Digital culture
“In a way, when TV went digital, we lost a foothold in reality. Now, we’ll never truly know if what we’re watching is real or has been altered and transmitted to us. Digital culture brought a step away from truth.”
― The RZA, The Tao of Wu
“During the last two decades, digital technology has begun to play role on almost every aspect of our lives. Today most forms of mass media, television, film and recorded music are produced and distributed digitally. These media are beginning to converge with digital forms, such as the internet, the (WWW), and video games. Technology surround us every day, even at work. Whether in offices or in supermarkets and factories, where almost every aspect of marketing, design, planning, production and distribution is monitored or controlled digitally.”
When observing the modern world, it is hard not to notice the changes that the rapid digitalization has brought. Although most of the changes, we as people notice in our everyday life, are good and help us improve in all aspects of work, education and so on.
There is an obvious problem with so called rapid digitalization, and that is: control and usage of the information received by the corporations that manage digitalization.
Control: There is a consensus among the experts that marketing is more efficient the more information about the target one can gather. The problem arises when this idea is misused and used to influence users (targets) to affect their political or religious standpoints. This leads to easier control and creates robots that cannot think with their own mind but repeat the ideas implemented to them by this dangerous type of marketing.
Usage of information gathered by digital companies is another problem that digitalization has brought. Who and how is using the information that every one of us provides the corporations with. We saw recently when the famous whistler Edward Snowden came out with the proclamation how the US government uses information provided by all the products brought to us via digitalization. They created a program similar to Google where you can search for ANY person in the world. Their family, friends, address, even personal pictures were just a click away.
On the other hand, it is hard not to notice the benefits of digitalization, both on the global level, and in everyday people’s life. Today doctors can communicate with their colleges in a matter of seconds to exchange ideas for helping the patient. In the near future we can even expect that specialists could manage operations via robots from miles away, even from another continent. Coming hand in hand is the usage of 3-D printers in medicine. Creation of body parts in exact proportions needed is our present, and our future.
Also students and professors today can exchange knowledge in the matter of seconds. Soon it will not be acceptable for people, living in the “Western World” to claim that they didn’t have the possibility of learning. These ideas may seem far away in the future but with the digitalization rapidly galloping it is inevitable.
It is in our hands to steer this digitalization towards creation modern culture where humans will use digitalization in creating culture of inclusion and equality. But to get the best out of analogue and digital development we must use our social and emotional skills, developed through thousand years of evolution, to leave the destruction in the past and look forward to creating bright future of the Universe.
