Canada and the digital world

I just found out that I am in juxtaposition to the Digital World. They call me a Digital Immigrant, born before the existence of digital technology, and one who has adopted it to some degree in his later years. Fortunately, not all Digital Immigrants are technologically inept. I can get around on the WEB, but I couldn’t say that I surf very well.

The terminology came from Marc Prensky who coined the term Digital Native in his work “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” published in 2001. Wikipedia said that he drew the term from an analogy to “a country's natives, for whom the local religion, language, and folkways are natural and indigenous, compared with immigrants to a country who often are expected to adapt and begin to adopt the region's customs.”

There is no doubt about it. We are living in a digital world, where technology reigns and dominates almost every aspect of human life and purpose. As Casey Stengel said, “The world ain’t what it used to be!” Sociologists are calling what the entire world is facing a socioquake, as technology is engulfing our culture with the force of a tsunami. The entire world has shrunk in size, and our neighbour, through the Internet, has entered our homes from every corner of the globe.

It is changing us in ways that are not easily recognized and measured: the way we parent and educate, the way we see ourselves, what we do and why we do it, what we believe and how we do life and business. Even our personal and national sense of identity and values has been challenged from faraway places.

We have come a long way, baby! David Bodanis, in his book about the history of electricity, “The Electric Universe,” reveals the depth and speed of this digital evolution. From simple digital signals of + or -, we moved from the telegraph to the telephone to the television to the global vision of Internet via micro-chips created by 287 million transistors. Wow!

In 1997 Francis Caincross predicted that information and communications technologies would mean the “death of distance.” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argued in 2005 that a confluence of forces, including information technology, had made the world “flat.” In his book, “The World is Flat,” he asks, “With this flattening of the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in place, has the world gotten too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?” We all feel the pressure.

Danielle Goldfarb, a researcher on the impact of the digital world on nations and economies, said that “common wisdom holds that mobile phones, the Internet, and cloud computing (where software and data are accessed over the Internet) make for a borderless world.” The Digital World is here to stay.

Where is Canada in the scope of things? The Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU’s) digital economy rankings placed Canada 11th out of 70 countries in 2010. That ranking reflects both “the quality of our technology infrastructure and the ability of consumers, businesses, and governments to use that infrastructure to their benefit.” In terms of digital skills and literacy, the EIU report gave Canada only a mediocre ranking.

According to the Wolfe and Bramwell study, Canada was one of the first countries to develop an information economy strategy in the 1990s. However, most countries now have digital economy strategies, and Canada has “failed to update this strategy in response to dramatic technological and market changes.” Establishing a digital strategy was a focus of the Conservative government prior to the 2011 election. Here’s hoping that it remains so.

We are going to have to get used to a new digital language if we are going to move from Digital Immigrants to Digital Natives. Words like "cyber-citizenship", "cyber-ethics", “cyber-identity,” and "netiquette" (referring to responsible cyber-social behaviour) are going to be part of our everyday life, whether we like it or not.

Canada is playing catch-up with the rest of the world. We may not like the changes, but as Winston Churchill stated, “There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.” I am convinced that if Canada is going to succeed in the global theatre, our citizenry, our business and our government, to quote President Barak Obama, will need to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build” the rest of the world.
 

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.