Can We Control The Digital World?

Technology Has Let Us Reshape Our Lives,
But With This Revolution Come Regrets

Fascinating article in todays WSJ from Jason Frey

This is the final Real Time column, and I’d like to use it to consider what I see as a dominant theme of our digital age, one that’s emerged again and again in this year’s columns. That theme is this: Wherever possible, we are taking control of our digital lives. When we see a new gadget or service that offers us greater control, we adopt it with disorienting speed, consigning old ways of doing things to oblivion and refusing to go back to the way things were. By taking control, we’re becoming better organized, more efficient and better informed about what interests us. We have many more choices, and the kind of power over our time that was the stuff of dreams not so long ago.

But in taking control, we also enter a new world, one in which long-established business models have been rendered useless, and the old social interactions and rhythms of life have been replaced by new ones that aren’t fully formed. That’s an uneasy feeling, as if everything we took for granted turned out to be built on sand. Moreover, as with so many technological advances, the ability to take control is driving pressure to come along or get left behind.

You can see this change at work in the way we consume information and entertainment, how we shop, and increasingly how we communicate.