Digital know-how has come a long way via all leaps and bounds over the past five years. As a tradition, we’re so dependent of instantaneous messaging providers, electronic mail, digital cameras, and above all digital cell telephones. Is not it shocking that all our progress has not introduced humanity any farther — for all the brand new discoveries in science, society and tradition, humans are mainly unchanged: love and hate, generosity and envy, trust and mistrust are nonetheless the bottom line.
If the top of the twentieth century may be characterized by futurism,” media theorist Douglas Rushkoff writes in his new e-book Present Shock: When Every thing Occurs Now, the twenty-first might be defined by presentism.” For Rushkoff, we’ve ceased being a future-targeted tradition” and instead morphed into one that can’t look previous the now.” The end result, he says, is current shock” — our panicky retort to an always-on, real-time society.
And if our social life was the one part that was being revolutionized by the overuse of expertise, we might reside with that. Then we are to comply with McLuhan on a leap of faith to say that ALL advances in communication know-how have had similar effects. On this networked and interconnected, converging and merging, world, emergent media ecologies exert and contain quite a lot of sociopolitical, cultural, and historical forces that work together interface with people as they change into media producers and customers-A brand new reality and environ of media use and interactive communication.
Human relationships and social buildings change, as we have now already seen within the “Arab Spring” revolutions happening in areas like North Africa, fueled by the crowdsourcing capabilities of cell phone know-how; in the micro-lending revolution within the developing world, enabled by the monetary transfers doable by way of social networks; or within the green revolution going on around the world, empowered by our access to data formerly out of attain of ordinary folks.
Over the previous few years, themes such as the ‘new communication paradigm,’ ‘digital economy,’ ‘techno society,’ ‘interactivity,’ ‘cyber tradition,’ ‘cyberocratia,,’ and many others., have been subjects of endless dialogue. Whether we like or dislike technology, in the ultimate analysis, it’s the very thing that connects and takes over your entire human communications and interaction, that’s bothersome.