Analigital

I feared this reading would be another of those "things were so much better when we were just hunter-gatherers" type screeds. There was certainly a good deal of that, but one can hardly argue with the author's thesis, that people shouldn't expect others, particularly their employees, to act like machines. The portrayal of the digital-analog divide seemed unnecessarily stark, and when I checked the date of the article on the footnote, I could see why--it was written in 1998. A lot's changed since then on the digital frontier, and I would argue that the way most people experience the digital world today is a lot closer to the organic, integrated model that the author argues for. Certainly the assertion that as technology gets more complex it gets more alienating has not turned out to be true for most people. Today, you don't have to know anything about how computers work to use them effectively and extremely advanced technology has become so integrated into normal folk's lives that they barely notice it anymore. If anything, widespread access to technology and the Internet have led to less old-fashioned, assembly-line type work, at least in the developed world. Today, millions of people who would've have once punched time clocks in offices and factories can do the same work on their own schedules at home. As for increasing specialization--well, it's true that 200 years ago, it was possible to read almost everything available on most major subjects in a single lifetime. But I'm not sure why it's a bad thing you can't do that anymore--in any case, given the complexity of modern life and the instability of most careers, the majority of people have a lot more general knowledge than the article gives them credit for.

Having computers at the center of society has of course come at a cost. People are more alienated and atomized, and we're losing many of the key consensus institutions, like mass-consumption media, not to mention actual neighborhoods and communities, that once held us together. But have people become more like machines? I don't think so. If anything, the primacy of digital media has reinforced our psychological "analog-ness". Paradoxically, the DIY reality of the web has allowed us to give freer reign to our irrationality and emotions than our parents or grandparents, back in the rigid and rationalist mid-20th century. It's a paradox, but I believe it's true--what's happened is actually the opposite of what the author feared back in 1998. Of course, one could say that constructing a reality out of digital phantoms is itself a symptom of the loss of understandable, "analog" reality. But it's not new. Maybe we should be comparing ourselves not to hunter-gathers but medieval peasants, who, because they lived in a world they couldn't understand, allowed themselves to be governed by all sorts of irrational fears and superstitions.