Demarcating Digitality

The cultural shift from the early web to Web 2.0 and how we currently conceptualise digitality is accompanied by another shift; a shift within techno-paranoia itself. Where once our digital fears and anxieties, and the speculative fictions they inspired, were concerned with the authenticity of strangers now they seem to look more towards the authenticity of our neighbours and ourselves.

Whilst I think it would be disingenuous to say that our speculative fiction has totally moved away from the fear of the stranger (or some totally digitalised Other), the anxiety surrounding power within anonymity has increasingly become localised; it used to be the case that the person on the other side of the screen was a detached figure, a sex offender lying about their age perhaps, and always some deviant who could only exist without a real face or real name or any substantial, verifiable authenticity. These stories (both the conventionally fictional and those in the realms of entertainment journalism and sensationalist public service announcements) predicted futures based on that early web context of the late 1990s: total anonymous anarchy, with no space for the casual user and only room for the socially deviant.

The new paradigms of Web 2.0 meant those dystopian dreams of digitality would never manifest, as the development of user-based content production signalled a shift in how communities could form and how our relationship with the digital could be naturalised (Jenkins, 2006). Instead of fearing the detached stranger, our anxieties under digitality are concerned with our digital identities: our own digital selves, alongside the digital selves of our friends, family and neighbours (Negroponte, 1995). We question not only the authenticity of others, but the authenticity of ourselves and even our capability to now detach from ubiquitous, instantaneous communication. The convergence of consumption and production in the notion of "prosumer" (Toffler, 1980) is often at the heart of these post-digital anxieties in contemporary speculative fictions; when we produce our digital selves, we are in turn consumed. Likewise do we consume the digital selves that others have produced. Yet I would also say that the differences between the early web anxieties of late 1990s techno-paranoia and more contemporary works, such as "Black Mirror", may not actually be so significant, in so far that despite the shift from fearing the stranger to fearing ourselves, the cultural imagination around the digital has remained solidly in the spheres of a parochial technological determinism.


Works Cited

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York; London: New York University Press.

Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Toffler, A. (1980). The third wave: The classic study of tomorrow. New York, NY: Bantam.