Digital is default

Image by Martin42 on Wikimedia Commons

When I read Being Digital for the first time, way back in 1997, it slowly dawned on me that everything was about to change. The book was published in 1995, just as the Internet was beginning to invent for itself a space that previously had not existed.  The following year I joined a ground breaking project in which my team set up digital learning spaces for businesses and individuals in hard-to-reach rural areas that until then had no infrastructure. We pushed the boundaries of technology, culture and human relationships as we extended digital spaces for learning into virgin territory.

Nicholas Negroponte's book was a useful guide for me during these pioneering activities. We had dinner in 2013 and I got him to sign my copy. It's on my book shelf. Negroponte's idea that society was shifting from moving atoms to sending bits was revolutionary - it showed that content had a new context. It revealed that new economies and ecologies were emerging from the digital age that would require a radical adjustment to our societal mindset.

Very soon thereafter, social networks and then social media began to emerge. They were free to use, and we slowly learnt that when things are free, the user becomes the product. It is only now dawning on us that there are complex legal, ethical and moral challenges around this model of digital society. Being digital in the 21st Century is less innocent than it was at the end of the 20th Century. Back then we were tentatively finding our way, discovering what was possible, but not necessarily what was appropriate. Lessons are still being learned.

Today, being digital is a way of life for many in the developed world, and is consolidating in the developing world too, but at the start of the digital age the ground was unstable. When the dot.com bubble burst in the last few years of the 20th Century, the shock was seismic. The notion of  centralised online content had seemed sustainable. What followed was a mad scramble to fill the empty spaces with a new digital approach, one that was decentralised, where spaces were 'free' and open, and where everyone who wished to participate could do so. The companies that survived this period, such as eBay, Google and Amazon, quickly adapted to this idea, with new marketing strategies that leveraged new tools such as social filtering, recommender systems and tagging. Tim O'Reilly's notion of the architecture of participation was apt. It described rapidly expanding spaces with increasing connections and user centred tools that could enable us to connect, discover, navigate, repurpose, reimagine and share. Now, anyone could act as their own publisher or producer, create an online learning space or a blog, share videos, photos, music - indeed, any content that could be digitised. Rapid growth ensued. If you weren't online, you were history. If you were, you were geography.

Photo by CCMSharm2 on Wikimedia Commons

What does it mean to be digital today? For many it means they are connected to a much larger community of colleagues, friends and family than they would have been without digital. Without digital connection I am peripheral at best, isolated at worst. Being digital today means that bits are the currency in which I trade. Some still buy a newspaper every morning. Photographs may still be stored in an old shoe box. Artefacts do not lose their charm or value for many, but secure storage is now the Cloud, and it is synonymous with rapid access to information. The idea of content has shifted to one that is now malleable, negotiable, quickly revised, open to change and repurpose.

Context has also changed. We are no longer tethered to our desks or to a specific location. Connecting, sharing, navigating on the move through smart mobile devices has become the norm. Digital is the default. For educators this means that they can, if they so wish, become global educators, reaching out with their blogs, YouTube videos and content sharing tools to a worldwide audience of people eager to learn. Being a digital scholar means that educators can be open in sharing their content and expertise, and the potential to amplify this content is exponential.

We don't know what being digital will be like in the coming decade or two, but we can reflect on the past two decades of the new century and realise that we have come a long way in a short time. We are still learning our lessons about what is possible and more importantly, what is permissible and appropriate. One thing is certain. We will not be returning to shifting atoms anytime soon, unless of course that is our choice. The psychological event horizon was breached two decades ago, and now we can only move forward.


Digital is default by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.