Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.
Interpretation
Digital actions leave a permanent trace that can be easily replicated and stored.
This quote by Douglas Rushkoff emphasizes how digital media inherently favors the creation of copies and the long-term storage of our digital actions, implying that our online activities are almost impossible to erase completely. It serves as a warning about the permanence of our digital footprints, suggesting that even deleted content can resurface unexpectedly, and that all our actions in the digital space can feel as public as a live broadcast.
In practice
During a social media workshop, to remind participants about their digital footprint.
Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.
The faux now of Twitter updates and things pinging at you - all the pulses from digitality that we try to keep up with because we sense that there's something going on that we need to tap into - are artifacts, or symptoms of living in this atemporal reality. And it's not any worse than living in the 'time is money' reality that we're leaving.
Treating an age group as a demographic requires coming up with something that's common to every single one of them. Right?... So it's reductionist in that it reduces an entire segment of civilization down to one person with one habit.
Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.
As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.
The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there's programming going on. It's as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on.
Who wants a stylus. You have to get em and put em away, and you lose em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.
If you write a blog post, you've got something to say; you're not just creating words and synonyms. We'd like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning.
I've actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don't mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.
First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.
The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.
I have stared long enough at the glowing flat rectangles of computer screens. Let us give more time for doing things in the real world...plant a plant, walk the dogs, read a real book, go to the opera.
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