The Dark Side of Digital Culture

Introduction

Since the rise of personal computers in our homes, technology has continued to expand and bring us opportunities to streamline and simplify work and to create in new ways. The once gigantic electronic machines used for computing shrunk decades ago and continue to increase in power and decrease in size. From desktop to laptop and perhaps, in the future, to microscopic size. Scientists working in nanotechnology are testing digestible sensors in pigs, computerized devices about the size of a multivitamin, that can travel through the human body monitoring vital signs, taking images and examining from the inside. Smaller and more powerful, technology of the future promises better healthcare, faster access to information, and seamless integration into our homes, our clothing, and perhaps “piped straight into your eyeballs” (Shankland, 2015).

Keeping up with the latest technological advance is nearly impossible as disruptive innovation stretches across all fields impacting institutions, organizations, homes and our individual lives. Experts tackle these concerns, yet most lay people admit to some anxiety about our technological age. Arguments about legislation, responsibilities of communities and individuals, and future predictions add to the confusion of digital culture.

Daily we hear about opinion overtaking facts in our news programs, social media overtaking conversation, the death of privacy, the threat of cyberattack, and an ever-increasing dependency upon the “grid” for our very survival. Our finances, medical information, shopping, learning, and record-keeping systems have moved from physical storage to digital networked cyberspace. Storage and retrieval in digital and virtual spaces brings challenges and changes not yet fully understand ushering an undertone of anxiety or, some may go so far as to say, cracking the foundations of our society.

There are no simple answers to this constantly changing landscape. Only through education and research can we identify real threats within the nonsense of nonstop digital chaos. An overview of these evolving issues and concerns is a starting point. This chapter will investigate some of the major concerns manifested in digital culture along with predictions by futurists and scholars leading toward the essential need to revisit our perceptions of literacy, examine our cultural moment and advocate digital citizenship responsibilities for all.

Background

One of the biggest looming elephants in the global digital room is a fear that we may approach a digital dark age, in part due to the massive amounts of information created and shared online, but more importantly due to changing media formats and obsoletion. “While perhaps it is all too easy to sound alarm bells needlessly, it is no hyperbole to suggest that some sizable portion of our combined global and historical heritage is at serious risk of disappearing” (Whitt, 2016, p.124). Proponents of digital preservation cry out for action because failure to address archival in digital culture could have dire consequences including what some call a digital dark age. Journalist Sarah Ditum (2019) warns, “Anything that exists only in digital format is just one technological change or server disaster from disappearing into nothing – whether it’s personal correspondence, vital scientific discoveries or the kind of public records that provide historians with unexpected insights into daily life”.

Is a digital dark age imminent? Futurists describe, “The World becomes a post-apocalyptic town without digital libraries where people living have no clue about the discoveries made by our generation” (Gogoi, 2016, para. 1.). Thinking about long term preservation will require research, legislation, fiscal responsibility and education. The library of the future has already arrived, and librarians have been seriously concerned about changing media formats, data migration, and digital archival for decades. Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero regards preservation of digital archives for the preservation of history for future generations as his biggest challenge and the one thing that keeps him up at night (Hayden & Ferriero, 2018). These issues will be discussed in Chapter 8 along with predictions about the long-term consequences of disruptive innovation in information science.