So I’m thinking about how this world of digital electronic communication really came to take over the world and take over the way that we experience life, the way we experience the world.
So much is through an electronic screen.
And the last video, I looked at the beginnings of it, telegraph, telephone, television, and that’s what I started my life with, with that world, and also I learned about the world of computers.
So you could type on a keyboard and look at a screen, and you know, things could happen, and there was this world of computers, computer games, programming, imagination, researching, communicating: all these things were there even in the 80s and the early 90s, when I started.
But then around the mid 90s, it seemed like really the internet started to take over and become widespread, in at least the area of the world that I was familiar with, and it became increasingly something that was normal.
So before, you know, computers were like a toy.
You know, maybe it was OK, there’s actual science, actual work that can be done on them, but it seemed like in the 80s like computers was like something to play with, almost like a train set, you know, or it’s like somebody who has a ham radio, you know, shortwave radio operator.
It’s just something for fun.
Most people don’t care about it.
It’s just like oh, you know, it’s a cool toy, it’s pretty amazing what it can do, but it’s not part of ordinary life.
It’s not important for everyday living for most people.
But slowly, going into the late 90s, the internet started to become much more of a normal thing.
Browsing the world wide web, communicating by email: it started to become normal.
And really by the early 2000s, then this was something that the internet became a new piece of the landscape. […]
So that became a normal part of life.
Maybe a bit more focused on like the business/science side, not so much the social side, but it started to become a normal part of life.
And then really in the late 2000s, that’s when we saw the breakout of social media.
I still remember the period where, you know, the Facebook network suddenly just spread around the world, and the whole idea of social networks took off.
And then possibly the biggest thing was the phone, the “smart phone”, that now people have a computer in their pocket at all times.
Instead of just being something on the desk at home, it’s now something that’s with you at all times.
So that combination, I think that really set it to a new level.
Now everybody was using computers and the internet socially.
It’s not just something that is about work and technology, business, it’s for actually communicating with your friends.
And it became, as each year went by, it became less convenient to not be using the internet to communicate with friends.
This combined with the phone, now we have ready access to the whole social world in our pocket at all times.
And I wonder if there has been another big change in tech since then.
But maybe it really was the social network and the smart phone.
Maybe those are the things that really kicked it in to this new level.
I can’t think of any major shifts after that, except that it just deepened and became more pervasive overall, that now this is how we communicate.
Now we communicate through the internet.
The telephone is irrelevant.
Telephone has been absorbed into the internet.
And television is absorbed into the internet.
And we can get- anything that we want to do, it’s cheaper to do electronically than to do physically.
It’s more efficient.
It has greater reach.
All the factors seem to be pushing towards greater and greater integration with electronics, and more and more of our time is spent using electronic interfaces, so that we become less and less important in our physical form, and we become more and more nodes plugged in to an electronic network.
So maybe it seems a bit extreme to put it like this, but it seems like this really is a fundamental change in the normal way of living, or the way that we imagine living life, as it just becomes so centred around this network, this electronic integration, so that it becomes like the circulation, the blood of social life and economic life and of the world, that this becomes the new environment.
The physical environment of actual bodies and rooms and spaces and sky and earth: that becomes secondary, perhaps, to the electronic environment.
And it seems like there’s no way that this cannot create big changes in the way that we experience life.
So I’m curious to hear more ideas about what this really means.
And it seems like this time now, as we are locked down physically and yet opened up electronically: this will see a new level of acceleration in this direction.
And really, I have no idea what’s going to come of it.
#digitallife #digitized #digitalhumanity