It is quite obvious that technology and social media are now shaping an important part of our lives, even without us noticing it. Technology also make our life more simple, when we think to the number of topics that we can manage with a single smartphone.

That being said, this openness can also make our life much more complex, in terms of sollicitations, that are almost permanent, which I mentionned already in the modern learner, and in terms of environment and tools which are now very diverse.

This permanent flow of informations and opportunities also means that we have to rethink our usage of these technologies in order to find the pace that we really want in our digital lives, and not just be passive customers of these technologies.

That is why since a few months I wanted to write a new post on the impact of digitalisation and finally, while making some research on this topic I found a selection of videos, all published on TED and that for me are a good summary of what are becoming our digital lives and how we can learn to make the best use of technology in our digital age.

A couple of points caught my attention on this topic and I would summarize them as follow:

  • The digital age also become a social age: our experiences are shared and mixed with the one of others which gives us the possibility to build and refine our knowledges. To me this is really a positive effect of our digital lives, we learn socially and we are able to give immediate feedbacks to support the learning of others.
  • Our information is more and more filtered, creating an information bubble: as we are using technologies and providing multiple feedbacks (we like, share, follow) we are customizing our environment and by doing so, we are creating a small bubble, purely artificial, that is limiting our exposure to information, providing only the information that we can most likely “like” based on our past history. That is why it is important to stay curious and to look for new sources of knowledges and not just to look at the first information that is displayed on our preferred social network homepage.
  • Our way of thinking and living is fundamentally changing at the pace of the technological change. Therefore, it is important to constantly upgrade our knowledge like we actually upgrade our apps. A new version means new functionalities and this is actually even impacting the way we design our work. A new trend means a new skill, a new customer segment can require a new job, a new profile and so on.
  • The learning cycle is permanent. This is a direct consequence of the fast change of the technology we use. We have to regularly rethink and relearn to adapt to new trends which makes that the learning cycle is much more short than before, and that the duration of the skill can also be shorter which is why it needs to be upgraded more often.

To learn more on our digital lives, I invite you to look at the following playlist of videos and then to comment this article if you want to.

And stay tuned for our next “focus” article on the digital age, we will probably come back to this topic…with upgraded ideas!

TED Selection Our Digital Lives

TED