Digital Impacts
by Tom Forman
My generation experienced Toffler's 'revolutions' in our way: the Agricultural (back-to-the-land), the Industrial (discovering chain saws and propane refrigerators) and the eventual Information Revolution. Music, sound, text and image are digitized into on off, yin yang, zero one, bits and bytes, beneath ever friendlier interfaces, storing, manipulating and moving exponentially increasing amounts of raw information. The interfaces grow friendlier and more efficient in their ability to entertain, deliver and instruct - a medieval dream marriage of 'sentence and solace'. In a class clash, video game, techno virtual arcade reality we co-populate with artificially intelligent robots.
The impact of digital technology upon society is revolutionary in every arena and the dust shows no sign of settling. Many are delighted; many are scared; many are bored. The Information Age, like the Industrial one, has its Luddites, its priests and practitioners as well as an audience who either choose to, or by necessity, ignore the virtual clothing the Digital Emperor is wearing. Fifteen years ago Psychology Today published an article speculating that it was unlikely that a computer chess program capable of beating a human being would be written in our lifetime. Now you must be a computer to win a game against a computer, if you choose to play with a computer. The wooden chess set and human opponent still exist. The old technologies remain, transformed as McLuhan predicted, into today's art forms, and that will be their most pronounced effect.
The global village has arrived, in spite of lingering choices and doubts. And the roads to and from it, paved in digital light, may indeed lead to a life of artificial body parts in a virtual space of virtual bodies, most of them looking like Pamela Lee by all accounts. And if we speculate about virtual flesh, why not a corollary in the machine--a virtual human subconscious lurking in the machine wearing, perhaps, the face of Pythagorus chuckling a numerically mystical Olympian laugh. Or perhaps it could be a monster the likes of which the Prospero father scientist uncovers in that classic 50's sci-fi flick, The Forbidden Planet. The Krell!
Data Terror or Data Enlightenment? Knowledge requires information, but information does not by necessity or by default, equate with or beget knowledge. A digitally inspired society can continue to breed analogue slums for Mother Theresa clones and imagine Texan Whacko (sic) Davidians assisting their children to burn. No digital impact there. There is effect, and there remains no effect. Not yet. I will remain as unafraid of the future as Bill Burroughs.