The enormous power of information technology, especially the instantaneity and efficiency of getting tasks done, paradoxically creates its own dilemmas. When such technology fails, or is incomplete; or is corrupted, compromised, snatched away, or attacked, we are left helpless. This is a new, near-nihilistic level of helplessness. It is paralyzing to the extreme, and frustrating to the core.
Such paralyzing dependence on technology is new. Yes, such dependence has characterized all technologies that become popularly entrenched. But nothing, not even the automobile, has embedded so deeply and pervasively in the lifespaces of the information working class as contemporary IT has. Even electrical outages, such as the Great North American Blackout of 2003, are less paralyzing because atavistic memories of how to subsist without electricity can be summoned up. In fact, all you have to do is hark back to that camping or fishing trip in the wilderness. But with the IT-drenched lifeworld, there is nothing to hark back to. Carrier pigeons and horsedrawn stagecoaches are not pre-IT formats, in ways that a camping trip is a pre-electricity format.
IT transforms and redefines lifeworlds.
This irreversible escalation of vulnerability that IT brings about.... in the retro perspective of looking back from the next millennium, that would perhaps be the hot topic of salon discussions...
Nik Dholakia
