You've Changed: Examining Our Digital Culture
Looking At How Technology Has Altered Society
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What's fair game for this column: How technology has caused changes in the law?.music?privacy?medicine?news?or whatever you suggest.
Your grandparents may remember the early days of radio, while your parents may be able to recall the first family on the block to get a television.
But when you sit down to tell similar stories to your own children and grandchildren, you may not know where to begin.
If you were born after 1970, you have grown up as a few fuzzy TV networks gave way to hundreds of channels burrowing underground or beaming to satellite dishes; as stereos and LP's shrunk into Walkmans and scratchless silver CD's; as video games came out of nowhere to fill arcades, family rooms, palmtops and personal computers; and as telephones shed their cords and gave birth to pagers.
Once, you couldn't have imagined needing e-mail. Now, many of you can't imagine life without it.
Once, you had a few news sources to look to. Now, information providers are chirping and chattering at you from every late-night infomercial, every airport TV monitor, animated billboard and spam e-mail. Every other product package and business card offers you another "dot-com" to read.
Are you better for it?
Has technology made us a smarter, faster society? Or is the Information Age really an Age of Disorientation?
These are the questions we'll examine in this column, "Digital Culture."
This column will endeavor to bring you fresh, entertaining, enlightening and thought-provoking columns about the evolution in thought, business, entertainment, law, society, medicine and other areas of our culture that are forever changed and changing still in response to technology.
When dry wit, snide sarcasm and flat-out satire can be mustered up, you should expect to see that as well.
In keeping with its name, the column will be driven by what is happening in the world around you. That means we expect to hear your comments, criticisms and topic suggestions for future columns. The power of the Internet medium is the power for each individual to affect the world unlike ever before. We intend on tapping this power of information access and responding to the digital culture through topic choices and some personal responses to e-mailed questions and comments.
Here is a sampling of some of the topics we'll be addressing in the months to come. Other topics will be suggested by viewers like you.
For example, not every state has legislation that will organize the system for digital signatures that is crucial to the smooth operation of e-commerce into the future. What has already been over-debated is how states or the federal government will handle Internet gambling. If just a few tech-savvy legislators were in that debate it would already be over. Why? Because the opportunity for legislation to control Internet gambling is already over. Actually, they never had a chance. But, we'll get into that later.
The once lucrative music industry may get itself pirated out of existence if they don't figure this thing out soon. Again, every industry needs to get its tech-savvy types in on the battle plan. Knowing only music, or any other similarly affected industry, is no longer enough to succeed. All those geeks you snickered at while you played in the local high school battle of the bands are the information bodyguards that may just decide if you rock or serve fries.
On the bright side, the bonus for artists of the change in the music business model is that independent artists will flourish like never before. You will not have to convince the proverbial 40-plus-year-old record executive that your sound is the new thing just to get a contract. The next Kurt Cobain can go straight to the Internet and start the grunge movement anew while grabbing all the royalties for himself. There's much more to say about the power and danger of Internet intellectual property.
The Internet may actually bring you an ad through your television on the exact day you need that product by estimating your use and noting the last time you purchased the product at the store. Big Retailer Brother is coming.
A low-tech example of this is the checkout coupons at the grocery store. In the Cleveland, Ohio, area where I shop, every grocery store chain gives obscene "discounts" on all their products if you sign up for a card of some sort which is swiped each time you shop. What is that about? It's a way to collect all your shopping habits -- all the time. At the register, based on the products that were scanned, a printer cranks out coupons for some things you just bought for use on your next trip. But the list of what you bought, connected with your little ID card, is then for sale to the highest bidder over and over. Sure, it helps the store know what products to order based on sales, but there's no way they are sitting on that gold mine of marketing information and not harvesting it.
I resisted getting a card, but the store kept making the price you paid without the card higher and higher. It became unbearable to constantly see the dollar amount of lost savings that they conveniently printed at the bottom of your receipt. I caved. And if you haven't yet, information about you is being collected in other ways that you can't prevent. Has your state begun issuing driver's licenses with magnetic strips on the back. Ever seen one of those being swiped in any machine? The magnetic strips are there for something. There's no X-files conspiracy here, but we'll talk.
"Today, doctors still need to be familiar with their patients' personal medical history
to determine what care they need. Wouldn't it be handy to have a medical card with a micro-thin embedded chip that could fit in your pocket? A card from which your entire documented medical history can be downloaded including MRI and X-ray images?
It's coming because it's just too convenient not to have. It's the grocery store card analogy all over again. It would assist any medical personnel whether you were out of town, in a non-English speaking country or unconscious. Good idea except for the fact that looking over the doctor's shoulder is the insurer themself. Genetic testing, not yet a requirement to obtain insurance, could make that little medical card a pile of information that you may want to keep private. Call King Solomon stat.
The Internet, soon coming through televisions everywhere to people whom will never own a computer, brings you information, not news. Unlike the music industry, television news was one of the earliest to embrace the Internet model and adapt to it. They still have the edge over radio and newspapers in that respect. It's their Web sites that are the most often viewed by ex- or now part-time-television viewers to get the new version of news. I know, because the local station in Cleveland, Channel 5, has a Web site at newsnet5.com that has links, organized and categorized, to all the news they can capture. That's my first stop when I get home after work each day. I surf through it, click some links on stories of value, and I am done getting my news in much less than a half-hour broadcast.
The world view of digital culture is also going to be changed by the explosion of information access. While "news" often highlights fires, crimes, scandals and that damn Dow Jones Industrial Average (honestly, how many of you sit paper in hand during the evening news and copy that number down?), the Internet highlights nothing. It gives you information.
Information is the currency of digital culture. We hope to make some valuable direct deposits to your information account through this column.
How has technology changed society? Give us your thoughts and we'll chew on 'em. E-mail Digital Culture at digitalculture@ibsys.com
Dean Boland, an assistant prosecuting attorney with the Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Prosecutor's Office, specializes in white collar crime and tried that office's first computer hacker case. In addition to teaching seminars on technology and the law and writing a column on the subject for the Cleveland Bar Journal, Boland authored a book on the names of rock bands, "Rock N' Roll Call."
The people responsible for our Constitution and system of laws intended the law to change---but slowly. Mainly, this would prevent hotheads and fads of the day from quickly becoming laws we would all later regret. Unfortunately, that system, when it comes to technology, is extremely problematic. It lets the bad guys get way, way ahead and keeps the good guys (business that want strong encryption for e-commerce for example) from moving in the right direction. The wrong areas of the law are sometimes debated while significant ones are overlooked.
First came mass marketing. Then direct marketing. Coming soon to a television near you: micro marketing. That refers to the tightest possible connection between the product or service someone is selling and the person who really will want to have it.
When the prairie doctor made house calls on the show "Little House on the Prairie," he didn't need to bring files or medical charts. He knew everyone in the little town so the information was in his head already.
First we had NEWSpapers, then NEWSradio and finally NEWStelevision. But, really, ask yourself if everything in the paper or on the radio or television newscast is always news to you? It can't be. It's not the fault of editors or station programmers. They are mass-marketing their product just like everyone else. It's the medium.
