Digitality

Increasing use of smartphones, especially by young people.

Digitality (aka digitalism) is used to mean the condition of living in a digital culture, derived from Nicholas Negroponte's book Being Digital in analogy with modernity and post-modernity.

Aspects of digitality include near continuous contact with other people through cell phones, near instantaneous look up of information through the World Wide Web, the third wave information storage where any fragment in a text can be searched and used for categorization, such as through search engine Google, and communicating through weblogs and email. Some of the negative aspects of digitality include computer viruses, loss of anonymity and spam.

With the rapidly growing technology, children at increasingly younger ages are learning to speak through the cyber world rather than in face-to-face conversation. They are becoming more digitally literate and creating a new culture in which they communicate more efficiently online than they do in person.

Development

In the 1990s, scholarship of the effects of interactivity with information began to be written and published, particularly focused on the immediacy and ubiquity of digital communications, the interactivity and participatory nature of digital media, and the role of "shallow" information searches. While in the tradition of Postmodernism in that they presume a decisive role for media in the formation of personality, culture and social order, they differ fundamentally from the analog critical theory, in that the audience has the ability to do more than create a personal idiolectic text, but instead is able to create new texts which reinforce the behavior of other participants. This made it possible to individuals to express themselves through interactivity of digital media.

Although the computer was originally created to complete large scale computations, it ultimately progressed into a processing machine that could retrieve and interpret information very quickly. The first personal computer was first introduced by Ed Roberts in 1975 and this sparked the introduction of other "personal computers". As technology continued to advance, more and more intelligent computers were coming to light with stronger processing power and wider range of utilities.

Digitalism Today

It goes without saying that technology today runs the world. Ranging from banking from your mobile phone to video chatting with someone across the world, technology for most of us is part of our daily lives. With almost every adolescent and adult in possession of a smartphone that world is constantly updated no matter where they are. Smartphones in todays day in age have more computing power than say a full sized computer had 15 years ago. With social networks people are able to access a forum where all the people they know are all at once. This type of interacting is why there is a significantly increasing about of phone use in younger people. Digitalism is also slowly replacing many forms of physical aids such as encyclopedias and dictionaries. Nicholas Negroponte describes this effect in his book when he explains how all our necessities in the future will be digitalized. To a certain extent all our news today is digitalized and so is our money. A large percentage of transactions made in the United States are made without the physical exchange of money.

Education

Digitality in the 2000's has had a great impact in the world of education. The internet creates an abundance of resources from all over the world right at your fingertips. Digitality of textbooks and all other written texts makes it so that you no longer need to find books in libraries or stores because you can have them instantly at your home or office. Digitalism has also made it so that children are now presented with electronic knowledge at a very early age. This makes for more implementation of electronic in the school systems.

See also

• Media influence
• Deconstruction
• Postmodernism
• Internet
• Information age
• Critical theory
• Postmodernity
• Modernity
• Digital philosophy