The Beginnings of a Digital Ecology

Voices in the modern ecology movement have called for us to reconnect in deep and meaningful ways with our environments. One articulate proponent of such reform has been Michael Pollan, a journalist that wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma and An Eater's Manifesto. His particular efforts have been to help us re-discover precisely what it is we are all eating on a regular basis, how it was found, cooked, manufactured,synthesized, shipped, etc. Bill McKibben, another prominent voice in the modern ecology movement, calls for deep economies conditioned by an intimate attunement to one's neighborhood and surroundings on a local level in contrast to broad economies that expand ever outwards but never deeper.

It strikes me that in this high tech age, where so many of us spend countless hours each day working on our computers we need a kind of digital ecology movement. How many of us if pressed could explain in any significant detail how our computers function, what they are made of, how software works with hardware, how all of the hardware fits together, etc? Yet, we are remarkably dependent on these machines that we do not know; we use them to store our photos, our documents, our music, to communicate with clients, customers, friends, and family, to create blogs and magazine layouts and films. Computers represent a significant investment of ourselves, they are the means by which we often think, remember, and communicate. And yet, while we reap all of the benefits of these devices, we are out of touch with precisely what makes it all possible. Is this irresponsible? Do we set ourselves up for disaster by trusting something so much that we do not understand in any significant degree? To be sure, we often invest ourselves in and trust other people with aspects of ourselves, but even there when we may not know the other person completely we at least share with them a common humanity, whereby we imagine that they have a similar kind of interior thought life to our own, that is, we do not imagine that we are merely interacting with zombies. And yet, we do not have this connection to computers, they have aura of the mysterious about them, shrouded and cloaked in an opaque container.

This is not an invitation to get rid of our computers, but rather to connect with them on a deeper level. That  is, to attempt to understand how they function, why they function that way, what the limits are on what they can do because of their particular configurations, and accordingly how software and hardware ultimately interacts with us, the users.