Digital Culture
From Conspicuous consumption of material goods and luxury, we are now in a digital culture, consumed by pervasive technology and social media. Language and textual conversations have given way to ‘Internet slangs’ and have been replaced by emojis.We are constantly distracted and manipulated by the technology around us. Endlessly subscribing for one thing after another but still never having owned any of it. But all that we do — every button we click, every purchase we make, every post we share, all the things we like, its all tracked.
With excessive use of social media, constantly sharing, constantly commenting, there’s so much information overload of, one might say, unnecessary things (for example - cat videos), where so much time is wasted online. We’re constantly in a state of distraction, being manipulated, being flooded with advertisements, notifications, pop up windows and dark patterns in user Interfaces. Constantly shifting between one window to another, one video to another, one app to another, one button after another, click-baiting our way into the rabbit hole.
Having no digital privacy or security, our data is segmented into data sets and mined to look for similar patterns amongst users where everything from our credit cards, our likes/dislikes, our daily habits, what we read, what we listen to, Fitbits, all our devices are tracked, especially by the 5 biggest companies Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft who have the maximum amount of our data.
There has been a major shift over time- from letterpress to web fonts, print to digital, paper sketches to screen based, processing film and developing it in a darkroom to digital photography. But analog is still making a comeback with the return of Vinyls, increase in film photography,this is because of a sense of ownership with digital content - especially in terms of ebooks, movies on Netflix or music on Spotify, where users pay for subscription but don’t technically own any of the content and cant share it. Its also the sense of showing someone what book you are reading, compared to reading one on your screen where no one knows what it is you’re reading.
Overuse of Social media can have a lot of severe consequences such as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome or RSI( Repetitive strain injury), that millions suffer from because of over texting and wrong posture. Increased usage of the internet has also made us forgetful where we rely on technology for the smallest of things. Especially with the increase of pervasive technology (eg. Google Alexa), we will tend to be more dependent on technology.
Bad spellings because of reliance on autocorrect and linguistic problems are also increasing.
Social media and the internet have benefitted us in numerous ways but the usage needs to be kept in check, else it could be harmful. Especially with the rise in pervasive technology, it is important to have limited interaction, and not let it take over our lives.