Chapter 7 - New Technologies Everywhere?

Summary

Logging the Digital Revolution in Everyday Life

Although “globalized technologies” constitute only one aspect of globalization, they are arguably the dimension that brings global flows “closest to home” (Lemert 2015: 14). How, then, might one capture, self-reflexively and hence critically, one's own everyday reliance on our era's information and communication technologies? One possible starting point for such an undertaking is a simple recording exercise: in a randomly chosen week, how many hours do we spend doing particular things, communicating digitally, consuming information and entertainment via channels and through means that simply did not exist until not very long ago? Here is my own, in many ways atypical “technology and communication log” compiled during a week in early September 2020 (Table 7.1).

This is idiosyncratic. Timing and immediate context must be borne in mind: early September constitutes an unusual point in the annual cycle of academic work, when “we” still get to spend proportionally more of our time doing research, writing publications, and preparing our teaching rather than engaged in administrative matters and the delivery of teaching. What is more, the point in time captured here was still profoundly shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic: with more of our lives spent at home, our reliance on digital means of communication was clearly pronounced. Concurrently, especially for those of us with families in different countries, and whatever our general attitude toward our technological age, the personal importance of video calls across long geographical distances cannot be overstated. At the same time, my nonexistent use of social media (neither as an active contributor nor as a consumer thereof) arguably shows me to be old-fashioned and anachronistic. Other people's categories of activity will undoubtedly be far more numerous and, in light of their “fuller” digital lives, considerably more nuanced and multifaceted. Yet, this tentative table says something profound, particularly as it captures one week's activities in the life of a digital skeptic.

The picture becomes even more revealing when Table 7.1 is read alongside Table 7.2, which summarizes my non-digitally-mediated activities in the same week in question.

Further explanation is needed at this point. The proportion of digitally mediated to non-digital activities is noteworthy: the sum total of the first log amounts to ninety-one hours across seven days, compared to a sum total of ninety-nine hours of non-digital activities (including six hours of sleep per night, which for non-Fitbit-wearers are by definition non-digitalized).