Howard Gardner: A Life-Altering Impact?
Filed at 10:00 am on April 6, 2007 • Leave a comment
Howard Gardner continues the conversation about where the most profound effects of digital media will occur. He suggests that digital media may have the power to qualitatively change life experience.
Over the long run, I expect the most profound effects of the new digital media to occur with respect to the classical categories by which we experience the world—categories that I will call, for short, the Kantian categories. As a species, we have evolved to perceive objects—animate and inanimate—as they exist in time and space, and as they interact and affect one another. And we have evolved to consider certain relations among humans as proper, others as problematic or even proscribed. Initially, most of these objects existed in the natural world, but with the proliferation of technology, each of these categories has begun to be represented and apprehended in new ways. The new digital media will accelerate this process and, perhaps, render life experience as qualitatively different.
Time: Individuals are expected to be, and expect others to be, available throughout the day and night. Rather than carry out one task at a time, one task after another, more and more individuals multi-task regularly. Information that used to travel over days or weeks now makes its way instantaneously around the world. The pace of life in a digital age seems inexorable.
Space: Individuals evolved to live in a particular region of the world, and to have access exclusively or chiefly to those who lived near them. Now one has equal and instantaneous access to individuals around the world. There is no longer a single space—there are as many virtual spaces (virtual worlds) as we care to create and participate in. Indeed, in virtual realities, space has only a metaphoric meaning.
Objects: More and more of our life is spent not with physical objects that have always existed, or with objects that one can build, handle, or destroy but rather with symbolic or virtual objects that can never be fully annihilated. Some of these resemble inanimate objects; some resemble animate entities; for an increasing number of robot-like objects or avatars, the line between animate and inanimate no longer makes sense. Indeed, as Sherry Turkle has demonstrated, young persons often attribute greater “reality” to digital than to physical entities.
The issue of ownership of objects becomes vexed. It is so easy to transmit the creation of another person and to represent it as one’s own. Notions of intellectual property rights, plagiarism, authorial voice, become blurred. Wikipedia is the creation of innumerable, essentially anonymous figures; whom does one cite?
Personal Identities and Relationships: While issues of personal identity have never been completely straightforward, the ease with which identities can be created, shaped, and acted upon places new stresses on the sense of who one is, and who one is not. Similarly, the number of relations to others that can be established online, and the fluidity of these relations, is also unprecedented. We do not know whom to trust, who is as represented, who is anonymous, who exists over time and in real space.
Ethics: As implied, these strains on the Kantian categories harbor ethical challenges. To be sure, individuals have always been tempted to cut corners and cross lines, particularly when the chances of discovery/sanction are small. As former CBS anchor Dan Rather can testify, the chance that a falsehood will be immediately apprehended actually increases in the world of the Internet; but so does the chance that a falsehood will become the “topic” of the week. The laws, rules, regulations, and implicit norms that have developed gradually over time are all vulnerable in the era of NDM, and it remains unclear which of them will remain intact, which will have to be reformulated, and which may need to be scuttled.
Of course, media do not operate in a vacuum. In addition to the forces of the media, there will be counterforces. Agencies of government, religion, family, community, and corporations will be affected by the new digital media but they can expect to resist, especially when their core interests are threatened.
On Tuesday, Gardner will explore how the American Context shapes the affects of digital media.
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