Human Awareness in the Digital Age
As humanity learns, we become more aware. It's a feedback loop. What does this mean in the Digital Age?
Grogi looked out of the cave opening at the morning frost on the grass. He was thankful for the idea his wife had to take the bears fur and make clothing from it. The days were colder than their clan history could remember. The shaman said the spirits were angry. They must travel to where hopefully, it would be warmer. What Grogi and his clan weren’t aware of, was the Ice Age was upon them.
Our world, both within ourselves and outside of ourselves, changes as we become aware of all that is around us. Awareness is, in some ways perhaps, a magical event within our minds. The more we can share that awareness, the more our cultures and societies change.
In the Digital Age, we are becoming more aware of ourselves, our societies and even of humanity and our place in the universe. Digital technologies are playing a starring role in this drama and it may be more profound than we are, well, aware of.
First, I’ll posit what awareness means in the context of this article, in which I’ll be brief and summarize, avoiding academic terms (I’m not an academic anyway) and then I’ll explore what might be the implications of being aware of ourselves as a species might look like.
On Being Aware of Ourselves
To survive as a species, we figured out early on that we needed to co-evolve with biological evolution. The process we created is what we call culture. Which is our myriad of norms, behaviours and customs and the things we developed to go with them; economic and political systems, militaries and social governance, arts, fashion, music and literature, architecture.
We developed these tools and technologies by becoming increasingly aware of our surroundings and communicating to both learn and organize into social groups. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our ancestors primary awareness was understanding the environment immediately around us. So that we could avoid being on the lunch menu of sabre tooth tigers.
Then we invented languages. Drawing on cave walls, carving into stone and wood, creating symbols and then of course, writhing. The more aware we became, the more knowledge we attained, the more we advanced our communication technologies. It is a serious of evolutionary feedback loops.
The printing press and the ability to create and share knowledge, the diffusion of knowledge, alongside transportation technology, like sail, then steam, then combustion engines, helped us spread knowledge faster, accelerating our awareness of the world and what lay beyond our planet.
Along the way we came up with ideas and ways of being human by telling stories, our primary means of expanding awareness and making sense of who we are and our place in the world. The idea of human rights came from the Mi’kmaw and Algonkian tribes in what is today called Canada and the United States (the French stole the idea during the Enlightenment by the way.)
We created philosophy, psychology, sociology, archaeology as ways to make sense of our humanity. We created hard sciences from biology to physics to add awareness of our physical selves and world. All meaning we became more aware of ourselves and the world around us.
All of this enabled us to imagine technologies too. We have been entwined with technology ever since we became aware of making tools from stones.
While this awareness is good overall, it’s also meant some utterly daft things like racism and war. Which we’ll explore next. We’ve also still not let go of some of our ancient ancestral awareness things, like constantly checking our surroundings for threats. Much less from sabre tooth tigers and more about cars zipping by and getting whacked by a bus on a busy urban street.
Technologies are symbols of being human, they evolve through what we call in anthropology, the ratchet effect. They come from our imaginations and that only happens when we become more aware.
We look out of windows instead of cave openings. Yet we still look out and wonder at what we are not aware of.
Awareness in the Digital Age
Until today, becoming more aware of things at scale used to take a long time and we had to deal with space, such as getting across oceans and not falling off of mountains to spread ideas and knowledge. And the time that all took.
Digital technologies such as the Internet, satellites and undersea cables means we don’t have to worry so much about drowning, falling off mountains or being eaten by a host of predators with big teeth and sharp claws. Finding other people in other places is quite easy.
But this has also meant the buffers that gave us some time and space, to cogitate on new ideas and knowledge has also collapsed. The ability to to share information and knowledge is almost instantaneous. We’ve never been more aware of so much, so fast.
This is where the challenging part of becoming more aware comes into play. Along with our ability to create real knowledge and information comes the ability to create false information and knowledge. Which we’ve long been doing, but now it’s at a global scale.
Our brains and our social systems are not designed to process ideas and knowledge at such a high speed. Especially if we become aware of ideas and information (often stories) that does not fit with how we see and interpret our view of the world.
Eventually we probably will. We will develop customs, norms and behaviours to be able to adapt faster and be more resilient as a means of survival. We are not there yet.
Today, we are becoming aware of one another in new ways, every day. All day. Digital technologies, specifically information technologies, have enabled us to present to the world societal issues at scale and almost instantly across the world and into every culture.
We are more aware of wars, conflicts, social issues like bullying, sexual harassment, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights. Social activism becomes far easier to create messaging and organize real world activities. From protests to marches, the changing of laws and political systems.
This is wonderful. Yet it also creates friction as dominant cultures see that their power positions are no longer tenable. Awareness leads to change. We’re always changing, especially as awareness dawns on us. We don’t like change. It’s a paradox of being human.
Right now, it’s very messy and may get a bit messier yet before we sort it all out. As we become more aware, throughout history, sociocultural systems change and evolve. Sometimes in good ways, sometimes rather horrible for a time.
We are becoming more aware of one another than ever before. So we’re in a phase where now we’re seeing how much in common we all have, while seeing the differences and seeing too, where we need to come together. This necessarily creates friction between those who accept greater awareness and embrace it and those who prefer to keep their awareness within certain boundaries.
This by no means will result in some global utopia. Or dystopia. But the fact that we are now connected at a global scale, that we are slowly becoming more aware of who we are and our place in everything, is an experience we’ve never had before. That we are having arguments and debates does mean dialogue.
Communications and information technologies are at the core of our increasing awareness. Oddly enough, just as Grogi and his clan came to understand they must move in order to survive a changing climate, so too, are we becoming aware we must move. But we can’t really move anymore. So our awareness today is that we must behave differently, rather than move. At least the bears don’t have to worry so much about us taking their fur.