“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” – Carl Sagan
“I’ll Google my Twitter all over your Facebook.”– Anonymous
We live in an age of hybridity. Hybrid cars, mobile devices and communication practices all represent the fusion of existing processes or things. Whether we’re 15 or 50, we acquire knowledge in different ways. Noticeably, experience is now extensively mediated by technology. Johannes Gutenberg ushered in the publishing revolution with his printing press, forever changing literacy. John Logie Baird similarly designed the first working television, and Charles Babbage, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs are often thought of as important forerunners of modern computing. Language, too, was a technical invention. As these examples suggest, technology is not something we can choose to ignore, not in the context of a hyper-modern civilization. ‘Globalized’ is one description of the world, although if you think about it, the world has always been ‘global’; it’s not as if the Internet suddenly made all borders obsolete. However, globalization does represent a radical convergence of perspectives and technologies mirrored in an equally radical collaboration of perceptions about space and time. Perhaps the most relevant example is our current fascination with digital technology.
Digital Life
Digital technology offers the promise of exciting and empowering advantages, particularly in communication. And with space and time now more manageable than ever, opportunities for participating, as both Canadians and global citizens, emerge. For instance, we can get on a plane and travel across the world in a matter of hours, retrieve vast quantities of information from search engines like Google and Yahoo, or instantly have a text message sent across continents. However, choosing to routinely use technology may come at the expense of a subtle adaptation to it. Adaptation is often beneficial, except that there are so many technologies geared at augmenting our experience of the world that it’s easy to take them for granted. Isn’t it difficult to put down a cell phone when it’s buzzing excitedly, trying to tell us that someone wants our attention? Or to stop checking Facebook when we should be studying? Or simply not using a computer for a week?
We often work symbiotically with digital technology. Most of it is designed to help us perform at greater efficiencies through user-friendly interfaces. Our relationship with technology is becoming more intimate as a result. Consider the success of devices like the iPhone and iPod. They provide a way to create our own individual ‘bubbles’, to craft personalized, customizable spaces from which to navigate our environments. A question arises of whether using these devices renders us more capable in, or more cut off from, the external world around us. For example, cultural objects like iPods demand more serious thought – Sacha Baron-Cohen’s latest film, Bruno, shows his character swapping his iPod for an African baby orphan. That scenario seems ridiculous, but novel technologies experience a type of devotion similar to what some religions practice. In this sense they have a profound effect on the way we live. Paying attention to how these digital technologies influence day-to-day activities is vital. We are, after all, tomorrow’s workers, thinkers, voters and citizens. Our decisions, or lack thereof, will form the next cultural paradigm with all of its privileges as well as problems.
Digital technology also allows us to multi-task in new and empowering ways, and increase our productivity. However, as the American literary critic Walter Kirn describes, doing two things at once is really to do neither (though science explains women are usually better at multi-tasking than men). He stresses that when the human brain isn’t focused, it concentrates on the act of concentrating rather than the activity it wants to be concentrating on. From his perspective young minds are “being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it”, largely through dependence on hi-tech mediation. Is he right? Think about a social networking platform like Twitter. It allows users to continuously create the medium in real time. It can provide up-to-the-second information of things happening RIGHT NOW. And we can react instantly to them. This has never before been possible and presents myriad advantages. Twitter also limits expression to 140 characters at a time. How accurate does a 140-character limit allow users to be? Who fact-checks all those tweets? And in posing the two former questions, can we infer that digital technologies complicate the ability to communicate effectively? The answer to this last question will depend on whether the user is active or passive. Simply having an advantage is not the same as utilizing that opportunity. Similarly, having the use of digital technology is not the same as making it work for you. Rather, without critical engagement, technology can tailor users to suit its protocols.
