Reed Ch1-3

Digitized Lives: Culture, Power, and Social Change in the internet era by T.V. Reed was an interesting class reading that discusses the directions that digital technology takes in the modern world. In the first few chapters Reed discusses the emergence of a digital culture, what that means, and those digital divides. As he was setting up this information one factoid that he states just blew my mind. “If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest nation in the world. YouTube broadcasts more in a day than all major TV networks have broadcast in their entire history. In the history of the world, counting every language, there have been about a hundred billion printed books; the amount of information contained in that number of volumes is uploaded onto the Web every month.” (p. 3). These statistics just give real perspective to the actual amount of information being created and readily available every single day, to every single person with internet access. This kind of immense information overload is what he touches on in a form of a digital divide. The fact that the amount of people with internet access is so much less than those who do not have internet access (in terms of population percentage) is showing a huge gap in income, education, and literacy. All of this is shown through statistics that Reed lays out in the beginning of the book.

One point that Reed visits in the first chapter is the question of a real-world verse virtual world divide. Reed discussion of the emersion of cyberspace and how that had been introduced in many different forms since then (such as e-commerce). This divide is something that I hadn’t really considered too much before reading this book. I previously just assumed it as a part of this world. Reed addresses this by stating, “This makes cyberspace a somewhat different kind of place, but it is still a place in the world.”  Unless you are an engineer, cyberspace is not something that the average user thinks of as an actual physical space but it is a space in the world. There are everyday average people who could look normal is every way to you, but online in the cyber world they could be an immensely successful blogger with a fairly large cyber presence. In this way I can completely see the digital culture that Reed is trying to describe to his readers.