Digital Age
The Digital Age refers to the period in human history characterized by the widespread use of digital technology, particularly computers and the internet. This era has transformed the way people communicate, access information, and conduct business, leading to significant social, economic, and cultural changes. The Digital Age has also brought about new challenges and opportunities related to privacy, security, and digital literacy.
6 Key excerpts on "Digital Age"
eBook - ePubYoung Children Playing and Learning in a Digital Age
a Cultural and Critical Perspective
- Christine Stephen, Susan Edwards(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Along the way, at various points in this chapter we reflect on the dimensions of play and learning required of children in different cultural and temporal eras. The account we provide of the evolution of the Digital Age in this chapter identifies three significant changes in cultural knowledge and understanding. These are: • Advances in scientific understanding harnessed for the enhancement of communication processes. • Increases in the capacity to gather, store and share information derived from the innovative process of digitisation. • Playing and learning in the Digital Age is informed by a disposition towards exploration, knowledge generation and re-generation. What is the Digital Age? The ‘Digital Age’ represents a way of thinking about a complex new period of time in human history. Broadly speaking, the Digital Age is differentiated from two earlier periods of time. The first period, known as the agricultural age, dawned approximately 10,000 years ago and focuses on the use of farming tools to capitalise food production, such as growing wheat or rice. The second, known as the industrial age, occurred as little as 300 years ago. The industrial age saw the application of machinery to raw materials in the production of new goods, as seen in the new capacity to mass produce textiles or fabricate metals. Culturally speaking, movement from one age to another is characterised by the application of new knowledge to existing systems of activity such that new technologies are developed. As new technologies are created, the ‘purposes and practices’ (Williams, 2004, p. 7) to which they may be put are examined, considered and implemented by people. Alongside technological implementation occurs adjustment in social and cultural systems of activity generating new forms of communication and patterns of work, as seen for instance when factory production rapidly replaced small-scale craft workplaces during the 19th century in England...
- Bettina Jansen, Bettina Jansen(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...Part II The Digital Age and Communities in Flux © The Author(s) 2020 B. Jansen (ed.) Rethinking Community through Transdisciplinary Research https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31073-8_6 Begin Abstract 6. Rethinking Community in Communication and Information Studies: Digital Community and Community ‘to Go’ Mary Chayko 1 (1) Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA Mary Chayko Email: [email protected] End Abstract 6.1 Introduction Members of modern technology-rich societies are constantly engaged in community-building activities. As we build and manage our social connections, relationships, and networks, we must face whether, when, and how we will employ digital technology in those efforts. At the same time, organisations and individuals are building the technological infrastructure within which those practices take place. Social norms and values are constantly shifting and changing, constraining and enabling people’s behaviours, modes of thinking, and knowledge itself, and the material goods they create (i.e. the technology itself). As social norms and practices change, our understandings must keep pace. Many of these changes—indeed, many described in this volume—are exciting. Some, also discussed within these covers, are concerning, even deeply troubling. Often, there is both an upside and a downside to the same phenomenon (the rapid spread of information in social media networks, for example). But there is no doubt that personal and societal changes are occurring more rapidly and disruptively than at any other point in our history. Many are left behind in a time of rapid technological change. More than half the world does not have Internet access, and only one-quarter of the adults in developing nations own a phone that can access the Internet and digital apps (Chayko 2017, 1, 98)...
eBook - ePub- George Ritzer, Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy, George Ritzer, Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...22 Digital Technology, Social Media, and Techno‐Social Life Mary Chayko Introduction In high‐tech modern societies, nearly every aspect of social life is touched by digital technology. Families and friends remain in contact via spirited streams of text messages. Individuals spend countless hours sharing, shopping, playing, and learning online. Organizations develop digital and social media presences and “brands” that are increasingly requisite for surviving and thriving in a digital world. Even those whose access to information and communication technologies (ICT) is limited or who are disinclined to use newer digital technologies are still profoundly affected by living in a world that is computerized, globalized, and interconnected. This chapter looks closely at digital technology and social media and their impacts, and proposes that it is highly useful to think of life in the Digital Age as techno‐social. “Techno‐social” will be hyphenated here to highlight the equivalent, reciprocal importance of the “techno” and the “social” in a world in which the digital and the physical have become completely and irretrievably enmeshed. The “techno” and “social” components of modern life will be probed in some depth this chapter, along with the history and components of a digital/social media participatory culture, features of digital environments, and some key issues and impacts. Finally, the meaning and implications of being “plugged in” to one another vis digital technology and social media will be discussed. Digital technology and social media influence all aspects of modern life: how people work, play, think, learn, create, relate, and even fall in love. In the process, social environments, relationships, communities, networks, societies, and even individual selves are created, established, and maintained. Throughout, the technological and the social components of life inform, shape and define one another...
