Closer Together, Further Apart: The Effect of Technology and the Internet on Parenting, Work, and Relationships. Jennifer Schneider
9 months
From Analog to Digital: Where Everything Old is New Again
One tangible way to illuminate the past three decades of technological change is to note that as a society and a species we have shifted from an analog world to a digital one. In the analog world of the past, physical movement was necessary to perform a specific function. In today’s digital world, most of our desired experiences require little physical movement beyond the occasional tap of an on-off button, a sweep of our finger, a spoken word or keyboard stroke. While this shift may seem obvious based on all the bleeping, vibrating, and multitasking going on, it can actually be difficult to identify in our day-to-day existence how profound these changes are. For example, let’s consider the history of the car radio.
When the car radio was introduced in the 1930’s (by Motorola, a company named and founded for just that purpose), the process of listening to the radio involved physically moving a series of knobs, bars and dials that controlled a large, heavy vacuum tube driven receiver and amplification device mounted into the dashboard of your automobile. To raise or lower the volume you physically turned a knob that magnified the sound level being produced. To find your favorite station, you had to turn another knob that would visibly move a bar across the AM frequency band. By moving the bar just so; you could find your station. To maintain good sound, the dial had to be frequently adjusted by hand as radio signals faded in and out as you drove from place to place. Careful listening was the key to successfully guiding the knob as you attempted to find and tune into the strongest signal source.
By the 1950’s this technology had evolved to allow users to actually preset the car radio to their favorite stations rather than constantly having to turn a knob to locate them. This analog evolution allowed users to push one of a set of mechanically keyed buttons. The sheer force of your push would physically slide the bar along to your preselected broadcast frequency.
By the early 1960’s as transistors quickly replaced vacuum tubes, car audio became more compact and efficient allowing for the addition of FM frequencies. The invention of stereo sound provided an even more varied experience. By the 1970’s 8-track players became popular, followed by the cassette tape. The 1980’s brought our first taste of fully digitized music via compact discs (CDs), which though encoded in a digital format, were nonetheless “read” by mostly analog machines.
Now fully digital, in cars today we have available to us automatic signal-seeking radios that find the strongest signals for themselves often initiated by a vocal command, along with satellite transmitted music stations. These radios are now most often combined with plug-in digital music players (most commonly in the form of an Apple iPod). It may be worth noting too that the analog to digital evolution described here was more or less a seven decade process in the making. It did not happen overnight.
An interesting observation is that now, just like in 1935, you can still listen to the radio while driving. We just do it differently than they did over seven decades ago. While it is true that the digital revolution has brought a literal end to our purchase and ownership of previously popular analog devices such as telephones, cameras, printing presses, record players, rolodexes, and televisions, we still need, want and enjoy the experiences those products produced for us. We talk “on the phone,” we still “take pictures,” we “read books,” and we continue to “listen to recorded music,” and “watch TV.” Most of these experiences are nearly the same as they were in days of yore, however, they are delivered in new ways.
While so much has changed that it may be difficult for someone to even grasp the relationship between a rolodex and the contacts icon on your cell phone, the function of both (analog and digital) devices remains the same. In 1960, no one would have known what the heck to do with a smartphone yet many of the functions our digital devices now provide (telephone, movies, books, maps, and cameras) would all have been quite familiar to them. It’s just in a different format. Multiple generations have indeed shared similar experiences but in a profoundly dissimilar manner resulting in the “new generation gap” which is the focus of Chapter One.
There is no denying that we are in the midst of a tech-connect BOOM. Virtually everyone in the first and increasingly in the second world economies today owns or has access to a computer, smartphone, or mobile device. Digital interaction has in less than three decades become an integral part of our worldwide daily routine. We check emails and texts, update our Facebook page, fire off a tweet or two, and then finish our morning coffee. This ever-increasing digital interconnectivity provides endless opportunities to support our very human needs for social interaction and feeling part of the larger community.
For partners, spouses, and families separated for long periods of time by work or military service, this tech-connect boom has been a godsend. Friends and family too distant for regular contact just a few years ago can now be intimately folded into each other’s lives. Couples, children, and parents are able to bond long-distance in real time, sharing a growing child’s latest milestone and even engaging in visual intimacy via webcams. Those not yet in a committed relationship can put technology to good use via e-dating, establishing and developing budding relationships with less focus than ever before on who lives where. We make friends, we share our experiences, we celebrate, and we commiserate via the Internet—one world, a growing, interactive community.
The digital world has also helped educate the general public about topics formerly considered too personal or embarrassing to discuss with friends and family or even a professional. Thanks to the Internet, nonjudgmental clinical information on mental illness, spousal abuse, sexuality, relationship intimacy, and drug and alcohol abuse can now be found online 24/7. This has helped to de-stigmatize formerly shameful topics and facilitate useful connections with like-minded individuals.
Perhaps the vast digital networks of like-minded individuals that form today via social media are merely a reflection of our deeply felt and unmet human need for a closer sense of community. Living in small family units is a fairly recent phenomenon. From pretty much the dawn of time up until the industrial revolution most men and women lived, ate, and shared their life experiences among large, closely knit communities. Most children were raised not by one set of parents, but rather an entire community.
In the past, people found both shelter and safety by living together. By doing so they were better protected from a seemingly unpredictable and dangerous world. While the past few hundred years of scientific and technological advances have brought humanity vast new freedoms along with the relative safety to enjoy them, these advantages have also pushed us further and further apart. The now typical household of one or two adults living alone or with children would not have survived during those times. And though today we are able to both enjoy more mobility and are less dependent on friends and family for our physical survival, it may well be that our social needs have been profoundly ignored. In this vein, we wonder if the time that many of us now spend on social media hanging out with like-minded people, sharing our current status and connecting online with old friends, distant family and loved ones serves as a good enough digital replacement for the centuries of communal living that in modern life has for the most part eradicated.
Yakkety Yak, Don’t Look Back
At the time of this writing, there are well over two billion Internet users worldwide. Asia leads the way with over one billion users and North America has more than 273 million—over three-quarters of our population. The least technologically developed continent, Africa, has just shy of 140 million users, which is only about 13 percent of that continent’s population, but the number of African users has increased nearly 3,000 percent in the first twelve years of the twenty-first century. Nearly one-third of the world’s population is online.7 And that number increases every single moment. To call the Internet a ubiquitous worldwide phenomenon would be a vast understatement. Essentially, we live in a new “golden age” of information and communication. We are interconnected in ways that were undreamed of a mere decade ago. In technologically advanced nations today virtually anyone, no matter where he or she is, can immediately connect with almost any other person.
Digital technology—primarily the Internet but also cell phones, cable TV, and other innovations—has,