An alarm wakes you up. It’s on your phone of course. You blearily reach over to turn it off, the screen blinding you in the process. You turn on the lights after a moment of vegetating in bed. Do you check your phone first, to read the global news that has accumulated in the eight or so hours that you rested, or do you get a newspaper delivered at the door which largely shows local news, delayed by a few hours it took to print and distribute? Do you message your friends who are heading to sleep in the timezone across the globe or do you send a letter that will take weeks to deliver at the quickest? People tend to focus on the negatives of technology and societies growing dependance on it, but the value of so-called ‘digital’ life is often ignored. The up to date news you can receive about the world as a whole, or your closer circle of friends and family is much more efficient for life than non-digital methods of newspapers and letters.
You leave your house a while later, running late to catch the bus. Luckily, the bus is also feeling the lethargy of the early morning: it is also running late by 6 minutes according to the app on your phone. This knowledge of the delay means you don’t arrive at the bus stop sweaty from a hasty jog. The bus goes, unimpeded, through traffic lights, special sensors and data tracking its movement to make it more efficient in passing through junctions.
At your job, you can hardly focus on the presentation about the safety systems of the project. Five people in various different roles of the project need to be consulted. Using the chat feature of your laptop, you can get real time responses, fixing errors in your presentation in minutes. However, the notifications from your family on the top right of your screen are unavoidable too. Intermittently throughout the morning you get the notifications, drawing your attention away from your work. One of these notifications involves a picture of your niece, a toothy smile grinning down at some cartoon character on an ipad. Not too dissimilar to the old photo of you grinning at your favourite TV show as a kid. Still…isn’t that a cafe in the background? Shouldn’t she be enjoying her juice and talking with her parents? Well, not your kid, not really your problem. Your parents bemoaned how you were glued to your computer, and your grandparents complained at how reliant on the TV and phone calls your parents were growing up. It seems there’s always going to be some object that fascinates the younger generation which older generations bemoan.
Still, it would be nice to have a moment disconnected from the screens. Your eyes are beginning to hurt as lunch approaches. Time for a break. Of course, your break from your computer screen involves using your phone. Part of it is useful: using your phone’s translation to see the possible nut allergens in the new sandwich you buy. Unfortunately, the rest of the time is spent endlessly scrolling through the various applications there. A double edged sword: you can both get almost any information, but you’re also inundated in the amount.
You continue work, slogging through the rest of the safety systems check before you clock out. The way home is spent with your earphones plugged in, gazing blankly out the window of the bus while blasting loud music in your ear. You awkwardly smile and nod at someone you vaguely recognise. At home, your dinner is a recipe from halfway across the globe that you stumbled across in a video. You hope it tastes authentic, but you can’t be entirely certain. After dinner you watch an episode of your favourite show before getting ready to sleep. You sacrifice your sleep schedule to look through your phone for a second before work. Tomorrow you can restart the process.
The world seems, quite often, mired entirely in technology, but how is the digital even defined? Is it limited to being the social influences and cultural networks that span across the world? Does it also include the somewhat mundane objects that we now take for granted, like lightbulbs that last long, or traffic lights which anticipate your arrival? While digital aspects seem to be overtaking our lives, it also seems that what we consider ‘digital’ changes. Often the idea of the digital is related solely to social media and the sociocultural effects that the internet and ease of connectivity has brought. However, perhaps before discussing the effects of the digital, defining what comes under the umbrella as digital should occur.
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