Have we realized the potential of the Digital Age? Or is it coming later?

I recently read two articles that, when juxtaposed against each other, helps better explain my personal philosophy of how we use technology now. Ergo, I’d like to share my opinion on the benefits/pitfalls of the oft-discussed digital age in the context of these interesting articles.  

Do check out the articles for yourself, but here are the snippets that made the lightbulb above my head illuminate: 

News becomes a guiltless form of entertainment because we view news as weighty and worthy of attention. We get to have our chocolaty treat while arguing it is actually nutritious. But the ubiquity of the Cloud extends this beyond the six O’clock news. While the leading edge in the old media was entertainment masquerading as news, now we have entertainment masquerading as just about every component of our waking lives. 

So for all the apparent newness we have become a culture of the remix. We think that we are in a technological revolution, but what we really have is more of the same, just faster, ever-present, and in color. We are mistaking high resolution and portability as an advancement of culture. 
[Rick Bookstaber titled ‘Culture Grinds To A Halt In The Digital Age’]

But then there is another way to look at this:

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. 

A series of tests in recent years has shown that after spending time in quiet rural settings, people “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for. 
[Pico Iyer, ‘The Joy of Quiet’]

I agree with Bookstaber that news-as-entertainment-as-content-filler is what we are consuming presently. Of course there is a limit to how much useful information our brains can process and indeed, we are already way past that point in the current iteration of the web. 

However, to say that all we are doing is reproducing decades old culture and content is beyond the scope of the news-as-entertainment observation. At the very least it ignores what culture has been created by these new behaviors created by our technology advances. At the worst, it applies (possibly outdated) decades-old definitions of ‘culture’ and ‘art’. To say that because we haven’t witnessed advances in civilization is a failure of the digital age is wrong. 

Technology has no agency, good or bad. The discussion should actually be on how people are currently using all this new technology, and how they will use it next. The issue is simply that the digital age is very new; and too open for those of us used to restrictions. We have yet to understand what the limitations in the digital age really are. 

I believe that we will look back in 5-10 years at our current behavior as naive and juvenile. I mean come on, an ‘age’ by definition is viewed on a longscale. We have to get through this mess now to start making the really useful stuff.

And here is where Iyer’s article comes into play. It reminds us yet again to find balance between our connected and disconnected life. But what I found relevant to the discussion of the digital age is the author’s summarizing observation. In his experience, Iyer suspects that the next generation of digitally-native children are most likely way ahead of us “in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential” and how they balance consumption with reflection. 

Indeed, the digitally-native kids of today will probably be the ones to create new metaphors for us to parse and consume information with better clarity and attention. And they will be the ones that look back at our current slaving to 24hr connectivity as naive. They will view our feeble attempts to grapple with information overload as juvenile. 

Quite simply, we cannot pass judgement on the Digital Age just yet, its only gotten started. I can’t even imagine the final benefits society will realize from the potential unleashed by the technological revolution.