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This book is about computer-based digital technologies and their substantial effects on contemporary life. Around the world, digital displays can be seen everywhere, from small ones on mobile phones to enormous LED screens in urban plazas. The typical worker in the information age spends her or his day engrossed in digital technology, then goes home to yet another set of digital devices for communication, information-processing, and entertainment. These technologies have given netizens an unparalleled range of tools for communication and connectivity. Anyone in the world with a mobile telephone – presently five billion people of the Earth’s population of eight billion – can be reached with a few keystrokes. Many of these subscribers will have fast access to a full range of net applications as they upgrade to 5G services, and the mobile phone may be one key solution to bridging the digital divide between the information “haves” and “have nots” on the planet.

This is an unprecedented era in the evolution of humanity. During the lifetime of those born after 1940 there has been an astonishing augmentation of human intellect by online access to all of the world’s collective stored information. The barriers to planetary communication presented by the babel of human languages have been diminished by online translation, and their quality will improve in this century. Access to this sea of information is not enough – we as a society must have the intellectual tools to make sense of it all and the individual and societal wisdom to use it wisely. Digital devices have improved our access to knowledge, but cannot make us wise.

In my own lifetime, I have witnessed the power of television to telecast events in real time as they occur anywhere on the planet or from our Moon. I started my career in educational technology and media production just as the first personal computers appeared on desktops in the workplace. We connected them to VCRs to deliver computer-based training programs linked to related video programs. While working on my doctorate in the early 1990s, I recall a friend pulling me into a computer lab to see something new online called the World Wide Web. At the time, we had no clue that a day would come when anyone could create a personal website in less than 30 minutes using templates available at Weebly, Wix, or Google sites. The notion that a website dedicated to building social relationships – Facebook – would eventually have over 2.7 billion worldwide subscribers would have been hilarious at its inception at Harvard in 2004. The concern now is that the US-based technology giants – Facebook, Google, Apple, and Twitter – have too much economic and political power and should be broken up. Data about their subscribers have been “weaponized” by third parties and used in anti-democratic ways. Increasing concerns about protecting personal privacy online and offline have led to new legislation in the European Union and the United States to give net users greater control over their personal data.

This book is about the global use of digital technologies and their effects on society. Some of these effects are beneficial in enhancing human communication and understanding. Others are less benign as they encourage increasingly sedentary lifestyles, the loss of personal privacy, and technological dependence. The stories of how information and communication technologies evolved to those that we use daily is a fascinating one and form a significant part of this book. The contemplation of the future of these technologies as we augment our personal and collective intelligence is a compelling topic that we will examine in these chapters. My hope is that the exploration of these themes will encourage you to think critically about the digital technologies that you use every day and how they might enhance or detract from human life in the future.