Greg O'Hanlon

Face it – The digital revolution is over

Nicholas Negroponte (1998)

Digital art, digital media, digital content, digital products…it goes on! Though few of us will have failed to notice that a great deal of our world is now transmitted and received as a string of 1s and 0s, in 2011, is the adjective ‘digital’ really relevant? Are we trying to suggest that by their very nature all things digital are the same, or, somehow different to their respective compound noun origins? Surely art is art, media is media, content is content and a product is still a product. The development of really great art/media/content/products involves stepping through a creative pipeline which we find to be remarkably consistent and irrespective of the tools used.

Convergence has forever forged media, data and personal IT to the extent that the content is indistinguishable from the underlying technology and the result is a transformative agent for both the mind and society. We shouldn’t be surprised by this however. Circa 1964 McLuhan pointed out ‘we shape our tools, and afterwards our tools shape us’ and Thoreau, 100 years earlier, suggested ‘we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us’. It’s important therefore that we maintain an objective distance* so as not to be consumed by our rapidly changing environment.

Let us now focus on the often cited concept of the digital native. Marc Prensky’s 2001 Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants theory carries with it a number of dangers, particularly in an education context. In short the proposal** is that those born before the rapid proliferation of digital technology are immigrants, and those growing up with the technology are native. It’s clear that in relation to the younger members of our population access to information and communication technology (ICT) has reached an extraordinary level and their malleable brains are adapting to the multitude of interfaces and media layers with greater ease than say their parents. However, we must not take from this that the native generation are fully literate in, or implicitly understand the network. Remember that the primary online activity for our younger generation is social and/or recreational in nature. We find community silos, for example Facebook, in abundance and the notion that the Google Generation understand and explore the web widely is quite simply false. The badge serves no purpose other than to unnecessarily distance a portion of the population from the emerging reality and the very real concern is that by assuming too much we risk creating a significant skills gap in the next generation.

* The reality is that we find a conflict between objectivity and engagement. As artists and developers, if we’re not engaged we’re restricted in our ability to conjure the very best of ourselves and/or the project.

** Marc Prensky has since revised the theory in favour of digital wisdom…and yet the original iteration persists???