Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
least we are beginning to cease to notice its presence and how it
affects us, or at least take these aspects for granted. We sit in front of
our computers at work, surf the net, send e-mails, play games on
consoles, watch television that is both produced and, increasingly,
distributed digitally, read magazines and topics all of which have
been produced on computers, travel with our laptops, enter infor-
mation into palmtops, talk on our digital mobile phones, listen to
CDs or MP
s, watch films that have been post-processed digitally,
drive cars embedded with microchips, wash our clothes in digitally
programmable machines, pay for our shopping by debit cards
connected to digital networks, and allow the supermarkets to know
our shopping habits through loyalty cards using the same networks,
withdraw cash from automatic telling machines, and so on.
Digital technology's ubiquity and its increasing invisibility have
the effect of making it appear almost natural. The tendency to take
it for granted can easily attenuate into a sense that it has evolved
into its present form naturally, by way of a kind of digital nature.
This naturalization is problematic, in that it has distinct political
repercussions. Like conservative fantasies about the countryside, it
ignores the complex human forces that determined its development
and present importance. Despite the sentimental rhetoric it inspires,
the English countryside is an entirely artificial creation and takes
its present form as the result of human needs, labour and social
antagonism. So too our new digital nature, which, as I hope this
topic has shown, is the creation of different, sometimes antagonistic
forces and needs. This topic can be understood as a kind of cultural
archaeology, digging under the surface of our contemporary digital
landscape in order to reveal the underlying structures that gave it
its present shape. It is these structures rather than any natural
tendencies within the technology that have determined how and
when we use it.
Thus our current digital landscape has been broadly shaped by
the informational needs of capitalism and its drive to abstraction,
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