Abstract

This article, starting from the premise of the centrality of the Internet ecosystem in contemporary society, investigates Internet development from a cultural standpoint. The focus is on some of the main digital industries (from Microsoft to Google, from Facebook to Apple, from Amazon to Wikipedia), their products, the experiences they offer to their customers and the evolutionary path they followed and that they are likely to follow in the future. The analysis is conducted through the proposal of some typologies of digital cultures (the scholar, the explorer, the aesthete and the anchorman) and brings to considerations about a new cultural system in which traditional publishing has come to the end of the line.