The predominant forms of media speaks about the culture and time frame they belong in. For example, think about radio:
When radio was as nuanced as social media is today people came to an understanding of the world in terms of radio and audio as a whole: We are in the same wavelength, are we in tune? Do you copy that? Loud and clear!
Thanks to radio we unlocked a hole new vocabulary - and by extension - a new perspective to reinterpret the outside world and society. Just like radio pushed forward our understanding in terms of audio, TV taught us to experience the world as a collective audience.
We were figuratively and literary on the same channel as we stud in awe at the moon landing. Events now became global as we broadcast them to the whole world.
Each medium gives us a new framework for reflection and self analysis, but this mirror effect is not exclusive for communication tools:
Think of the electronic age, a time of punk music and rebellion against authority. This new medium made us interpret our landscape in terms of circuits, we would resist the oppressive government just like resistors would fight against electric current.
Another example of non communications media that also changes our understanding of the world is the invention of time and money. We came to popularize the saying that time is money only because modern clocks and centralized currency were invented relatively closed to each other. To our medieval selves this relation between the clock ticking and the workday coming to an end was crucial to our modern understanding of time and popular economics. The mediums had left a mark on what it means to be human.
And just like many technologies and innovations in our past had influenced us deeply - like radio, TV and even spoken and written language themselves - Our current shiny devices have something to tell us. Today is digital technology’s turn to change what it means to be human.
This blog is an exploitative journey, we will try to look inside the code and analyze what is our collective brain on tech like. It’s extremely important for us to analyze the symbols that we are creating for ourselves. Not only to explain past events but to look into the future we are building.
Nobody foresaw the level of polarized discord online when the Internet was built, to the engineers behind the web it was all about connection in the form of hyper-links, collaborative documents and shared databases of information.
Will having access to endless amounts of information in our pockets make us more intelligent and productive? Well, initially we thought so but it’s increasingly clear that it accomplished the exact opposite - It made us distracted and impatient.
The nature of always on connection, Internet culture, and software trends are all acting upon us by changing the framework we use for our collective self-understanding.
This change of identity via embracing new mediums goes far beyond downloading new apps. Because we don’t adopt new technologies by themselves, these technologies come prepackaged with extra values embedded into the code - They come tangled together - to accept new tech means to accept the biases and ideologies presupposed to be true by the programmers and designers.
We usually adopt these technologies and their embedded values without second thought. I say no more! It’s time to get our VR blindfolds off and examine the digital world. By understanding the underlaying values of the new mediums we can learn about ourselves and our future. It’s time for each one of us to think twice on an individual level and to collectively and consciously reflect about the unconscious machines.
What are the hidden values of tech? is this agenda being pushed on us with intent or by accident? What do online spaces reflect about what it means to be human? And how do human rights tie into all of this?
Follow us on twitter, join the community on reddit and be part of the change, submit your work with us and be part of the latest cry for humanizing our technology before it dehumanizes us.
Join us on our journey to explore, analyses and intervene!