Nothing comes from nothing. How we became the “people of the screen”

Ela Kozera | May 14, 2020

As a college student, I visited the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany, one of the oldest museums of printing in the world. It is named after Johannes Gutenberg who, in 1450, by inventing printing of movable metal type instilled the culture of the written text. Printing became the change agent leading to the discovery of new spheres of knowledge and to the progress of human achievements. At that time, and many centuries to come, “the book” formulated perfection. The prosperity and liberty of numerous countries in Europe and America were shaped by the culture of reading and writing from “the book.” The change came with the digital revolution in the 20th century when the printed word turned into digital displayed on screens. The digital word became significant and widespread as a direct result of the invention of the modern computer. The entire humankind moved from the “people of the book” to the “people of the screen,” as defined by Kevin Kelly in his book “The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future.

The screen culture has enabled billions of ordinary people to promote and enjoy the results of creative work. It has grown to be “a world of constant flux” of fast, ever-changing, endless, open-ended and half-baked ideas. In this new era, a fast-moving code (like an updated version of a computer code) becomes more important than law printed in text, shaping people’s behavior and thinking – both online and offline. The “people of the book,” according to Kevin Kelly, resonate more with solutions resulting from law, while the “people of the screen” see technology as the answer to all problems. Probably, majority of us are still stuck in the middle clashed between physical and digital books while looking for the right solutions. This tension, erupting from both cultures, is “a new norm.”

The digital world has brought new threats. In their top strategic predictions for 2018, Gartner researchers announced that, by 2022, most people in mature economies will consume more false than true information. With that, trust in information will depend more on whom we decide to listen to rather than on the quality and validity of the data source. According to Gartner, people like false news because they prefer information that conforms to their biases and belief preferences. As a consequence, companies face not just a dilemma of repercussion coming out of consumed fake news affecting the prosperity of their businesses but also a challenge of developing accurate real-time detection algorithms. The prevalence of fake news has led to emerging concerns about the vulnerability of companies, democratic societies and individuals to disinformation, in addition to the public’s limited ability to detect and contain it.

As reported by Kevin Kelly, people are writing and reading far more than the generation of our grandparents because of this “screening” revolution. And I am interested to see where this revolution will take us, and what will happen to the old way of reading for posterity to come. Nevertheless, I belong to the generation drifting between both worlds, physical and digital, feeling the inner tension arising from their intertwinement. I cherish the textual, tangible and fixed foundation of our modern society rooted in the rule of law, humanities, arts and science, but  I am also curious about the future of this universal and endless digital library of interlinked ebooks, where all knowledge could be housed in one place, as a great digital democratic library, connecting past and present.

Nothing comes from nothing

Latin philosophical expression “Ex nihilo nihil fit” – nothing comes from nothing – applies aptly to new technologies that are just about extensions, variations, or combinations of existing ones, with some twists to count as different. Today’s accelerated pace of technological and scientific advancements keeps making computers, software, phones, watches, robots, TVs and machines faster, smarter, cheaper, and better. And we can augment our life and work with screens, enabling us to save time, money and energy, so we make humanity more efficient than we ever imagined we could be. “Screening” is poised to affect everything, starting with arts and education and progressing to other areas of our personal and professional life. We are moving toward screen ubiquity where we engage our whole bodies and screens detect how we feel and what we desire. Both, physical and digital worlds, provoke different emotions and reactions. The physical nurtures reflective-thinking and persuasion while the latter real-time-thinking and action. This ability to generate, process and apply knowledge so much faster is empowering us to constantly train our nervous system and bring the most out of humans. What some people might not realize yet is that today everything can have eyes and ears thanks to the cameras we can install on everything. If we give the five senses to machines, they will interact with humans in the same way we interact with each other.

In 1922, Albert Einstein wrote a theory of happiness claiming that: “A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the constant pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.” Kevin Kelly is right describing “screening” as one of 12 technological forces that shape and change our future. We have evolved from the “people of the book” to the “people of the screen.” Every new application of cutting-edge technology brings plenty of gratifications and a handful of drawbacks and challenges. Despite the abundance of ever-present powerful screens that show us not only the outside world and our inner world but also make our screen experience better in bringing us closer to one another, at the end of the day, we thrive mostly in person-to-person interaction and as an integral part of physical community. To some, this new “screening” force is mentally and physically overwhelming, terrifying, isolating and lonely where screens record, display, and annotate the database of our existence, become part of our identity, and know us better than we know ourselves. Without its critical evaluation, we might lose the traits that can be attributed only to humans: creativity, imagination, passion, thoughtfulness, and happiness.

Hence, one question comes to my mind: Why are we heading toward the world dominated by screens that are “the first place we will look for answers, for friends, for news, for meaning, for our sense of who we are and who we can be?” Our goal is not to simply take advantage of the technological progress and live this new reality without careful consideration of our well-being and happiness. Our ultimate goal is to leverage both worlds while exploring a whole universe of new opportunities that steadily expand us, humans, as the thriving existential wonders.