What Does It Mean to Be Digital?
That is not an easy question to answer. We live in a world where pretty much everything is connected to technologies. We might not realize this but we are dependable on them. We cannot live our lives without everyday use of our smart phones, tablets and computers. We are so used to that, we can’t even imagine our lives without those technologies.
In his book Nicholas Negroponte talks about what it means to be digital. He talks about the evolution of computer and television technologies and how they merge into nowadays multimedia. He gives credit to important people such as Douglas Engelbart who helped the development of the new media as it is right now. The purpose of his work is to convince the readers that the digital age is coming, if not came already. Negroponte says that within a decade, Americans will spend more time on the Internet, rather than watching standard TV. Which has already happened. I barely know people that watch TV on a regular basis. Since I am still in college, I do not have a TV, but some of my friends do, and the only thing that they actually watch on TV (excluding Netflix or Hulu) is AMC’s the Walking Dead. The rest of the channels are non-existent to them because they can always find any content online. Negroponte saw it coming:
The growth of personal computers is happening so rapidly that the future open-architecture television is the PC… there is no TV-set industry in the future. It is nothing more or less than a computer industry: displays filled with tons of memory and lots of processing power.
Almost 20 years ago Negroponte’s book would be viewed as a science-fiction book, but his predictions came true. All the technologies evolved and became “smart”, maybe even too smart. For example, Apple completely changed our visions of how a phone should look like. When I was in the middle school, NOKIA was the coolest phone that you could possibly imagine. Only cool kids could afford it. And where is NOKIA now? I do not know a single person who will use it because their technologies are old and not up to date.
But are the technologies that good? Just think about it. When I was younger, I’ve watched the movie with Will Smith I, Robot and you know what? That was the biggest nightmare of my life. I like technologies. I find it so cool that you can just dictate to your phone what you need and Siri will find the answer within seconds. Our phones, tablets and computers became what McLuhan is called “extensions of ourselves”. But the question still remains, is it so good for us? As I mentioned the movie, I am honestly scared that sooner or later we are going to have robots walking around and doing all kinds of things for us. That stuff is scary. We are already losing the ability to communicate with each other, instead of going for a picnic with your friends on a nice day, you would prefer to stay home and watch a movie (possibly a movie of other people going for a picnic on a nice day).
Also why do we need to have real live conversations with others if we can chat online and lie about ourselves? Thanks to cyberspace that makes it possible. You can be who you want and do what you want and if you are smart and talented enough, no one will know what you did. Is it so? I doubt it. Google’s cool feature “OK, Google” seems reliable and trustworthy (because it is Google, ain’t it?), but I wouldn’t be so sure. This nice feature used to pick up on everything you say around your computer. Same stuff with Samsung Smart TV’s.
Another example of a nightmare that comes to my mind is the Japanese animation series that are called Psycho Pass. I am not much of anime fan, but the other day my friend showed me this show and told me that it is a “must see” since I am dealing with the new media on a daily basis. So. This show is about future which is present in the show (huh?). There is this super computer Cybilla that reads people’s “psycho passports” which are your brain waves and decides how talented this person is and if he or she can become a potential criminal. And there is this young police girl who has like super good and moralistic personal traits. She gets a weapon, that reads psycho passes and decides if the person has a criminal index and if so it goes either on the paralyzer mode or a full killing one. That society looks so safe and everything, people get the jobs that they deserve and there is no way that you can trick the pass scanner. But even in a society like that there are always some exceptions. This villain has a clean psycho pass but can kill people. And there is nothing Cybilla or the police can do. All digitalized weapons are not working on him so he can do whatever he wants. Boom. Sounds like something that could actually happen in our nowadays society, eh? Even though technologies seem reliable, there is always an exception, when they fail. That is why I believe that we still have to hold to the old traditions and some of the old technologies, even though they became a part of our past.
When you think about it this way, it doesn’t sound that much fun anymore. Invasion of your personal space, privacy, collecting your personal data, machines being able to process that information — Negroponte could see that long before it became true. He was talking about the future, but in fact, it is already past for us.
The next decade will see cases of intellectual property abuse and invasion of our privacy. We will experience digital vandalism, software piracy, and data thievery. Worst of all, we will witness the loss of many jobs to wholly automated systems, which will soon change the white-collar workplace to the same degree that it has already transformed the factory floor.
Technologies grow with an enormous speed and there is no way anyone could stop it. The only way to deal with it is to decide for yourself whether you want to accept it or not.