eBook - ePub- James Lull, James Lull(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...INTRODUCTION Why the Communication Age? James Lull To describe the spectacular nature of what’s happening today as the ‘Information Age’, the ‘Digital Age’, or the ‘Internet Age’ takes most of the life out of this exciting era and puts the analytical emphasis in the wrong place. No doubt we live with much more information now than ever before; lots of that information comes to us in digital form; and the Internet has certainly become an indispensable resource. But for what? Symbolic exchanges facilitated by high technology and the new networks of ‘complex connectivity’ in place today (Tomlinson 1999) are contemporary elaborations of what is really a very basic activity – human communication. Although information technologies have greatly accelerated and altered some of the ways human beings communicate with each other, motivations behind the signifying practices that people create in order to construct their social and cultural worlds remain fundamentally unchanged. Hightechnology jargon unfortunately often detracts from the vital and complex processes that motivate and manifest communication, as it dehumanizes one of life’s most fundamental undertakings. Compounding the problem, the technocratic language of the current period generally privileges the rational side of communicative interaction. We might easily get the impression nowadays that imperfect, real human contact has somehow transmogrified into seamless robotic conversations with databanks located somewhere in cyberspace. The expression ‘Communication Age’ serves as an umbrella term that can be used to broaden, humanize, and make more accurate a description and interpretation of the exciting new era. The Communication Age refers not only to the efficient transmission of digitized bits and bytes from here to there, but also to the significance that communication processes hold for real people as they engage the entire range of material and symbolic resources at their disposal...
eBook - ePubDigital Sociology
Critical Perspectives
- K. Orton-Johnson, N. Prior, K. Orton-Johnson, N. Prior(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...Introduction Kate Orton-Johnson and Nick Prior The increasing pervasiveness of digital technologies in everyday life has fostered much academic debate about social relationships and social structures in what has been termed an ‘Information Age’. Emerging from these debates is an interdisciplinary field of research concerned with the complexities and contradictions involved in the transformations which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are purportedly bringing about across cultural, political and economic practices (Baym, 2010; Bijker & Law, 1997; Jones, 1995a, 1995b, 1997; Wellman & Haythornthwaite 2003). As sociologists we see exciting and important opportunities for the discipline to contribute to a growing and diverse range of empirical and theoretical work that seeks to map these changes. From cyberselves to online communities, from media war to networked inequalities, from culture to social structure, sociology and our sociological imaginations are confronted by new digital landscapes. Internet research (IR) has provided scholars with a wealth of research that has refocused, challenged and recontextualised concepts that have long been a staple of sociological enquiry. In a relatively short but rich history IR has traced hyperbolic discussions of revolutionary and transformative futures and the potentially deleterious social consequences of virtual practices. While some might claim that we can now declare the end of the ‘cyberbole’ (Woolgar, 2002), the aim of this collection is not to recap or evaluate these literatures and debates. Our concern, as sociologists, was to question the position of the discipline in this interdisciplinary landscape. The collection was prompted by our own curiosity about how sociology was dealing with what we see as a new phase in IR. The very pervasiveness and normalisation of contemporary digital technologies means that few spheres of social enquiry are insulated from some form of digital manifestation...
eBook - ePubResearch with Children
Perspectives and Practices
- Pia Christensen, Allison James, Pia Christensen, Allison James(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 Researching children and childhood in the Digital Age Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross Introduction to the Digital Age The rapidity with which digital, networked and online media and information technologies (hereafter, ‘the digital’ or ‘digital media’) have become embedded in children’s lives has been startling, triggering a revival of public hyperbole about media-related opportunities and risks, along with a burgeoning of argumentation and experimentation among social researchers keen to explore the significance of ‘the Digital Age’ for children and childhood (Livingstone, 2009a). In even the 2008 (second) edition of this volume, there was no reference to mobile, smart or personal devices, no social networking sites or online identities; just a mention of online surveys as an addition to the researcher’s toolbox. Until recently, it would seem that analysis of children’s experiences, social relations and lifeworlds implicitly prioritised face-to-face, physically co-located communication as the primary means through which their everyday lives are constituted and, therefore, the primary means through which research with children is to be conducted. For sure, those researching children and childhood recognise that children like to fill their leisure time by watching television, playing computer games or looking things up on the internet. Now that traces of children’s activities are visible on social networking sites, stored in mobile phones or collectable via ‘big data’ (Foucault Welles, 2016), researchers are also recognising that digital media expand the methodological toolbox by adding a new means of communicating with children and a new source of data about their lives...
