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Nathan Felde has done a lot of thinking about the impact of technology on communications, and he sees what he calls a “storm front on the horizon,” the identification and expression of the individual. A designer of visual communications systems, Felde describes this issue as a conflict between the need for “surveillance for security” and the need to “control or evade those who would control us.” We want to express and thus identify ourselves, yet we long for freedom of action, choice, and thought--freedom from invasion of our individual beings. Within this conflict lies a whole host of questions brought into sharp relief by the “digitalization” of society.
The crux of the matter, says Felde, is that to a greater and greater extent, humans are finding themselves at the mercy of the decisions of other humans. “You can measure the height of any high technology by the magnitude of the consequences of its failure. But the consequence of error is not new: What is new is the scale of irreversible collapse. A single character misplaced in a text of a million words can destroy a global network; a single flaw in genetic makeup can doom an individual body. One electron too many and a nucleus shatters, destroying Hiroshima or Chernobyl. This specter of irreversible error at inconceivable scale has turned us against ourselves and the traits that distinguish us from animals--our ability to forgive mistakes and our ability to redeem ourselves, which are made possible by the capacity to respect differences.”
By making it possible for humans across the earth to be linked in a digital world, technology has opened a Pandora’s box of possibilities, says Felde. “A burgeoning, if not pandemic, explosion of individual liberty accompanied by staggering population growth indicates a rapid and rabid escalation of need for the articulation of difference.” The more we become numbers and “target audiences,” the greater is our need to differentiate ourselves.
Frightening? What curative can we find for this scenario? Felde’s hope is that we will learn to have “a vital interest not only in understanding how each individual can find expression of self, but also in how each of those selves will be expressed by efforts to understand, appreciate, communicate with and, yes, exploit others…. It would be better to search the frontier of visual communication for a kaleidoscope with which to identify, express, and protect the individual in one another.”
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