Digital media reverse the direction of electronic media, which until now was a top-down expression.

by Douglas Rushkoff | February 10, 2012 | (0)

I JUST HAD A LONG CONVERSATION WITH A GROUP OF VISITING DIGNITARIES FROM CHINA, where businesspeople and government alike are struggling to understand the impacts of digital technology on, well, pretty much everything.

It struck me as ironic because I’ve been bellowing for a decade about how the West is falling behind China and India in terms of tech skills. We buy visas for foreign programmers to come to the U.S. and work at Google, Facebook and IBM doing what we can’t seem to educate or motivate our own kids to do, while our own computer education languishes. Our generals and admirals—at least in private—fear the West is losing its military edge and that only a devastating cyber attack will convince the government and the public to get serious about computer science education. 

But it’s easy to forget that all those programmers are still coming here to work. It’s Google and Facebook that fascinate them and give them the opportunity to flex their programming chops.

The hardest thing for me to explain is that digital media are really different than the industrial age technologies that came before. Digital media reverse the direction and dynamic of electronic media, which, until now, has been an extension and amplification of the printing press, broadcast, mass production, public relations and other top-down expressions.

The printing press let sovereigns and wealthy people (with permission) create documents that other people could read. Broadcast allowed corporations and governments to send messages and propaganda to the masses. Industrial-age factories coordinated the efforts of thousands or millions of workers, who did not need to think or contribute in any way other than simply doing the task they were assigned, passively

Digital (think: digits) media reverse this. Most of us have 10 digits (fingers), which is why we use a Base 10 numbering system. Digital also refers to the individual, discrete fingers themselves—or anything stored and sent discretely in little sample packets instead of smooth and analog, like real sound or record albums. Digital is what we do with our fingers on keyboards. We’re not receivers, but creators. We make words and videos; we write software. Our computers aren’t monitors, but broadcast stations.

Digital media promote creative activity and participation. It promotes bottom-up industry and peer-to-peer exchange. It even stimulates bottom-up politics and new sensibilities that are dangerous to people who hold power by oppression rather than engagement.

And no matter how well a nation or culture trains its programmers, if its leaders don’t grasp this shift, no amount of skills advancement will make a difference. “But what about McLuhan’s ‘Global Village?’” one Chinese leader asked me, believing that the great Canadian media theorist’s vision of the future involved things getting smaller and more manageable.

But McLuhan was discussing 1970s-era technology, and his global village was meant rather sarcastically and no doubt gets lost in translation, or when your understanding of McLuhan comes from Wired. When he actually came up with the phrase, McLuhan was teasing hippies who thought that satellite television and other global electronic media would bring the whole world together. What he realized was that all this connectivity—not our digital connectivity, but the connectivity of television networks and global markets—would generate globalism.

And he was right. We saw the ascendancy of global markets and corporations that don’t respect national boundaries, an International Monetary Fund and World Bank that oppress one people for the benefit of another, the destruction of local environments to dispose of computer or nuclear waste.

Digital media doesn’t work this way, because it’s not global—it’s local. The power is not a government-controlled satellite; it’s human-owned computer chips. Thus, we see the bottom-up, local revolutions of the Arab Spring. The threat to powerful regimes isn’t in protesters’ connections to global media, but their connections to one another.

In other words, it’s less important for a repressive regime to cut off its people from the rest of the world than it is to prevent them from gaining access to one another.

Meanwhile, whoever recognizes the immense power of peer-to-peer connectivity and fosters rather than shuns it, will attract all the programmers they need, wherever it is they may come from. One+

Douglas Rushkoff

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF speaks and writes about communication, values, culture and organizations. His latest book is "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age." He can be contacted via www.rushkoff.com.

TAGS: technology , column , One+ February 2012 , china