The Digital Age?

During the State of the Union address on Tuesday January 25th, President Obama spoke of the need to usher in the Digital Age.
Obama presents the Digital Age as a social and economic epoch. Social because of the urgent necessity to bring Internet technologies to those without them, and economic because digital tools enable advancement to the next stage of industrial growth. Beyond the coffin of Fordism lies the hope of capturing and domesticating the IT contributions of international engineers, transnational financial institutions, and online sales. The Digital Age is imminent, and we must face it with our heads held high and our eyes alert, so that we may master it before others learn to master us through it.

A few months ago I read an article in the BBC that similarly spoke of a lack of access to the Internet not only as an infrastructural shortcoming, but as an educational shortcoming. Those lacking continuous private access to the worldwide web are presented as being at worst impoverished and at best unwittingly ignorant. The Internet now represents the crux of education in the 21st century, and once the population is wired, a basic necessity of the Digital Age will be satisfied. A society well connected to the Internet is a society predisposed to success in the 21st century.

When Obama speaks of the coming Digital Age I feel a tinge of excitement and a surge of apprehension. The politics of ambition may lead to a nation with a purpose, and purposes can unite a scattered society under one narrative. The narrative of the Digital Age is both heroic and modernistic, presenting a teleology of world affairs that overcomes postmodern cynicism through a Darwinian economic struggle. Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt both spoke regrettably of the slow dawn of the Modern Age and the arrival of the Technological Age or modern world, respectively. For both of these thinkers, the Modern Age was marked by a steady disenchantment of the religious world and the arrival of rational explanation. What set them apart from other thinkers was a perceived notion of the instrumentalization of not only the natural, and what present itself to humans in an undisclosed form, but also of the human. If the world is what humans make of it and how we relate to it, than an excessively rational and instrumental view of the world isn't simply progress, but actually dehumanizes our worlds and ourselves. People become cogs in a machine world, used and discarded as any production material. The natural world itself is no longer beautiful in its mystical beauty but is seen statistically as something to be exploited to an end.

For Arendt, the nuclear bomb and Sputnik both represented the extreme alienation of man from nature. The nuclear bomb is the uncontrollable transubstantiation of nature into a pulverizing unearthly force, and Sputnik was man's flight away from the hearth of the earth. Both Heidegger and Arendt have been accused of conservatism in the ways they nostalgically speak of the home, the private, and the earth, yet their somewhat mystical characterizations of these elements betrays the very human anxiety of imminent undeterminable change.

What changes does the Digital Age promise? Does it bring further instrumentalization and dehumanization of the human condition? Do technologies such as Facebook and Wikipedia further disclose our privacy and level knowledge into trivia? In a world dominated by the private made public and the public made unavoidable, do we lose an essential and important element of what humans need? Or is such apprehension simply situated (as it must be), conservative (it certainly is), and therefore reactionary?

The nuclear bomb and Sputnik were earth-threatening events. They hinted at a possible destruction of the globe as we knew it.
This was, however, a differentiated globe. When Kierkegaard wrote of the modern press in early 19th century Denmark he described it in terms similar to those I used to discuss Internet technologies. The current condition is more Kierkegaard's fear than Heidegger's or Arendt's. Instead of fearing the destruction of the earth, the fear is that of destruction of culture and the self, to be replaced only by a society sucking at the teat of the latest Internet meme.

When Obama speaks of our "Sputnik moment," he clearly suggests a heroic transcendence of cynicism and factionalism and ushers in a new age of meaning and purpose. "America does big things," he claims. This is certainly true. But what will be threatened by the Digital Age, this imminent, purposeful, and destructive paradigm. What will it change and what will we later regret about its arrival. A dawn that we certainly do desire, are creating and are already reeling from.