Seeing The Digital Turn As it Occurs:

Historical analysts (among others) know how difficult it is to measure changes as they happen. In real-time, measuring how the technological revolution sweeping across the world is changing society is a daunting task compared to understanding the effect Gutenberg’s contribution in the 1440’s to the enlightenment-era thinkers like Rousseau, Locke, and Descartes. While looking backwards across time gives us what P. T. Cohen called the gift of historical hindsight, much has changed since the advent of the printing press some five-hundred-eighty years ago.

In the last two-decades no less, we have witnessed a cacophony of digitized technologies with which to connect to each-other and to the seeminlgy endless archive of information entrenched throughout the world wide web. This has transformed us at the societal level, yes, but most heavily at the site of the individual. What has occurred in this short time is worldwide sea-change in knowledge access and production. Put most simply, it is a severe change in the way we access information.

In twenty-years, the whole of humanity has accepted this drastic act; this trend of turning away from physically accessing books, atlases, newspapers, etc. All in leu of accessing these forms in digitized realms. What’s more, as the decline in physical mail and the rise of volume in digital inboxes attests, the speed of rapport has now increased to real-time speed: these effects of these major changes needs to be examined further. What’s more, the smartphone revolution only intensifies this transition, and in some sense, exacerbates a widespread sense of disconnection all the while gripping society at the family, community, national, global, and individual levels.

That the same fears and doubts Gutenberg may have had about the widespread access of information via his press are the same doubts we must confront concerning the transformation of our society in the digital age.

If at any point, let it be now that we ask ourselves not if, but how this digital turn in history is shaping knowledge production in our society? Furthermore, how is the aforementioned major shift in our frequency of rapport related to the reduction in our capacity to digest large pieces of information? If hindsight reveals Gutenberg’s press really was the mechanism underneath the Enlightenment, then is the digital revolution the mechanism behind the veil of our greater future? Let us hope so.

As news media streams of information become more and more frequent and less and less informative; as social discourse online prevails in public domains, more users get information in short packets of highly scripted information, much of it propaganda designed to cater to your conditioned reality. That you need this item rather than you want this item is the subconcious credo of the first world propaganda machine.

As data collection prevails with government and private firms, the race to collect an individual’s personal data is now big business. Through the monetization of your information, it is then sold to the highest bidder in an effort to customize an online advertising experience specifically designed to sell to you, the end user.

New fears and concerns for safety have emerged as well, as social networking becomes more ubiquitous at all age levels, the risks for privacy and security are increasing. Not only is cyber-bullying now a predominant social issue, the separation of real-life and one’s digital reality has become difficult for masses of unfortunate users. Now even Speilberg’s adaptive screenplays reveal this reality with a sobering sense of accuraccy. In some cases, real life retaliation as punishment for digital misdeeds is as much a reality as the student’s tangible fear of dying in the next mass killing.

In social-networks, users reveal a self which in most cases, does not fit the reality of the organically embodied user. And while contact with those we cherish is no less sacred via US Mail; Facebook and Instagram, amidst a slew of iterations, now supplant means by which we seek each other out.

All this amidst an unsustainable population growth rate society wants to silence and nobody wants to talk about.

This perversion of human contact is no more apparent than in dating platforms designed connect those unwilling to undertake the endeavor of first contact on actual terms. In this digital turn in history, as Augustine’s ‘City of God,’ is been repurposed and fitted to become the ultimate social network; where Man places faith and reason into a digital embodiment of the ego-self. All while the urban counterpart in Augustine’s allegory becomes the city of earthly actuality. Where human contact still constitutes the means of human connection. And at the library, the archive, the holy sepulcher, and on the ground beneath one’s feet, a time tested tradition of hugs and handshakes persist amidst this digital turn in history.