Reflecting On The Steady March of the Hyperlinked Digital Infrastructure …

.. and the accompanying socio-cultural, economic and technological evolution.

I have been lax in making work in which I have engaged available online.  Much of my work over the past three years has been focused on digital capabilities , digital culture and growth in the awareness of social and cognitive behaviours (including but not limited to social networks).

Here’s the introduction to a report to Canadian Culture Online that I and my colleagues Michel Dumais and René Barsalo pulled together.  I think it’s fair to say that I did the bulk of the research and writing, and they provided the mission-critical editing and filling in of the gaps.

As always, if anyone is interested you probably know how to contact me … I will share with you a copy of the report.

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The report was constructed in such a way as to identify the major trends associated with:

·      Access and availability

·      Capability

·      Uptake by users

·      Areas being developed by producers of digital content

·      Disruptive impacts on business logic, business models and established structures and practices

·      Quantitative analyses of trends in the development of infrastructure

·      Probable / likely impacts and forecasts

Taken together, the elements outlined above represent a “whole system” or an infrastructure that offers both producers and consumers a new interconnected and interlinked environment for creating products and service that can be offered and distributed to markets, both large and small.

There is mounting evidence that this new environment is creating new economic conditions that demand new logic and new models. There is also clear evidence that the major manufacturers of hardware and the decentralized and widely distributed creators of software and Web services recognize that there is underway an ongoing integration and convergence of functionality and capabilities. 

This digital convergence  … the digitization and democratization of information, whether based on text, images, sounds or combinations thereof …  has been predicted for approximately a decade, but it is only over the last year that the patterns have become clearer for a wider audience of interested parties.

The elements outlined above, when considered together, also represent an undeniable movement towards integration and convergence.

But … this transition towards a digital era will not be accomplished without pain and difficulty, especially on the part of established industries.  Many of them will suffer in one way or another during the process of change and adaptation from an economy based on material objects to one in which work and production is dematerialized.   With convergence will be created new products, new markets and new segments within those new markets. And in addition, this phenomenon will modify (in certain cases) the actual structure of existing industries, which will in turn transform the balance of power and alter the principles upon which current perspectives about competition are based.

So, to understand well this world in the process of transformation, it’s useful to look at the ways the generations of consumers are adapting .. or not.  Who are the young people, the *digital natives*, who seem to have grown up with these new technologies under their skins ?  And, above all, how do the rest of us understand and interact with them ?

They are between 10 and 20 years old, and they have been born into a world that was being transformed into a sense-surround digital environment. They resonate more than they reason, they are fickle consumers who who focus on brands … they multi-task (see Homo Zappiens in the Report “The Time Is Now”), and above all they are not shy about questioning several major foundations of established society, which has the effect of knotting up well-established industries such as the mainstream industry of cultural entertainment: they are the “Digital Kids” or “Digital Natives”.

Ever since birth, these children of the digital era have bathed in screen-based images, in digital sound, and in digital video, and have been using remote controls and computer mice.  Their universe is based on immersion in information technology, of one sort or another.  It’s an interactive universe consisting of more and more consumer electronic products such as game consoles like the Xbox 360 or the Playstation, computers, portable phones, and listening-and-viewing devices like the iPod.  Their world is one with a network-based interactive culture based on sharing and building common knowledge.

In his study titled “The death of command and control”, the researcher Marc Prensky helps us learn that these young people have experienced an accumulated 10 000 hours of video-game playing, have sent and received more than 200 000 emails or text messages of all sorts, have spent more than 10 000 hours speaking to their friends on portable phones, have more than 20 000 hours of watching television under their belts whilst having been exposed to more than 500 000 advertising messages. On the other hand, these digital natives have spent less than 5 000 hours reading what we call “real” books. 

But let’s be careful …  and not jump too quickly to incomplete conclusions.  These numbers are far from stating conclusively that these young people do not read at all.  On the contrary, this simply signifies that their sources of information are other than the traditional ones printed on certain sizes and types of paper in conventional formats.

In summary … in the past, the transition from oral distribution of information (speech) to text and writing, and then to the widespread use of printing followed long, slow cycles of adaptation over many generations.  However, never since the beginning of human civilization have we traveled through such and intense period of rupture between the meaning-making tools, processes and capabilities of different generations. Over the past century, each generation has had its own new mode (medium) of communication: telegraph, cinema, radio, television, computer, and today the Internet and all things digital.  And each of these periods changes not only our uses of language and thus the shaping of our culture but, perhaps more fundamentally, these forces help change the way(s) we use our imagination and no doubt the fluidity and plasticity of our individual brains.

The ways we are adapting and will adapt to these changes will not occur in the same rhythm or time frames for everyone. It’s likely we will have to wait several decades before we all live in a society that has been stitched back together, in a cultural sense.  For the immigrants to a digital world, this will mean that they will have to face up to a continual re-organization and re-shaping of their existing habits.

This will depend much on the individual and the extent to which she or he is willing and able to experiment and learn.  Happily, doing so is likely to get easier and easier from a usability-of-products perspective, as well as being helped by the growing ubiquity of services which require some adaptation (look at how many older people use online banking, or paying bills, or using email to stay in touch with distant relatives or friends).  While for digital natives (the new generation who will soon increasingly inhabit positions of influence, power and decision-making), their habits and practices will be built around and by the possibilities that have been and are being offered to them.

Tags: SAT, ThermoSAT, digital natives, homo zappiens, Marc Prensky, Wim Veen, Heritage canada, canadian Culture Online, CCO, command and control, wirearchy

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