Towards Meaningful Digital Life

In Mass Media’s Last Blast, Reid Johnson of the LA Times gushes as only Old Media can about the combination of new media outlets and social networking, and their impact on American consumer culture. The piece is at points teetering between tongue-in-check and geniunely effusive. Look, guys: iPods! Blogs! Google! CafePress! My favorites, they’re all here, and I can see their buddy lists!

For Johnson’s overeager exploration of the subject, “Mass Media’s Last Blast” is a fine summary for the many (the majority?) who are utterly disconnected from these developments, or at least those who can’t see the common thread between them. Further to Johnson’s credit, he recognizes that we’re in a transitional period:

“[…] Americans now have an unassuageable appetite for creating and consuming entertainment and interacting with media of all kinds, mass and otherwise. They’re schlepping the kids off to “The Narnia Chronicles” and cruising the Web for old high school flames. They’re loading up on Wal-Mart CDs and iTunes gift certificates. They’re firing off bellicose e-mails to the Wall Street Journal and daily kos."

As I see it, these transitions suggest that we’re finally nearing the end of the Information Age’s test cycle. We’ve realized, one beta site at a time, that you can do online just about anything that can be done in the physical world: you can engage in commercial life, social life, civic life, private life, even a secret life. None of what Johnson describes is particularly novel, it just happens to be online, and wrapped up in the benefits and challenges that online interaction poses. We’ve proven that we can do iAnything and Everything.com, and that they work functionally as well as their brick-and-mortar counterparts.

Now the hard work starts.

We need to recognize that digitizing a process is not the same as creating a meaningful, efficient, or responsible process. Johnson spends the latter part of the piece exploring this idea, and rightly so.

Just because information is easy to get to doesn’t make that information perfect (see Google, Wikipedia). Just because it’s easy to build a semblance of a community doesn’t make it a valuable community (see most social networking sites esp. MySpace). Just because our tastes and self-hewn identities can be pandered to at the speed of our cable modems doesn’t mean that we’re becoming well-rounded, or smart, or good people.

We’re still at the stage of being shocked when our virtual endeavors have positive, tangible outcomes. I’ll rest easy when we’re shocked that positive outcomes, in whatever arena, don’t have virtual roots. The potential is there. It’s simply time to do better.