Digitality

Digitality (also known as digitalism) is used to mean the condition of living in a digital culture, derived from Nicholas Negroponte's book Being Digital in analogy with modernity and post-modernity. Digitality (also known as digitalism) is used to mean the condition of living in a digital culture, derived from Nicholas Negroponte's book Being Digital in analogy with modernity and post-modernity. Aspects of digitality include near continuous contact with other people through cell phones, near instantaneous access to information through the World Wide Web, third wave information storage (where any fragment in a text can be searched and used for categorization, such as through search engine Google), and communicating through weblogs and email. Some of the negative aspects of digitality include computer viruses and spam. With the rapidly growing technology, children at increasingly younger ages are learning to speak through the cyber world rather than in face-to-face conversation. They are becoming more digitally literate and creating a new culture in which they communicate more efficiently online than they do in person. In the 1990s, literature of the effects of interactivity with information began to be written and published, particularly focused on the immediacy and ubiquity of digital communications , and the interactivity and participatory nature of digital media. While in the tradition of Postmodernism in that they presume a decisive role for media in the formation of personality, culture and social order, they differ fundamentally from the analog critical theory, in that the audience has the ability to do more than create a personal idiolectic text, but instead is able to create new texts which reinforce the behavior of other participants. This made it possible to individuals to express themselves through interactivity of digital media. Many works have been written outlining the fear of digitality. In the 1990s, the realization of digitality caused many artists to visualize and fear a future where analog would become completely extinct. They viewed digitalization as a deletion of the past. Although the computer was originally created to complete large scale computations, it ultimately progressed into a processing machine that could retrieve and interpret information very quickly. The first personal computer was first introduced by Ed Roberts in 1975 and this sparked the introduction of other 'personal computers'. As technology continued to advance, more and more intelligent computers were coming to light with stronger processing power and wider range of utilities. This new age of technology lead to the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 which revolutionized the modern world. With the introduction of this World Wide Web people were able to more commonly access a data pool online with a trove of information. This information is now easily accessible from a Smartphone which can connect people from anywhere at any time. Digital technology plays an important role in 21st century life. In the United States, nearly two-thirds of people own smartphones. Using social networking services and online forums, people are able to communicate with other users, regardless of geographic region or time constraints. The rise of this type of interaction partly explains the significant increase in phone use in younger people, and mobile technology is mainly used for the purposes of communication. Digitalism is also slowly replacing many forms of physical aids, such as print encyclopedias and dictionaries, with people turning to newer technology for various needs. In his book, Nicholas Negroponte explains how necessities in the future will be digitized. For example, a large proportion of mass media (including newspapers and magazines) are becoming digitized, and a large percentage of financial transactions made in the United States are being made without the physical exchange of money (e.g. online). Computation is frequently discussed in debates on digitality. Modern theorists are now choosing to focus more on our relation to computers rather than the computers themselves as an important element of digitality.