Digital Age

Digital Age

 

For many, the digital age is simply the industrial era ‘amped up’ on tech steroids. Perhaps marked by the IT industry’s coming of age as new technology became as much part of the social fabric as it was in the world of business. But that doesn’t really cover it.

There are certain interesting traits that for me define the digital age:

• Many of us now have virtual lives as well as physical ones.
• Some of us use our virtual life to promote an idealized physical life.
• Technology is augmenting us in unimaginable ways. We have the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, thanks to smartphone technology, but we choose to use it primarily for shopping and picking arguments with strangers. Either way, Alexander Graham Bell would be dumbfounded.
• Thanks to digital distraction, we appear to be losing the ability to think deeply. We take in content like a whale takes in plankton. In other words, very little of what we ‘consume’ has ‘nutritional’ value.
• Increasingly dumb objects, such as trolleys and toothbrushes, are becoming data-rich smart devices.
• Many of us are happy to trade privacy for convenience. And some of  us are unaware of the value of our own data.
• Our own data, thanks to ‘quantified self’ technologies, is permanently streaming from us like a comet’s tail.
• There is a growing acceptance that citizen surveillance is a price to be paid for being part of a developed society.
• World leaders constraining foreign policy statements to 140 characters.
• It has never been so easy to share.

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