Abstract
We live in a fast-changing, complex, and technology-driven world where users are confronted with a host of digital gadgets, and an ever-expanding array of social media apps, and have the ability to generate content. In a fairly short period starting in the early 1990s, the telephone evolved from a traditional landline to a mobile device that has changed the way people communicate and conduct their businesses around the globe; the Internet and the World Wide Web revolutionized communication and access to information and paved the way for social media such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. While these technologies are bringing people closer together, they have also caused divides between countries and across generations. The main goals of Peter B. Seel’s highly readable book, Digital Universe: The Global Telecommunication Revolution, are to make people think more critically about the media saturation and its impact on society.
A highlight of Seel’s book is that he provides the context of the inventions, and background information about scientists, enhancing what could otherwise have been a rather dry book filled with technical information. The author narrates the history of communication technologies by using simple language and by telling the stories of the inventors and scientists behind the inventions. For example, he brings to life the extraordinary work done by Belgian Paul Otlet who created a multimedia classification system in 1904 that was a forerunner to the hypertext links of websites used today. He writes about Douglas Englebart who created the Augmentation Research Center (ARC), and of the excitement felt by audience members when in 1968 he and his team presented the early versions of E-mail, teleconferencing, use of a mouse, and other features of the Internet that have today become commonplace. He personalizes the more recent history and diffusion of digital and online media by including examples from his own experiences. For example, he mentions that he and his siblings inherited a dated edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica and acquired the skill to “identify when we needed to find a more up-to-date source.” He is of the opinion that online users may lack this skill if there are no dates provided with the online information.
The book is well researched and contains details that one may have overlooked. For example, Seel, a professor in the Department of Journalism and Technical Communication at Colorado State University, draws the reader’s attention to the fact that although 1969 is the year mentioned most commonly as the beginning of the Internet, initial E-mails were already being exchanged in 1964 in connection with the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (ARPA)’s efforts to link major research universities via computers primarily meant for computer time-sharing. However, it was ARPANET’s E-mail application that had wide appeal to people wanting to communicate with each other. The author provides a number of tables throughout the book to provide timelines of the evolution of technologies, historical events, and key actors connected with the event. The tables, along with numerous figures and photographs, serve to organize complex information in a coherent manner.
The book has fourteen short chapters organized under five parts that include framing, history, convergence, cyberculture and dystopian views, and the future of the digital universe. The author cites Moore’s Law, which predicts a steady decrease in size and increase in capacity of computer chips and how in practice this law has allowed technologies to become cheaper and diffuse widely. He coins the term “complexification” to explain how simple devices have become “appliances with astonishing capabilities and with equally complex operational learning curves.”
The author takes a critical look at both the pros and cons of living in a technological society both at the individual level as well as societal level. For example, while content of all media may now be easily accessed via the Internet, and more people are connected worldwide than ever before, it is also “a battleground over who controls its structure, operation, and governance.” The book includes a discussion on numerous issues such as concerns over the lack of privacy, blurring of boundary between home and work, distraction and interruption caused by using digital media, blurring of actual and mediated experience, censorship, and global cyberculture. Seel’s advice is for everyone to be a more critical observer of the social use of ICTs, that you will assess the positive and negative consequences of using them, and that you will gain new perspectives in the process that will add richness and depth to your knowledge of human communication and intelligence.
The book covers various forms of technology such as virtual reality, wired and wireless technologies, wearable access devices, and video games. Envisioning an inevitable future where humans and intelligent machines will co-evolve and coexist, the author cautions that we need to weigh the consequences and try to diminish the negative effects. The book is broad in scope and the information is “decomplexified” (to use a variation of the word coined by the author). It will make a good textbook in a digital media history class or a supplemental textbook in mass media and society, or a related class.