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- Teich, Ch. 25-26 -

‘Being Digital’ by Nicholas Negroponte

1. Digital ‘bits’ and ‘bytes’ are transforming our world.
2. The speed and extent of information on the electronic superhighway is revolutionary and will require a revolutionary change in our society.
3. A digital society changes dramatically, and is demand or consumer driven. In terms of information access and absence of controls, this is a liberating technology.
4. Another way to put it is that the digital society is a pulling rather than a pushing technology.
5. Although the digital revolution may have been postponed, its inevitability is a given. Convergence between different technologies will make sure that our future is digital.
6. As digitization and convergence advance, the cost of the new technology will be driven down. As the costs of the hardware decrease, it will be the consumer driven applications that will be most important.
7. Individuals with a product/application (i.e. digital publishing) to sell will be able to deal directly with the customer. Information selling will become highly specialized because of the ability to reach a maximum number of customers. It will become a boutique business.
8. There will be a dark side to digital technology in terms of disenfranchising large parts of the population, particularly those who work in more traditional industries. But, on balance, the potential for empowerment, decentralization and liberation should make us optimistic, says Negropone.
9. The young, who are more open to the digital revolution, will react more positively to the future than the older generation.

‘Being Analog’ by Donald A. Norman

Norman goes in a completely different direction from Negroponte. He believes that there is a fundamental disjunction between human beings and digital technologies. Humans and computers, for example, are a bad match.

The strength of human beings is analogous to analog machines. They resemble the complex, chaotic and inefficient world within which they live. The analog nature of human beings allows them to function very well in the real world where continual and complex flow (accompanied by a lot of noise) is key. The strength of computers and digital based machines is that they are very precise precisely because they get rid of the messiness of real life and transform life’s continuous flow into a discrete and largely mathematical set of symbols.

Digital machines can be very useful to human beings when they complement us and our weaknesses, suggests Norman. They only become a real problem in a modern digital society where information is increasing at such a rate that humans can no longer process it effectively and where information technologies assume greater power. They particularly become a problem when living and breathing human beings are expected to conform to the dictates of numeric, computational digital systems. When digital technology becomes dominant, it is not willing to tolerate human behaviour. Human beings appear to be highly faulty biological systems when measured against digital systems whose precision and reliability “is maintained through massive redundancy.”

But “error tolerant” human beings have some real advantages that digital machines lack. We are “marvelously complex structures” that are able to read subtle meanings into situations; our capacity for change and adaption is unparalleled; we move in and out of social relationships that would befuddle any machine; human communication is not likely to be paralleled ever, even by artificial intelligence. In short, we are superbly designed for our environment.

The problem we face in an information and highly specialized society is that knowledge has accumulated too fast for us to absorb it. Digital databases now outstrip our ability to keep up with them. Moreover, new technologies are able to process information rapidly, to communicate with one another, and to learn in a digital way. But this digital way is based on a numeric concept of efficiency rather than anything human, which is why human beings are being forced, more and more, to conform to the requirements of digital systems. Digital systems no longer serve human beings, and make up for any deficiencies; human beings are forced to conform to the digital world.

People are being treated more and more like machines. Norman believes that this tendency is far from necessary or inevitable. Until the scientific movement of the 1870s, associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor, machines were at the service of human beings. Taylor and his colleagues were interested in creating complex engineered systems in which human beings were required to conform to technological imperatives. To this end, they analyzed human work patterns, divided them into discrete (almost digital) actions, and geared them to the imperatives of “productivity and efficiency”. In the process, the purveyors of scientific management may have taken “into account the physical properties of the human body but overlooked the mental and psychological ones.” They, therefore, deprived “work of its meaning, all in the name of science.”

The price of this mathematical/mechanical efficiency is a very steep one. Taylor’s methods transformed human beings into machines and alienated them as human beings. Also, arguably, this transformation of human beings into efficient machines, has made us less adaptable in terms of dealing with the real world. Norman provides examples of this real world to show just how unpredictable and non-digital it really is. He suggests that human beings monitor, classify and shift information in conscious and subconscious ways that make us very good at dealing with the unexpected.

In order to restore our biological and analog potential, Norman believes that we need to adopt a more human-centred approach to technology. When designing computers and software, for example, those responsible for information technologies should look at the requirements and the habits of those who must use them. In this and similar ways, we could try to achieve a more complementary interaction rather than submit to dictates of technological efficiency. We could blend the qualitative or analog qualities of human beings with the quantitative or digital requirements of technological systems. In this way, humans and machines could become a more powerful team.

The choice for Norman is not between analog and digital, but the best way of blending the advantages of both. Of course, if there is to be an hegemony, is should favour human beings. We have been able to adapt to our environment and one another because of our analog characteristics. They have served us so well, that it makes no sense, and would be very dangerous, to relinquish them now. Especially to digital machines that are very good at generating data, but not so good at processing it in ways of value to we human beings.

The notes presented here are for the AK NATS 1760.06 “Science, Technology and Society” course offered in the Fall/Winter Semester of 2001/2002 by the Atkinson College of York University, Toronto, Canada and taught by John Dwyer. The lectures are based on the following texts:

1. Martin Bridgstock et al, Science, Technology and Society: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1998), ISBN 0-521-58735-2
2. Kevin Robbins and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life (New York, Routledge, 1999), ISBN 0-415-16115-0
3. Albert H. Teich, Technology and the Future (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2000), ISBN 0-312-01885-1

For more about John Dwyer, visit: http://www.sayitagain.com/ivorytower/