ABSTRACT

In January 2012, there was a major winter snow storm in Toronto on the first day of Winter Semester classes at York University. Traffic accidents clogged roads, public transportation was snarled, and sidewalks were buried under a foot of blowing snow. Russ taught a 7:30 a.m. MBA class and students straggled in late and exhausted. When a reasonable number had arrived he asked how many had been on Facebook that morning and about three-fourths of the class raised their hands. He then asked how many had been on Facebook before they got out of bed and nearly a third raised their hands. Clearly there is something compelling about the digital world in which we live. Spending a large proportion of our time online, adopting emerging technologies easily, and multitasking fluidly are all signs of the increasingly digital nature of our everyday lives. New media have been integrated into our daily routines and agendas, shaping, shifting, and transforming the way we interact, play, shop, read, write, work, listen, create, communicate, collaborate, produce, co-produce, search, and browse. Each of these actions is now very different from the way we did these things in the pre-digital age. New media have altered our daily lives. Even the most mundane routines in the early

morning have been replaced by switching on technological devices. Logging on is now first thing in the morning for many, even before getting up. We may text our children to wake

them up. Sharing breakfast with the family with a newspaper as our only source of distraction is an increasingly old-fashioned memory as we now substitute computers, mobile phones, and other technological devices for what was once family time (Stone 2009). We then check the traffic online if we cannot work from home and must head to the office. Once there, we are apt to work in a collaborative way using new media. During the day we may browse the net to find restaurants, to book movies and entertainment, to listen to music, watch television and movies, and to keep track of our daily exercise, using specialized apps for each. Technology permeates every aspect of our everyday lives and gives rise to dependence on new media to such an extent that we may feel panic if our Internet connection is down for even a short time. In the transition from analog to digital representation over the past half century, technically

speaking, something has been lost; zeroes and ones substitute discrete approximations for continuous sensory phenomena like colors, sounds, and shapes. But for the consumer far more has been gained than lost. We have gained speed, miniaturization, and a cornucopia of new creations. Digital technologies of the microchip make possible not only a host of new devices and applications, but also new ways to present and fashion our identities through what Foucault (1998) called technologies of the self. The contributions in this volume outline some of these possibilities and the revolutionary changes, both good and bad, that digital devices and applications are bringing to our lives as consumers. Many earlier technologies from fire and language to electricity and photography have also radically changed our lives and spawned explosions of creative opportunities. In the future digital technologies, too, may be eclipsed by nanotechnologies, the “Internet of things” (see Chapter 4 by Campbell in this volume), or some other game-changing ways of interacting with our environment and each other. For the moment, however, we are caught up in the swirl of digital possibilities. The excitement and anticipation characteristic of the current era of digital consumption are

illustrated by the yearly Consumer Electronics Show to which the media swarm in order to report on the next new thing. Apple’s new product announcements draw equally rapt media and consumer attention. Numerous websites, blogs, magazines, television shows, and news reports help to sustain the excitement and feed the desires of digital aficionados seeking the magic that each new device and application seems to offer. By the time of his death in 2011, Steve Jobs had been virtually deified (Belk and Tumbat 2005; Deutschman 2000; Isaacson 2011; Kahney 2004), not so much as Prometheus bringing us digital fire as Vulcan forging wondrous new things from digital magma.