Because of the intangible aspect of the digital world, there's a lot of uncertainty in how it's perceived, despite this world increasingly becoming a main driver in how people work, socialize, and express themselves.
How do you perceive the digital world? Is it like a dream that you'll one day wake up from and realize that it was all just a figment of your imagination?
I personally don't think so. This dream is as real as it gets, arguably one that's worth putting a lot of focus on if I want to thrive in the future.
That said, my biological self isn't convinced. The digital world isn't part of its nature, and it definitely can't do non-linear thinking, which seems to be a hallmark of the digital world.
I'm thinking of picking up my smart device, logging in to cyberspace, doing a bunch of mental things, surfing emotional minefields, and then logging out again only to have this tangible sensation that I haven't done anything or rather what I've just done is incomplete.
Depending on interpretation, this isn't entirely a bad thing, generally.
A good aspect of it is that much can be done for less effort and in a relatively short amount of time.
Say you can coordinate a global event with a couple of Discord messages and a shared document which would've been a task that would have taken weeks of physical travel and correspondence in the past.
But because of the lack of tangibility, my biological self feels a sense of incompleteness and struggles to assign value to these non-physical experiences.
When Analog Meets Digital
One of the frameworks I like to look at this from is the analog versus digital versions of the same actions.
The former is a product of millions of years of evolution, wired to understand the world through cause and effect and hence physical results. You plant a seed, a tree grows. You build a chair, you can sit on it.
The digital world, however, is a world where your actions might not have a physically manifested outcome.
You can spend hours writing a long, heartfelt post online, and while it might resonate with millions of people, it doesn't leave a physical artifact you can hold.
Of course, I get the part that the impact is still very real, even if it's not physical, and this is where it all comes back to a new kind of literacy we're all learning.
A New Kind of Literacy
We've long understood how to read a book. Now, we're learning a new language called digital existence which could be defined oversimplified as learning the ability to live in the digital world.
Here too, an analogy from traditional literacy might help bridge the gap.
When you learn to read. At first, the words are just symbols, not much can be discerned, this is especially true of characters that are not part of one's native language.
I can pick up on the pronunciation of Chinese words when they're spoken. If it's written, it's like I'm staring at an alien scripture.
Similarly, when I first started interacting online, it didn't feel meaningful or substantial. Fragments of that exist still to this day as some interactions seemed hollow and achievements ephemeral.
But over time, I've learned to "read" the digital world, as in understanding its nuances.
This new literacy is more than just knowing how to use an app or type on a keyboard.
I tend to view it more so as developing a digital intuition, an ability to sense the social and emotional undercurrents of cyberspace in a way that's still a bit hard to put into words.
Kind of like knowing with knowing.
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