Human Reality in the Digital Age
Giles Crouch | Digital Anthropologist
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4 min read
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5 days ago
Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash
We all see the world in different ways. We all have a different view of reality, even within our group of friends and family. To find common ground, to be able to socialize and work together, we created language. Through discussion, debates, literature, music, math, architecture, art and especially story telling, we find a common ground. As a species, we advance. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, always messily and often unpredictably.
Until very recently, over hundreds of thousands of years, this was done through the supporting technologies of writing, first on clay or stone tablets, papyrus, paper and then today, through digital devices. In zeroes and ones.
The way we talk about and agree on realities is also connected to time. And we perceive time personally and societally, in different ways as well. In digitally advanced societies we employ time very differently from nomadic or hunter-gatherer societies (some of which exist today). Some cultures that operate within modern societies, such as indigenous ones, work within different concepts of time as well. This is neither right or wrong, it is just part of being human.
Our realities shift based on our perceptions of time. You may, for example, experience time compression (the cognitive effect of when time passes more quickly than we think.) Some days seem interminably slow, vacations zip by. As we age, we talk about time moving faster.
With digital technologies, we are intermixing time and reality in increasingly novel ways. This can be seen in a number of social media tools like TikTok and Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. Videos that compress reality and oversimplify in a shortened time. A meme for example, distills a complex idea that might take a long time to truly understand, into a simple this or that statement. This is why memes are so dangerous. They lack the nuance that informs the opportunity to agree on a reality more pragmatically and hit our emotional buttons.
Toss in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence that can tell stories through hallucinations and making facts up and well, you get the picture.
We know that ongoing time compression, for example, can lead to dissociation with reality, anxiety and addictive behaviours. Sudden disconnection can lead to depression and addictive behaviours as coping mechanisms.
technologies have always been augmenting our realities and changing time, but in a more physical way and with an ability to adapt over longer time spans. Our cultures and societies had time to consider and adapt to trains, planes and automobiles. This becomes compressed with digital communications technologies.
Our brains and sociocultural systems are not designed to handle multiple realities and switching between various time formats so rapidly. It’s why we cannot multitask, contrary to popular myth.
This mixing and mashing of time and reality doesn’t mean the collapse of civilization as we know it, nor does it mean we should go back to picking berries. Our brains are quite a bit more elastic and adaptable than we sometimes think. In his famous book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler proposed that societies would feel overwhelmed by rapid technological change.
Although we don’t have much hard proof that this is the case, circumstantial evidence would suggest that we are in the overwhelmed phase currently. I believe this has to do, in part, with us trying to figure out how to deal with so many realities and shifting concepts of time.
The Future of Human Realities
While it is impossible to truly predict any form of future reality, that would be unrealistic, the reality is, we will redefine the realities of the human experience. That was a lot of surreal wordplay.
Throughout the ages, we have complained about the world moving too fast. Literature, movies, songs, poems are littered with references to life and our world moving ever faster. Going back centuries.
Yet somehow, over thousands of years and generations, we’ve always managed to adapt. Because humans are very good at adapting. Perhaps consciousness, (whatever that is because we still don’t really know) plays a part in that adaptability?
It is less the pace of change that we should be concerned about and more the way we deal with a multitude of realities in an increasingly global, hyper-connected society. Where mis/disinformation can be generated and flow without friction and has no understanding of the mental borders we call nations.
As the brilliant mind of Yuval Noah Harari has posited, the biggest danger of AI is that it can tell stories and story telling is a critical survival mechanism of humanity. Which in turn affects our realities and sense of time.
We know that we lose our perception of time when we use Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. And VR time places us into different realities. A topic covered well in science-fiction entertainment.
As scary as this may all seem, and it is concerning, we might take heart that we’ve had this issue of figuring out each others realities for hundreds of thousands of years and well, we’ve always figured it out. The upside of AI is that it may in fact help us to manage our realities, to find common ground.
Much will come down to how we organise and cooperate in the sense of sociocultural systems. For while a technology may change us at first, culture ultimately determines the true reality of a technology.
