Digital Pilgrims, the Podcast Series: Episode 2 is out!
In each weekly episode, analyze with us how the latest digital technologies impact our society from a historical perspective.
Have you ever wondered what a “bit” really is? Despite our daily use of digital devices, we rarely stop to consider the profound impact of the digital world that is all around us. In this episode, we’ll explore the hidden power of bits, revealing how they come together to create the Digital Environment we inhabit. Join us as we journey into the interconnected universe of the digital semiosphere, where meaning and communication take on new forms.
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Read the episode transcript here:
Episode 2: The Digital Environment
The bit or binary digit, the elementary particle of the digital world, is a decision between two options: 1 or 0. It was defined in 1948 by the scientists at Bell Laboratories. From that moment on, thanks to the development of binary code, any kind of digital object can be summed up in an ordered series, whether long or short, of yes (one) and no (zero) decisions. We can reduce to X quantity of bits an immense number of intangible objects, complex reasoning, intelligent systems, chess theories, or processes that are independent of human control.
The whole of digital development, about which humanity has few certainties, emerges from that black or white, on or off particle that we discovered a little over seventy years ago. From its beginnings as a powerful tool for computation and decodification, the bit held within its nature the transformative ability of a new kind of atom. If we propose the Digital Environment as that world that is coming toward us, it is one made up of minute particles that can be reduced to that initial decision of defining everything as a series of binary combinations. Today, we are surrounded by bits, in constant contact with them.
Science and technology help us and have the ability to change what we understand as our reality. It is fair to say that our present cannot be conceived of without the impact of digital developments. From the moment we get up in the morning until we reach the end of the day, they are with us. At this moment, there are more than twenty-five billion devices connected around the world, 60% more than in 2016 or, in more concrete terms, six devices for every human being on Earth. This materializes the progress of the industrial development known as the Internet of Things, a market that surpassed 250 billion dollars in 2019 and which, during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, proved indispensable for modern life. Material life is becoming more and more connected to the network.
In parallel, we have advancements in Artificial Intelligence that never cease to amaze: it writes articles, paints pictures, finds solutions to complex problems, dances on the Internet, makes presentations at conferences, and, above all, thinks and reasons (or does it?) very differently from people. We can add the fact that quantum computing has left the laboratory to make an early but concrete arrival in the world of commerce. Perhaps we cannot know exactly where this process is leading or what consequences it will have, but we can at least maintain that the potential of these developments is unprecedented.
Beginning to think about digital technology and its effects, consequences, and opportunities forces us to question truths we take for granted and take note of others that perhaps we had never stopped to consider. The first logical step is to ask ourselves what digital technology is, how we understand it, and whether we ought to update that conception.
Since its development in the final decades of the last century, different ways of understanding digital technology have circulated. At first, we considered it a tool that allowed us to carry out very complex processes. With the development of the Internet, different ways of overcoming the barriers of distance and time to share information and communicate became more explicit. And progress did not stop there. While we used to use technology to complete a specific task, today digital technology surrounds us. The feeling is that it is everywhere, so much so that sometimes we do not see it. We spend several hours a day in front of a screen, we live with the content of what happens “online,” and we experience what happens in the virtual world as reality.
The most urgent question is whether it is correct to think of digital technology today as a tool or if it has become something more. Bearing in mind that digital technology encompasses all forms derived from bits, whose materiality must be understood as a combination of atoms and bits that includes everything from the first computer up through Artificial Intelligences and 5G, is it fair to compare it with a tool like a hammer, a tractor, or a windmill?Or, since it is everywhere, permeating our reality, should we think of it as something more? Can we think of it as a kind of environment?
The simplest and most common of words are often the hardest to define, but in this case we must try. In general terms, when we talk about an environment, we are referring to the conditions that surround someone or something and allow for its development. Nature, for example, is an environment in that it is a set of elements (physical, chemical, and biological) that interact with living things. This Natural Environment is the foundation for all life and allows everything that inhabits it to develop and exist. It feels ordinary to us because it existed before the development of the human species. It was already there when we arrived. However, there are now other types of elements that surround us, in another moment of our existence, when “we’re on the Internet.” At these times, while the physical body is in a specific place carrying out the small actions through which we interact with a device, where is our mind? Where is our attention? Are we on Twitter, or are we in our homes? We might say we’re in both places: while our body is in the Natural Environment, our consciousness is in the Digital Environment.
