Visual Communication Blog: Entry 10

 Nowadays many people take the conveniences of technology for granted. Each morning my mobile phone’s alarm loudly triggers and, after many attempts at blearily fumbling for the virtual snooze button, the tinny piezo speaker eventually wakes me up. Then I confirm the time kept by my quartz-regulated wristwatch, stumble towards the kitchen and rapidly enable my kettle’s heating element to brew a mug of dehydrated instant coffee. After a hot shower, courtesy of our fancy electric boiler, I’m finally prepared to sit down, plug in the external monitor’s HDMI cord, and then activate my laptop to check e-mails and browse the daily news. Less than a century ago, such technologies would’ve been dismissed as wildly imaginative science fiction, yet for many people living in modern society this routine is considered mundane and repeated daily without a second thought. As someone that grew up during the millennial period of rapid technological development, my nostalgic memories of floppy discs and internet modem dial-up tones are interspersed with adolescent recollections of saving for months to purchase a USB flash drive that possessed what seemed like an absurdly vast capacity of one entire gigabyte. Before we could even realise what happened, the ubiquity of internet-connected smart phones and social media had become a technological medium for culture, and an essential backbone that now supports our global population. This computational evolution was researched by the Russian professor of digital studies, Lev Manovich (1960), who discussed the process in his academic work, ‘The Language of New Media (2001)’. He explored the distinct ways in which computers store and manipulate information, such as with moving image footage, and then compared this with traditional techniques of manipulating and editing film stock:

‘What is more likely is that just as the printing press in the fourteenth century and photography in the nineteenth century had a revolutionary impact on the development of modern society and culture, today we are in the middle of a new media revolution – the shift of all culture to computer-mediated forms of production, distribution, and communication.’

 Consequently, digital technology has become an inseparable aspect of ordinary life and functioning non-digitally is now a foreign and impractical concept. Looking back, there are hardly any times when I consciously chose to reject these comforts and only a few examples come to mind. The first unfolded whilst attempting a journey from Spain to France with only a rucksack and minor essentials. The train ticket consumed all my cash and, although I reached the destination city, it quickly dawned that there was no possibility for notifying the friend of my arrival. Eventually I managed to persuade a generous stranger to permit a brief emergency call on their land-line telephone, but without such kindness I’d have struggled to wait for my friend’s response after posting a hand-written letter by mail. The second event took place more recently, during a week-long spiritual pilgrimage to a remote Hindu monastery. Staying there required complete abstinence from not only meat and alcohol but also technological distractions. Therefore, all cameras, phones, tablets, and laptops were strictly forbidden on the premises. Initially, I didn’t mind relegating my sole leisure time to books and meditation, yet long days of constant hourly prayer sessions and endless meditation slowly wore me down, until the joys of reading were insufficient at providing a necessary level of personal entertainment. Perhaps it’s a shame that our attention spans have been enslaved by clicks or jingles, and older generations love dramatically lamenting about the woeful impact of technology on modern youths today. Nevertheless, I’d still consider this Luddite rejection small-minded and horrendously ungrateful because too many people fail to recognise the inherently privileged majesty of beholding a compact device, manufactured with silicon and powered by lithium, that provides instant access to the entire repository of human knowledge and recorded history.

Reference List

Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Available at: https://dss-edit.com/plu/Manovich-Lev_The_Language_of_the_New_Media.pdf [Accessed 23 Jan. 2020].