I get by with my level of skills in the everyday digital demands of society today. Barely, I must add. If I was pushed five years ahead, I would fall behind with the pace of development today. I’m probably not the first generation to feel that way. When I look back to my parents’ generation and my mother, she probably felt alienated when she was much younger than I am now. She was born in the early 20’s when newspapers and radio were the medium for news. When she was 20, radio was banned and there was strict censorship in the newspapers. Until she was 24, only oral accounts could report the situation in Europe and beyond. She was 38 when the first black and white television broadcasts started, and 50 when the broadcasts came in colour. Video players came on the market when she was 56, but did not become commercially available to her until moviebox came on the market when she was 61. Moviebox was a player you could rent with the movie and connect to your own TV at home. The first CD was released when she was 60, and it was Billy Joel’s 52nd Street that had the honour of being first out on the new medium. Mother kept up with developments, but lagged behind in a deeper understanding of all the new technology. The same is about to happen to me now.
Advances in digitalization are necessary and inevitable. There is an app for everything, and almost no matter what kind of issues I address, the answer is “you just download the app…”.
Cryptocurrency is obviously something everyone should have these days, but I do not understand what it is, and I do not understand how it is created and used. I know that it is extracted by “mining” and that it requires electricity in the magnitude of a small country. And that it fluctuates more than supply and demand due to prices and availability of electricity and mining capacity. Now it has also become a market for digital art. That is, art you can buy, but which can only be found in a digital file. Anyone who wants to see the art can go online to see it, but only the buyer owns it. One such work of art was sold for $69 million by Christie´s last year. The bidding round started at $100. Now forgeries of digital art also have appeared… I would still choose a Rembrandt or Vermeer if I were to buy art for 70 million dollars. Original paintings of the latter cost a fraction, so I could buy several.
My scepticism towards cryptocurrency and digital art probably stems from a lack of understanding, and that I’m not quite up to the mark.
But it does not have to be Blockchain technology before I fall short. My PC “ran into a problem” the other day and had to be restarted. It did not take long before it “ran into problems” again. And so, it continued. It was reboot after reboot with and without “Bitlocker recovery keys”. But it seems to be a perpetual loop and I had no idea what I could do to get it back on track without handing it over to professionals. But my son obviously had a clue about this. In any case, he makes it do other things than I could make it do, even if we have not quite stabilised the error.
And it’s not just the PC where I struggle a bit with the interface. I also have challenges with all the different streaming services, the mobile phone and all the other digital gadgets we surround ourselves with when they do not behave as we have agreed.
The alienation from the digital is not an obstacle to what I can accomplish on a daily basis – if all the systems work! I notice that months away from regular working life also have created a freedom to think long thoughts without format and without the urge to put everything into a spreadsheet, which is also an old-fashioned tool now.
I probably should just admit that I am a digital immigrant and that my children are indigenous when it comes to understanding today’s technology. It has probably been that way since the dawn of time, with constant new inventions of tools and techniques.
At some point, there will be a new type of technology that my children have to immigrate into, and where their children are indigenous. What that will be, I do not even have the imagination to envisage.
Billy Bronco is telling you 