Digital Technologies - Good? Unknown. Intracate? Definitely!

Throughout history, humans have used several mediums to communicate. Speaking has been our primary way of communicating, followed by written text. These forms of passing knowledge and information have always been clear and concise. Very little failed in its delivery, and mistakes could be quickly rectified. In our post-modern society, technology is becoming the main way humans confer information, and this has brought about multiple ethical problems that must be addressed.   Figure 1 , Timeline of Communication tools (Wikipedia, 2014) Figure 1 demonstrates how technology is taking humanity away from physical interactions and moving us towards audio and screen-based communication. From practically the beginnings of human history to around the early 20 th century, humanity has used either basic talking or text to deliver information. Nowadays, we are seeing more innovations towards long-range devices that allow us to send and receive messages, no matter the distance. Sure, t...

The whole purpose of virtual realities is to entertain, from building complex structures in Minecraft to murdering everyone in sight in Grand Theft Auto. These online games deliver enjoyment expertly, but that isn’t all they do. For one thing, we have seen online gaming become a great way to socialise. Remember your mate Dan you met in under 8’s basketball and played with until last year? I do. Little Dan (he’s not so little anymore actually, the lad’s like 6” 5’) and I became great mates because we played the same game. The same story is being told on online virtual gaming. Millions of people are being connected and coming together because they all enjoy taking someone’s limbs off with a double-barrelled shotgun (in a fake world, don’t worry). Online gaming has the mystifying potential to combine global communication with virtual entertainment, enabling strong relationships to flourish. On an educational level, I would like to point you to Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series. Wh...

                    Figure 1 , A Boy and his Blog, (Sfarnas Animation, 2009)  © Our society, being in the middle of the largest and swiftest technological revolution of human history, has seen a great division. Two categories of people have been reborn into the 21 st century. Firstly, the one who knows how to operate the new post-modern technologies. This is one who has the fingers of speed. They know where every letter is on a keyboard instinctively. They discover and collect information not through hours of library searching, but with their personal, electronic, pocket-sized encyclopaedia. This is the native, specifically the “digital native”. Marc Prensky identifies them as “the first generations to grow up with this new technology” (Prensky, 2001). As the agricultural native knows how to grow food from the ground, the digital native instinctively knows how to operate smartphones, tablets, and computers. The second “...