A Time Of Turbulence- The Digital
Interregnum
By Michael Hulme
 The
human capability to categorise and order surely lies
at the heart of our capacity and desire to make sense
and establish notions of explanation for our world.
Perhaps the Victorians with their desire to collect,
classify and so tame and explain their environment
were the most profound example of this very human
need. However, I suspect from early consciousness
we have been dividing the flow of the world into ‘handy
bite size chunks’, thus allowing us to assemble,
disassemble and reassemble our experiences into more
manageable accounts.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in our capacity
to segment and by applying labels and names, to order
sequences of events over time, thus we conjuring into
some apparently substantial existence Ages or Epochs
such as the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment.
More recently we have seen the Age of Steam, today
we live in the Digital Age, having recently, I suppose,
passed through the Analogue Age. Such thinking can
of course be helpful. However over simplification
may also be damaging particularly when applied without
the ordering benefit of hindsight. Today do we live
in the Digital Age? What might we mean by this term?
To state one is living in the Digital Age carries
with it ideas of passage or transference, in this
case from analogue technologies to digital. There
is obviously great truth in this statement, the PC
has arrived, our mobile phones are digital and, despite
critical comment digital television will surely soon
be in the majority over analogue television. Whether
this is sufficient for us to truly state that we have
‘arrived’ in this age is however almost
certainly suspect. Indeed this idea is probably profoundly
damaging. Looking at the level of technology, we may
indeed in some sense have arrived, but technology
itself is of little value without users and their
ensuing behaviours. Many of the recent disappointments
relating to technology adoption in both the Internet
and Mobile arenas can be interpreted as overemphasising
the capacity of digital technology to be useful and
expressive of real peoples lives.
At this point we might pause to ask ourselves when
did this Digital Age begin? Is it to be marked by
the rapid spread of the PC from the early 80s onwards
or some other significant moment such as the birth
of the Internet? If we take the PC as the significant
moment on the basis that it ensures we have been ‘in’
the age for the longest period of time, a significant
and often overlooked demographic fact becomes immediately
apparent. Only 26% of the UK population has been born
post the introduction of the PC (and this is the most
optimistic reading). In other words for only this
26% is ‘digital behaviour’ or familiarity,
a natural behavioural mode in as much as only this
group has grown up surrounded by and using the artefacts
of the Digital Age.
For the rest of us, some nearly three quarters of
the population, digital behaviours represent adaptations
or modifications to pre-digital modes. For example,
to move from passively sitting in front of ones television
to ordering clothes and banking on the same screen
is a pretty big leap. Human behaviours neither adapt
uniformly or necessarily along predictable lines or
patterns, indeed it is our very unpredictability or
‘infinite variety’ that makes us human.
Our adaptive rates will vary for many reasons including
old chestnuts such as age and gender. However of more
significance is likely to be life style, work and
exposure to technologies and media. Indeed even the
act of having children can change the pace of change
and form of behaviours toward technology.
Looking back over the events of the last two or three
years leads us to think of a further ordering of time.
Perhaps it is now more helpful to sustain the optimism
of the Digital Age, but to see ourselves as in the
processes of behavioural change, adaptating to our
own technological creations (they, of course, will
be further adapted by our actual usage), living in
turbulent, uncertain times where some apparently ‘winning’
technologies/uses may fail and others may almost spontaneously
emerge. A time we currently inhabit may become easier
to predict as adaptive behaviours become more naturalised,
however it is not an Age, rather an Interregnum.
For more information about our research project "
Technology and Cynicism: The Digital Interregnum"
click here...
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