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Preface
This book is about computer-based digital technologies and their substantial effects on contemporary life. Around the world, digital displays can be seen everywhere, from small ones on mobile phones to enormous LED screens in urban plazas. The typical worker in the information age spends her or his day engrossed in digital technology, then goes home to yet another set of digital devices for communication, information-processing, and entertainment. These technologies have given netizens an unparalleled range of tools for communication and connectivity. Anyone in the world with a mobile telephone – presently five billion people of the Earth’s population of eight billion – can be reached with a few keystrokes. Many of these subscribers will have fast access to a full range of net applications as they upgrade to 5G services, and the mobile phone may be one key solution to bridging the digital divide between the information “haves” and “have nots” on the planet.
This is an unprecedented era in the evolution of humanity. During the lifetime of those born after 1940 there has been an astonishing augmentation of human intellect by online access to all of the world’s collective stored information. The barriers to planetary communication presented by the babel of human languages have been diminished by online translation, and their quality will improve in this century. Access to this sea of information is not enough – we as a society must have the intellectual tools to make sense of it all and the individual and societal wisdom to use it wisely. Digital devices have improved our access to knowledge, but cannot make us wise.
In my own lifetime, I have witnessed the power of television to telecast events in real time as they occur anywhere on the planet or from our Moon. I started my career in educational technology and media production just as the first personal computers appeared on desktops in the workplace. We connected them to VCRs to deliver computer-based training programs linked to related video programs. While working on my doctorate in the early 1990s, I recall a friend pulling me into a computer lab to see something new online called the World Wide Web. At the time, we had no clue that a day would come when anyone could create a personal website in less than 30 minutes using templates available at Weebly, Wix, or Google sites. The notion that a website dedicated to building social relationships – Facebook – would eventually have over 2.7 billion worldwide subscribers would have been hilarious at its inception at Harvard in 2004. The concern now is that the US-based technology giants – Facebook, Google, Apple, and Twitter – have too much economic and political power and should be broken up. Data about their subscribers have been “weaponized” by third parties and used in anti-democratic ways. Increasing concerns about protecting personal privacy online and offline have led to new legislation in the European Union and the United States to give net users greater control over their personal data.
This book is about the global use of digital technologies and their effects on society. Some of these effects are beneficial in enhancing human communication and understanding. Others are less benign as they encourage increasingly sedentary lifestyles, the loss of personal privacy, and technological dependence. The stories of how information and communication technologies evolved to those that we use daily is a fascinating one and form a significant part of this book. The contemplation of the future of these technologies as we augment our personal and collective intelligence is a compelling topic that we will examine in these chapters. My hope is that the exploration of these themes will encourage you to think critically about the digital technologies that you use every day and how they might enhance or detract from human life in the future.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I extend my appreciation to my life partner Kay Collins for her insightful feedback about the revisions in the second edition. Her professional background as an intellectual property attorney was very helpful in understanding how digital technology has affected every profession and how AI might affect information-focused professions in the future.
I would like to thank my managing editor at Wiley-Blackwell, Andrew Minton, for his support during the year of research and writing for this edition. We were all working from home during the COVID-quarantine year of 2020, and Andrew and his executive editor Todd Green followed the progress of revising the manuscript with interest and encouragement. Special thanks to associate editor Nicole Allen and editorial assistant Sophie Bradwell at Wiley’s offices in Chichester in the United Kingdom for their fine work on preparing the manuscript for publication. I am greatly indebted to Carol Thomas for her thorough and detailed work copy-editing the text for each chapter and double-checking the links in the citations. Johannah Racz Knudson again provided a thorough and detailed index for the second edition.
A special note of appreciation goes to my colleague, Jaye Powers, who has taught online versions of our New Communication Technologies and Society course for the past decade. Each semester, Professor Powers asked her students to provide constructive written feedback on the first edition of this book, which I have incorporated in this new edition. This student-focused feedback was especially insightful in revising and updating this text.
I would like to thank my former students and colleagues in the Department of Journalism and Media Communication at Colorado State University for their support while I was a professor working my way up through the ranks. I retired in January of 2020, but have maintained my contacts with my friends among the faculty, chair Greg Luft, staff, and many graduates of our BS, MS, and MCMM programs over two decades of teaching and conducting research in communication technology. Specifically, I want to extend my appreciation to colleague Mike Humphrey and CSU social media expert Ashleigh Schroeder for their contributions to the key terms list.
Thanks to my faculty colleague Tim Amidon at CSU for the introduction to the insightful scholars Safiya Umoja Noble at UCLA and Shoshana Zuboff at Harvard. Their critical perspectives were included in the chapters on search technologies and privacy issues related to digital surveillance.
My son, Peter James Seel, contributed helpful feedback for the chapter on Alternative Digital Realities about digital game culture and e-sports, an area of personal expertise. Friend Michael Szczepaniak is a professional working in information technology and contributed to the chapter on artificial intelligence and machine learning with many helpful comments. Retired telephone company executive Clifton Phalen shared unique insights about working for one of the regional Bell operating companies when it was part of AT&T.
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