Challenges Of The Digital Age

In the Depths of the Digital Age

Edward Mendelson | June 23, 2016

The most socially alarming effect of the digital revolution is the state of continuous surveillance endured, with varying levels of complaisance, by everyone who uses a smartphone. Bernard Harcourt’s intellectually energetic book Exposed surveys the damage inflicted on privacy by spy agencies and private corporations, encouraged by citizens who post constant online updates about themselves. “We are not being surveilled today,” he writes, “so much as we are exposing ourselves knowingly, for many of us with all our love, for others anxiously and hesitantly.” In place of the medieval idea of the king’s two bodies—the king’s royal powers derived from heaven and his natural self—Harcourt proposes the two bodies of “the liberal democratic citizen…: the now permanent digital self, which we are etching into the virtual cloud with every click and tap, and our mortal analog selves, which seem by contrast to be fading like the color on a Polaroid instant photo.” (This seems accurate about common feelings, but overestimates the likelihood of digital immortality; in fact vast Web-based communities, with all their history, have been swept away with a click.)

So I’ve been on both sides of the digital debate. In the 1990s, I was really enthusiastic for this change because I was convinced that Western culture had undergone a major transformation in technologies of representation, communication, information, and so forth. It seemed to me that since education was not a natural form — it emerged at a certain historical moment under certain historical and technological conditions — and since those conditions were changing, we needed to change our response to it. My beginnings had a lot to do with the local historical situation. 

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/digital-humanities-interview-richard-grusin/ (The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Richard Grusin. Melissa Dinsman interviews Richard Grusin. August 18, 2016)

"Using Information Technology. A Practical Introduction to Computers and Communications" Source: http://slideplayer.com/slide/6643002/

"Strategic principles for competing in the digital age" Source: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/strategic-principles-for-competing-in-the-digital-age

<more at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/depths-of-the-digital-age/; related articles and links: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/digital-humanities-interview-richard-grusin/ (The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Richard Grusin. Melissa Dinsman interviews Richard Grusin. August 18, 2016) and https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/6-questions-digital-humanities-librarian (6 Questions for a Digital Humanities Librarian. August 17, 2016)>