Obsessed with what we can do with our mobile phones and the web, it's easy to lose sight of the big picture, because so much is changing and so fast. We are distracted by it. This book steps back to look at our use of new technology and draws some uncomfortable and challenging conclusions about what society may need to do to get the best, not the worst, out of the digital era. Why are our fundamental notions of space and time changing? Why going mobile is the big difference. How new technology makes us prefer the distant to the close at hand Can we sustain current levels of communication? Will we have to start blocking things out? How are people doing this already? Why time is the biggest issue for most people, and technology is not helping. How can we make media deeper? How our sense of who we are is changing too. Why building trust online is going to be so important, and such a challenge. Why we need to focus on social networks. Why a new sense of discipline is required to prevent us drowning in distraction. Why each of us can use digital to be creative.
Human relationships and the science of social networks
· Is face to face human interaction in decline?
· If adults spend more time interacting with screens what will the next generation regard as normal. What sense of self does it communicate? Does it suggest we are avoiding reality and living in an artificial reality?
· Yet paradoxically, digital connects us together more than ever before. Indeed networks underpin much of the way the universe works.
· However, we are destabilized by some of the uses we put this new technology to. Can existing social norms deal with the explosion of dating,digital, flirting and sex made so easily available or do we need to put new
conventions in place to cope?
· A focus on connectedness leads us to examine a model for thinking about the way communities work - the new Œscience of networks.¹ The latter has profound implications for society, business and marketing in general.
Sensory overload and distraction
· Can we have too much communication? Can we deal with the amount of messages we receive and send out without sacrificing some other activities
such as thought?
· Are distraction media and technologies creating a dysfunctional society a trend that some research suggests started with TV?
· Personal distraction is a considerable downside of being always on. The time is right to engage with and manage the likely distraction effects of digital technologies.
Perceptions of space and time
· New technology is changing our understanding of space and time. With mobile phones, our connectedness travels with us everywhere we go.
· The meaning of the street as a public place has been hugely diminished we are transported by a phone call or a text message to a different place we are somewhere else, yet not.
