We’re human, we grasp and hold onto all sorts of things; from abstract concepts to moral values, food, drink and technologies, talking, texting and emailing our way through life, adapting and evolving.
Fire once protected us (those were the days) and provided heat and light but language (visual and spoken) was and is our primal and prime technology. Words are our most accessible tool and sustainable resource.
We learn how to use words to find and use information, knowledge and truth if we are taught properly – learning their differences, diversity, diversions and digressions, takes time.
The printing press liberated books from monasteries and democratised reading and power to varying degrees.
Electricity energised us, revolutionising our ability to organise, expand, record, amplify, and to share the information, knowledge, heritage and history, every minute of every day.
ABOVE: Argyle Cutting, Argyle Street, The Rocks, Sydney, a heritage precinct where it’s easy to imagine gas lamps like the working replica further up this street.
Telegraphy transmitted messages from point to point in Morse Code echoing the drum beating relays of days bygone. Photography recorded pinholes in time.
Telephones subverted time, place, space and distance. Radio creates networks of audiences.. Cinemas lured us out of our homes. Broadcast television turned us into consumers and categorised us using demographics. Video recorders drew us out of cinemas and back into our homes..
The Internet, Wi-Fi, AI, Google, Apple, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon, apps, video games, live streaming, GPS, smart devices and Siri and her friends, reshape our needs, wants and behaviours.
The Global Industry Center at the University of California has calculated that the average person consumes multiple gigabytes of information across devices each day (equivalent to between 50,000 and 100,000 words).
Megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes of data surround the world in a swirling cloud every bit as transformative as its fine and foul weather friends.
ABOVE: ‘If you’re reading this, it must be knock-off time’ 2015 Simon Masterton, 2,500 beer bottle tops individually painted and mounted with 300 metres of wire.
Our attention is pushed and pulled constantly in different directions. Politicians take full advantage of this confusion and stress, spinning stories to distract us and deflect attention away from carbon emissions, land clearing and species extinction, promising prosperity with endless economic growth.
Reading diverse content on digital devices requires a new kind of literacy in parallel with, overlapping and intersecting with print literacy like learning a second language.
Digital literacy is vital to the protection of our cognitive security, separating fact from fake and truth from lies. Learning digital literacy is essential to critical thinking, analysing, inferring and deducing the truth.
Technology has given us longer lives, more to do, and the potential to replace coal and gas power stations with solar, hydro and wind renewable energy to turn back the temperatures and tides of climate change.
ABOVE: ‘The Kiss’ 1901-04 Auguste Rodin, interweaving art, passion and nudity, expressing beauty publicly for personal and private individual interpretations.
Apple’s logo with the bite out of it owes its origin to the bible and temptation. Eve took a bite out of the apple and Adam realised he was naked. Apple’s strategy against Google ironically focuses on privacy.