One possible reason why this idea might sound disruptive is because perceiving and understanding a new environment is difficult. How would the sea be described by a fish that has spent its whole life swimming around a tank? How do people describe an environment that cannot be seen or, so far, touched? Although Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and projects with the Metaverse and the Omniverse are searching for a way to give the Digital Environment a certain degree of tangibility, humans have been moving through and inhabiting the Digital Environment for longer than we think. We are inside it, and it is all around us.
In considering how the different elements of our culture take on meaning, Yuri Lotman introduced a concept that is helpful for thinking about the Digital Environment. The linguist uses the term “semiosphere” to refer to a defined set of signs to which a community assigns meaning and exchanges in order to communicate and interact. So, (like geological concepts such as the lithosphere and the atmosphere) the semiosphere describes a closed and abstract space formed by signs, which cannot be perceived with the senses. Within that space, some physical elements (like notches in rock, sound waves, or ink patterns) can hold meaning in reference to a system of relationships. At the same time, there are different spheres of meaning. As such, a text acquires its value (and usefulness) in its interrelation with different signs and practices, which is very different from what happens with a tool like a pencil. The potential of digital objects lies in their ability to connect with each other (their system of relationships) and to connect with human life (their practices) on different levels. Extending Yuri Lotman’s idea, we can argue that digital technologies are configured similarly to the semiosphere, a system that makes sense within itself and simultaneously produces both new signs and new values for the old ones.
When we talk about the Digital Environment, this is how we are thinking about technology. This environment is developed based on infrastructures (optical fiber, servers) and physical supports (robots, computers, chips), but it is also its own space. Its elements make up an abstract space that we cannot perceive with our bodies’ senses, but that we can feel. We see each other on the Internet, we look for each other online, we meet on social networks and work in the cloud. And the digital sphere is also an environment because we can inhabit it.
The habitability of the Digital Environment will be analyzed in the next chapter. Until then, we will lay out the following difference. If it is very clear to us that we are in the Natural Environment when we are in our homes, why is it hard for us to think that we are in the Digital Environment when we are in a Zoom meeting or looking up information on Google?
When we begin to see that digital technology constitutes an environment, this opens the door to considering the emotional implications that this change causes in people. It is possible to imagine that if the Natural Environment was for centuries the only place we could be and inhabit, the appearance or development of another environment, with such dissimilar characteristics, it must have been quite disruptive for people. The feeling of confusion is a constant companion to modern humans.
The Digital Environment also changes how we understand reality. The idea is simple but highly transformative: a new understanding of the historical relationship between space and time. That duality, which seemed unbreakable, which was a certainty and made up the foundation of our existence, is questioned by coexistence with the new dimensions activated by the Digital Environment. Beyond the time and space we inhabit with our biological bodies, there emerge new ways to inhabit spaces that are not physical and allow for the coexistence of different times. There are now other possibilities we had not considered. Grasping that is a huge challenge that can lead us to reconsider the meaning and scope of our existence.
Once we understand digital technologies as a Digital Environment, atomic materials cease to be the basic elements of an unambiguous reality; instead, they become the medium for new digital dimensions, a kind of supporting materiality from which the multiple realities that can be digitally imagined and produced might unfold and become part of material reality. This implies an extension of our existential dimension, which allows us to reach territories beyond the Natural Environment.
Unlike other inventions that have been vital to human development and have marked entire historical periods, such as the invention of the steam engine, electricity, or the telephone, the tools developed for digitalization have moved beyond their nature as mere instruments and gone on to solve problems and achieve goals. Today, they have come to constitute the development of a new environment for our species.
Our confusion is an expression of our uncertainty, but it also stimulates our hunger for knowledge. We achieved digital technology believing that we were arriving in the Indies, but a few decades later, it revealed itself to be something we did not expect. Digital technology is a new environment that not only invites us to ask questions about the depths of our being but also to consider the existence of another dimension of the universe. On a daily basis, we experience a New World we cannot yet explain.
There are facts and discoveries with the power to upend all that we know, and they force us to reorganize our worldview. This happened to Europeans when they arrived in the Americas and also to those who were already there and saw them arrive. It was a New World for all of them: as full of opportunities as it was devastating, as powerful as it was controversial, as unexpected as it was inevitable. When modern people run up against digital technology, something similar happens to us. Digital technology is more than a powerful tool; it is an environment unto itself. Have we arrived in the Digital Environment? Did the Digital Environment come to us? The only thing we do know is that now, we are not the same as we were. Our universe has expanded, and reality is being reconfigured.
In the next episode
Learn how Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made computer history, and explore the technical revolution that defines our modern world.
Digital Pilgrims is a podcast based upon the book “Digital Pilgrims. Towards a Quantum Humanity”, sponsored by Coderfull, a unique Service Management platform for remote teams.
