Our Brave New Digital World
There is no doubt that, thanks to the digital information revolution (which in my view really began at the turn of the century), the world of information – from the daily news to education and to personal communication – has completely changed.
When I’m with my grandkids, I sometimes wonder how the world seems to them as children that live in a world in which access to virtually everything you might want to read about or watch is not just available, but available from hundreds of content providers in dozens of different formats – and all in a matter of seconds.
There have been hundreds of essays and books written about this topic, most of them exploring the most obvious opportunities and problems. There is no doubt that digital media can be enormously useful in facilitating the amount of information easily available to us. But in recent years, we’ve also become acutely aware of problems with the quality and dependability of that information, the algorithms that control what users are “fed,” and, with the onset of AI, how easy it is to create and generate fake news and forgeries, including avatars – dead-ringer images of real people that can be made to do and say anything the programmer wants.
These big problems, I believe, will soon put us into an entirely new world where nothing generated by digital media will be trusted. Our knowledge systems have already been compromised by the algorithms in a pleasing but addictive way. Before long, our belief systems will change entirely, too, with trust becoming a very rare resource that few people or social media outlets will have.
But there are also all sorts of smaller problems, which might, in one’s personal life, be disturbing or disrupting in a large way. Take attention span, for instance. One of the most-documented effects of social media is a shortened attention span among those that use it for more than, say, an hour a day.
I can relate to that. Ever since I stopped watching network TV – which must be at least 10 years ago – I’ve been getting all my news from digital sources. And what I’ve noticed is that my attention span for acquiring information has shortened from about an hour to about 11 minutes – which is about my limit when it comes to clicking on a YouTube link.
What’s worse, I don’t have the patience for full-length movies or long books anymore. I still watch movies and read books, but I do it almost out of obligation these days. My instinct is always to get on YouTube or some other streaming service and click away.
I wonder how my new habits are affecting my brain. I wonder if I’m getting more or less informed, smarter or dumber, more or less socially responsible and empathetic.
