Digital Nation
On air and online Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 9:00pm (check local listings)
Over a single generation, the Web and digital media have remade nearly every aspect of modern culture, transforming the way we work, learn and connect in ways that we’re only beginning to understand. FRONTLINE producer Rachel Dretzin (Growing Up Online) teams up with one of the leading thinkers of the digital age, Douglas Rushkoff (The Persuaders, Merchants of Cool), to continue to explore life on the virtual frontier. The film is the product of a unique collaboration with visitors to the Digital Nation Web site, who for the past year have been able to react to the work in progress and post their own stories online. Dretzin and her team report from the front lines of digital culture -- from love affairs blossoming in virtual worlds, to the thoroughly wired classrooms of the future, to military bases where the Air Force is fighting a new form of digital warfare. Along the way, they begin to map the critical ways that technology is transforming us -- and what we may be learning about ourselves in the process.
This is such an interesting topic, I think, because it relates directly to our perception. On the Digital Nation website (I just love the irony of writing about this on a blog-maybe a typewriter would be too reactionary?) it mentions in the introduction a Doctor from Stanford saying "We've done studies with children where they see themselves swimming around with whales in virtual reality. ... About 50 percent of them will believe that in physical space, they actually went to SeaWorld and swam with whales." Wow! Ok...I have to admit that that seems a little scary to me that half of those kids could not discern between actually being in water with whales and understanding that that scenario is quite separate from physical reality- to me this is something akin to imposed schizophrenia. But I did not grow up in chat-rooms (do they even do that anymore???) and while I appreciate all of the information in the world being apparently available to me at the click of a mouse, for me, nothing will ever replace a good library or bookstore. That is, my experience colors my perception and makes me think what I think and have preferences for certain things above others. As designer I cannot even begin to understand how this sense of things- for lack of better terminology, will effect what I do. I only hope that there will be a place for embodied reality in the future-for being present without being plugged in.
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