Capturing the impact of digital technologies

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Every day, the digital technologies around us make a difference in almost everything we do: education, work, entertainment, war and peace, how we keep in touch, politics, socialising, banking, services, shopping and so on. It’s challenging to think of something in your life that has not been affected by digital technology. Indeed, its influence is only expanding.

Several years ago, I was asked by the European Commission to work on that impact. At the time, we were trying to understand how digital technology was going to affect ordinary European citizens’ lives. I had to find a way of expressing this new kind of experience.

I still remember I was next to a river trying to think of a keyword that captured the essence of this new experience, something between being online and being offline. Suddenly, it became apparent: we can call that experience “onlife”, as a single word. The term has this mixed nature of being both online and offline at the same time. It also contains a kind of joke about life.

Living onlife

Living onlife, of course, is continually changing. That said, it’s what happens when I’m cooking and listening to music via a streaming service. At the same time, I might be checking a recipe on my mobile phone. If someone were to ask me, ‘Are you online? Are you offline?’ the answer would be ‘You must be from the 90s.’ Indeed, it’s no longer meaningful to ask whether you are online or offline in a world that is always mixing and matching the two experiences simultaneously.

This does not mean that the offline experience doesn’t exist anymore, because it obviously does. All I need to do is turn off the electricity in my house, and I’m completely cut off. Likewise, it doesn’t imply that younger generations just live online all the time. Sure enough, students of mine still want to have a beer in a pub, an entirely analogue experience. What onlife does mean is that there is an enormous amount of experience occurring at the intersection of these two sorts of experiences.

One could use mangroves as a metaphor. Mangroves grow in brackish water where the water of the sea mixes with the water of the river; asking whether the brackish water is fresh like a river or salty like the sea is meaningless. It’s brackish for a reason. We are all living in a mangrove society where the two kinds of experiences are mixing, and that experience is transforming what it means to be human.

The natural and the digital

One of the capabilities of digital technologies could be called “cut and paste”. Digital technologies and digital realities cut things we formerly believed were unique and could not be divided and glue them together.

For example, think about our relationship with machines on the one hand and the environment on the other. The distinction has always been apparent in the past. There was humanity on one hand and all kinds of machinery or technology on the other. There were man-made realities and then there was the natural world of this planet.

Of course, through the millennia, we have transformed this divide. Today, we are more reliant on machines. For example, we may use devices to determine our daily rhythms by measuring how many steps we take according to some app. We are always on call, geo-tagged 24/7 and so on.

Simultaneously, in terms of environment, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between a pure, untouched natural environment and territories that have already been transformed by human interactions. Indeed, we have changed many parts of the planet by our interactions with the environment.

A new reality

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If you consider these divides between humans and machines and between nature and manmade realities, they are clearly becoming blurred. This observation gives you a better sense of the new reality of the 21st century, as opposed to the ideas of the past.

Clinging to our old notion, you might believe that nature is just nature, and a city is just a city. However, my kitchen cannot be considered only analogue, and my life cannot be regarded as entirely independent of the gadgets surrounding me. In many ways, this incorporation of technology into everyday situations makes our modern lives possible. This new reality is increasingly evident during the current pandemic.

Our reliance on digital tools, on the one hand, and synthetic onlife experiences, on the other, have made clear to everybody that we live in a very mixed world. In this new world, those former distinctions are not necessarily incorrect; they just belong to a different age. Unless we start to incorporate these blurred distinctions into our view of the world, we will miss the opportunity to improve our relations with our machines and the relationship between nature and man-made realities. Indeed, within this mixed world, we must act to shape this new reality of blurring distinctions, because they will be increasingly less obvious and more blurred over time.

Information abundance

Our generation is indeed quite special. We need only think of the amount of information available today to realise this. It is not just that we perceive the amount of data to be extraordinary – the whole of humanity has never seen so much data as the current generation.

Looking online, diagrams are available that depict the exponential increase in the amount of data. The curves shown in these images inevitably start small only to skyrocket upwards on the right-hand side with time.

The critical aspect, however, is the left-hand side. While these diagrams have different end dates, you only have to look backwards in time to realise how minuscule the amount of information we recently had available. Often, by looking back as recently as 2005, the curve appears to approach zero.

Indeed, an overwhelming majority of the data available today has been generated by the current generation. That means, of all the words ever spoken, from Shakespeare to speeches by the prime minister, most have been generated in the last decade or so. The same is true of all the images ever created. Indeed, zettabytes of information are available, a fantastic amount.

Learning to swim

Nevertheless, the quantity is overwhelming. It is a tsunami. Humanity has never had so much data, and therefore so much information that can be meaningfully interpreted. The opportunities are staggering, and so is the potential for confusion. Moreover, the development of artificial intelligence during this period is no accident. It was necessary to have all this data so that artificial intelligence could be trained on the data and consume the data to be successful.

These are two critical observations: our difficulty navigating this information abundance and the success of AI. Indeed, we struggle to find the right information and to understand which voices to follow. AI is likely the best tool we have to navigate this enormous sea of data.

One thing that we could see happening in the future is that AI will be increasingly used to navigate this vast amount of information. If we can learn to do so effectively, our lack of orientation may be remedied by the digital tools we develop.

Changing reality

Photo by helloabc

Finally, sometimes to ensure something exists and is real, you need a successful interaction. Imagine kicking something in your house and not touching anything. You go whoosh and pass through. Now, imagine the opposite experience. You interact with something, and it responds. Typically, that is a good test for whether or not something exists. Yet, that response could come from a digital reality and could merely be an icon on a screen.

We can understand today that there are many ways of performing this existential check, but one way of understanding what is real is whether or not I can interact with it. This begs the question of whether or not interaction is a good criterion. Maybe I can get something to respond, but it could just be an icon or some virtual entity. Overall, this consideration is evolving today with respect to our sense of reality and what we consider to be real.

Discover more about

The "onlife" experience

Floridi, L. (ed). (2015). The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era. Springer.

Floridi, L. (2016). The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford University Press.

Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2018). How AI can be a force for good. Science, 361(6404), 751–752.

Living onlife: how the boundaries between the online and offline blur