Being Human and Digital

We live in a digital age. According to Nicholas Negroponte, a founder and the director of the MIT's Media Lab and the author of Being Digital , the digital age, like a force of nature, cannot be denied or stopped. And there are four powerful qualities in being digital: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering. Obviousbly, this is one more rosy and promising picture of technological development painted by another social and technological optimist. In contrast to this sort of utopian view, however, critic Wu Bofan (吳伯凡) warns us that human beings are now transforming into digital beings, and that the digital environments make our lives increasingly "light," in Milan Kundera's insight, thus more unbearable. Similar to the feeling of detaching ourselves from the earth, the ground, and losing our sense of gravity, in Wu's view, our immersion in digital technologies takes us farther away from our own physical capabilities and biological sensibilities. We allow the machines to take over our bodily functions. And we are happy about it.

I think that we now are both human beings and digital beings. Our bodily senses still function, but in different ways from how people perceived with these senses in the past. The multi-media objects make our senses intertwined. The virtual world not only creates fantastic pseudo-realities, but also prompts us to appreciate our natural environments with deeper gratitudes. The fake will make the real more desirable; the natural will make the artificial more imaginative. We will learn, through media literacy and self-reflection, to make the proper switches between surfing on the cyberspace and living in the physical, material world. I don't think the digital being is necessarily groundless and unbearable, but given the fact that media and technology can definately change our sense of self and other, and transform human consciousness, we simply cannot overlook the effort that contemplates on how that transformation happens with what significant consequences.

But for now, what interests me is that I am able to find various kinds of video clips for my entertainment on Youtube. com. My favorite concert highlights, movie scenes, and TV moments all become free video on demand materials, showing up on my computer screen at the moment I want them. I am waiting for the day when I will have the access to any book I need in electronic libraries. But, then I won't have the excuse for not finding the resource needed for my work. And that will be the burden, the "heaviness," that is embedded in the freedom, the "lightness," that the digital world offers.

As Wu reminds us of the Italian writer Italo Calvino's view, humans should strive to live a life as light and free as birds, flying high in the sky, rather than turn their lives into feathers, wandering and eventually being lost in the wind. Let's think about technology as wings that help us soar higher like birds. Though technology may have the power to take over the human brain and guide our minds, I believe that we have the wisdom and capability to make better judgments on the technological impacts. If machines allow us to develop new and fresh visions in life, give us the opportunities to understand and accept other human beings more, and open our minds and hearts to other creatures that we thought were strange and insignificant, then we should do ourselves a favor by embracing the screens, the robots, the fiber optics, etc. We let technologies participate in our own process of reaching to a higher level of human spirit and quality of life. It is absolutely important to pinpoint all the negative impacts of digital technology on human lives, but it's more constructive to learn and teach how to utilize the cyberspace in order to widen our own inner world and meet the challenges in all the new frontiers.