All projects: Gel, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Bit Literacy
To fully embrace technology, we must learn to let it go
In Techno Life Skills, Kevin Kelly lists some rules of thumb for mastering "how technology in general works." I especially liked these two:
• Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything until 5 minutes before you need it. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete. Therefore acquire at the last possible moment.• You will be newbie forever. Get good at the beginner mode, learning new programs, asking dumb questions, making stupid mistakes, soliticting help, and helping others with what you learn (the best way to learn yourself).
Kelly calls these skills, collectively, "techno-literacy" - which of course isn't too far from "bit literacy," as described in my 2007 book by the same name. The skillsets are different but complementary: Kelly is talking about how to master the tools we encounter - the sites, apps, software, gadgets, devices, packages, platforms, and so on.
Bit literacy, on the other hand, is talking about the bits themselves - the text, photos, video, audio, and others; in formats that are open, closed, legacy, or new; variously streaming, accumulating, changing, disappearing. We need to understand how bits work, and how to work with bits just as much as we need to learn about tools. A good first step is to acknowledge that bit literacy is different from, and complentary to, tool expertise (or "techno-literacy," as Kelly puts it).
I think ultimately the change we're undergoing as a digitized culture is due to the bits - their power to engage us, and their paradoxical nature (both physically light and psychologically heavy; permanent, perfectly retaining form, yet shockingly ephemeral). The more we interact with bits, the less time we have for our traditional analog experiences.
For years people have read Bit Literacy and indicated that they were mainly engaged by the section on managing email. Which is a fine outcome - I'm happy for people to find anything in the text helpful - but it's still just a fraction of the book's full message. Bit literacy exhorts the reader to let the bits go so as to live live more fully, while in control of - and, whenever we choose, away from - the bits. (You can only do this if you have certain skills - hence the how-to nature of several chapters.)
Now in 2011, there are early indications that the culture is turning the corner to a new awareness about the scope of the issue - a sense that "we like gadgets" isn't the whole story behind this societal transformation. Novelist Jonathan Franzen gave a commencement address last month reprinted in the New York Times as Technology Provides an Alternative to Love. And MIT researcher Sherry Turkle was profiled in an interview summarizing her book Alone Together (see also the companion video). Both Franzen and Turkle suggest that we've allowed digital technology too infiltrate our lives, yet we feel powerless to do anything about it.
Writing such as Kevin Kelly's - and his recent book What Technology Wants - offer helpful guideposts as we continue our embrace of digital technology. Just make sure to learn how to work with bits, too.
