Text messages, emails, check-ins and status updates… we’re living in the era of constant connection, and when the battery dies it can feel as if life comes to a halt.
Technology has permeated every aspect of our lives, and the stats are staggering: the US now has more cell phones than citizens, globally people spend a collective 3 billion hours a week playing online games, and research shows that Canadians spend more time online than any people of the world.
But most of us don’t need to see numbers like this to know how much life has changed — and how quickly it is changing. We see it all around us. Our mobile devices have gone from being tools to appendages, and in the process we’re becoming makeshift cyborgs. We have the privilege of access to information – and lots of it – but like a kid in a candy shop that bounty can become overwhelming, making it hard to concentrate amidst the constant din of data.
Technology is advancing at rapid pace, and along with it so is the pace of our lives. We’re living in the upgrade era, the age of more, bigger, better, faster, and according to the law of exponential growth, the next 20 years are set to bring about a wave of innovation that forever changes what it means to be human.
Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist author of “The Singularity is Near” explains, “We are the species that invented tools, and those tools expand our reach… evolution is not just biology. It started with biological evolution and now we have technological evolution.”
What impact will this technological evolution have on our lives, our relationships, our communities? Ryerson University, the Digital Media Zone, and the RTA School of Media have joined forces to find out with Rdigitalife, a new interview series that examines the intersection of technological innovation and the human experience. Rdigitalife takes a deeper look at the myths and realities of life in the digital age, exploring the ethics, possibilities, and repercussions of our increasingly connected lives.