Over the last decade, Digital Identity has
become a more prominent way of defining Americans, as the influx and constant
adaptation of technology continues. The United States of America is the country
that is leading the way in this digital new age, with companies such as
Facebook, Youtube and Google all originating from there. However there is a
worry, especially from ‘Digital immigrants,’ that this reliance on technology
is unhealthy for the future generations of Americans.
You only have to look as far as the amount
of worldwide users there are on these networks: with Facebook attracting 1.23
billion people, iTunes 500 million and Twitter 243 million. Obviously this
includes other nations in its scope, however the USA is the largest contributor
of users to these sites, with more than 40% Americans using Facebook everyday.
As it is a fairly recent phenomenom, social media is a system that attracts
young people, therefore it is clear that the main users of social networking
are younger Americans, or ‘Digital Natives’ (those who have been brought up
with computers as an essential part of their lives), suggesting that the future
of America and American citizens will continue to be broadcast online. When you
consider that Facebook is a company that hasn’t even been active for a decade
(it was launched in 2005), the speed in which it has accelerated into an
essential part of day to day activity suggests that this will continue to
increase over the next few years.
For a country as vast and diverse as the
US, social media does help to establish a more unified identity. Over the past
few weeks of the course, we have studied the tensions between black and white,
male and female, rich poor; however, America’s presence online is not governed
by these identities. John Perry Barlow wrote in his 1996 Declaration of
Cyberspace Freedom that “we cannot obtain order by physical coercion,”
something that I believe to be true, as you are physically hidden on the
Internet and protected behind a screen. It is a great benefactor to the US that
someone in Maine can have an uninterrupted conversation with someone in Hawaii,
when this distance would previously have been a huge inconvenience. The freedom
and equality that is available to Americans online, seems to be the only place
where physical, gender or sexual identity is not important; they can in fact,
simply be one American talking to another.
The worry in this is that a reliance on
technology and the Internet can only go so far before the next generations of
Americans become addicted and overly dependent on it. The future of America
would appear to be driven by technology and there is a worry that the identity
of Americans will be determined by machine over mind. In an article in The Atlantic, observations of American
children concluded that they would rather be indoors staring at a screen,
whether it be a television, a phone, an iPad etc, rather than outdoors
socializing with other children. According to the article 90% of American
parents believe that some good can come from the usage of smart technology from
an early age and by 2010, two-thirds of American children had used a touch
screen device between the ages of 4 to 7.
Whilst there has been an emphasis on
learning on apps and websites, there is a risk that the next generation of
Americans will have grown up without sufficient interaction with other people
their age. Along with the ability to do educational course online and work from
home online, there is a possible prospect of a human being going through life
believing that they do not need to physically interact with other people when
they can get everything they need through a computer. This proposes a worrying
new American identity that has been named “the zombie effect,” where people can
essentially switch off from reality, and through the use of a screen, live
their lives online.
This is one of the more radical ideas of a
Digital identity, but one that is not inconceivable when you consider that
acceleration of modern technology and the dependence that this generation, and
the next, will have on it.
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