Our Technologies Have Created a Fragmented Reality: Here’s How
This blog post will explore the Guardian article entitled We’ve Spent the Decade Letting Our Tech Define Us by Douglass Rushkoff. Rushkoff is an author, documentarian, teacher, and podcast host that works to explore and analyze how digital environments impact us as humans, including how they can alter our perceptions of reality. Rushkoff has also studied at Princeton University, the California Institute of Arts, and eventually earned his PHD in New Media and Digital Culture from Utrecht University. His latest book, entitled Team Human, explores the idea that, although these technologies were created by humans, these digital markets, medias, and institutions often have an anti-human agenda.
In his 2019 Guardian article, Rushkoff explains how much of our digital technologies have been designed to oversimplify and categorize humans, which has led to a huge jump in extremism and a fragmented reality due to the fact that algorithms have made it so that each of us are presented a totally different reality than one another. This makes it almost impossible for individuals to reach a consensus on reality, which only fragments our relationships and society further in the “real world”.
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This article also calls attention to different initiatives that have started to call attention to these issues, such as the Center for Humane Technology, whose mission is to help the world make a shift toward humane technology that “supports our well-being, democracy, and shared information environment”.
This idea is echoed in the goals and learning outcomes of the Digital Studies minor here at GVSU, which states the school’s desire to not just teach students the tools and skills of the digital world but to also give them the ability to critically analyze and debate the impact of digital technologies on our culture. These two ideas will then help graduates contribute to creating digital technologies that are better for us as people, which is a sentiment both Rushkoff and the Center for Humane Technology agree with greatly.
This article also reminded me greatly of our previous reading by Meredith Broussard and the concept of technochauvinism, which explains the belief that technology is always the answer. This is something Rushkoff mentions in his piece, stating that “our leading technologists increasingly see human beings as a problem and technology as the solution” but that he does not believe this to be the case. This insight, along with many others presented in this article, will help us as Digital Studies Minors to further develop our maps on digital studies by helping us see more connections between various concepts and technologies as we learn how everything in the digital world is connected, and what the impact of those connections truly is.
