collaborations between Information Design and Digital Humanities fields.
Highlights
Trends are often defined as signs of imminent social change (Caldas, 2004; Erner, 2015)
The teacher published 6 texts with graph visualizations that synthesized the partial findings in a website section https://medium.com/tendênciasdigitais/mapas/home
The visualizations were useful for the purpose of this research, as signs of social differentiation that could be identified in the node connection patterns
Summary
Trends are often defined as signs of imminent social change (Caldas, 2004; Erner, 2015). These signs represent new values, new economic orders, new gender relations, or any other type of novelty that introduces social differentiation. The search for references is a common habit among designers to assimilate and reproduce trends without further reflection. The differentiation captured by benchmark analysis is usually restricted to formal or functional variations; there are other methods that identify, analyze, and accommodate social differences in design projects (Dragt, 2017; Caldas, 2004). C. van | Conservatism in digital trends: findings from a differentialist analysis of influence graphs important vehicle for the reproduction of trends that there is already a niche for specific trends born in this media, the so-called digital trends
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