Becoming Digital

Six degrees of separation – purportedly, that is all that separates a farmer in mainland China from a business executive in New York City. In view of the emerging networked sphere, the six degrees of separation hypothesis warrants amendment; within the networked world, a three degrees of separation hypothesis might prove more adequate. Networking and digital advances have reduced the degrees of separation that separate people from people and people from ideas. However, becoming digital also comes with a price; humanity pays by sacrificing degrees of freedom, degrees of sensation, and degrees of thought. Never before have people been closer to other people, but yet further away. Never before has such an abundance of information been so readily available, yet new knowledge and innovation so far out of sight.

Perhaps the foremost problem with "becoming digital" is an intrinsic one that derives from the meaning of the phrase itself. Digitization connotes (if not simply by definition) the quantization of phenomena. That is, the wide, continuous range of human perception and sensation is discretized to a string of zeros and ones. For example, when people communicate via email and instant messenger over the internet, they often use emoticons. Emoticons, however, are a pity attempt to express human emotion. In effect, they discretize personality and sensory images into twenty to thirty cases. So why have email and instant messenger become so popular when the depth of interaction they provide is far inferior to that of the face-to-face conversation? The answer is ease of use and multitasking – having an instant message conversation does not preclude a busy student from working on a project at the same time. In a self-perpetuating cycle, "becoming digital" makes life faster paced and more busy; this, in turn, promotes the further use of "digital goodies" that supposedly save time.

The internet is a medium that is characterized by quickness: people gain rapid access to news stories, and peer communication is expedited. Gone are the days of written journals in which people would take the time to weave words into a finished masterpiece. Online journals such as Xanga contained daily accounts that were shoddy counterparts to their written predecessors. Things only got worse when the Xanga phenomenon was replaced by the MySpace phenomenon in which people expressed their individuality even less. Facebook, for example, reduces college students to a single, dichromatic, blue and white page; users are severely limited by the few degrees of freedom. While this limitation of freedom is imposed upon the user, the complete immersion into the digital world also causes people to voluntarily give up freedoms. When people know that machines, such as video surveillance cameras, are always watching them, they tend to limit or "self-censor" their expression.

In addition to fewer freedoms and sensations, accompanying the rise of the digital world is the decline in degrees of thought. Daydreaming and daily reflectance often beget innovation. However, in the digital sphere such entities are virtually nonexistent. Furthermore, the quantized nature of digitization promotes thinking within certain predefined schema. However, a prerequisite for ingenuity is breaking out of the routine schema that pervade society and hinder progress.

Some might argue that as we become more digitally advanced, we will receive the benefits of the digital world and be able to simulate the sensations and freedoms that accompany the real world. However, we must remember that no matter how high the resolution of a digital image, the pixels always become apparent when it is projected onto a sufficiently large screen.