The new digital culture

The new digital culture

In practice this road towards greater unity in human society requires a change in culture, beginning with a profound change in daily working habits. This is turn supposes special training which is not easy but is worth the effort as the advantages are obvious. In the first place there is a leveling of leisure and study time. The stress of change will be reduced. For example, going away or coming back from vacation will not imply such a sharp change in activity for students and teachers. The urgent need to "leave everything ready" before departing, and the mountain of tasks and pending decisions on return will all disappear. Vacations will be less of an abrupt divide, more natural and we would thus achieve greater personal harmony. This aspect will prevail in distance learning, which is never suspended for vacation. We will always find someone on line with us to learn from or to teach. However, the fact of being always connected, always on line, does not imply being tied to a job. Quite the contrary, it creates a sensation of great freedom which can be exercised at any time and place.

We consider that at present "disconnection" does not always mean rest. These new digital study habits will begin to grow in school and will continue to develop throughout life in the form of continuous education. The change will be profound and will have unsuspected consequences for education as a whole, for global society and for each one of us. True rest, absolutely necessary for the physical and spiritual balance of the individual, will be protected when work and study flow freely along digital networks. These rest times and work times will not be governed by a rigid bureaucratic schedule, but will be regulated by our own internal clock.

A basic piece of advice: it is necessary to practice the elimination of paper documents as far as possible. This will take time, as we have accumulated centuries of printed paper culture, mountains of public and private documents. We know that paper is expensive and deteriorates, and that books, newspapers and magazines cannot be kept for a long time. It is necessary to find more ecological, lasting and flexible methods for recording documents for consultation. The answer once again is digitization: the incorruptible bit. This has been perfectly understood by documentalists and librarians, but not by many educators.

Initially, hybrid situations will exist, such as the coexistence of printed and digital texts, as when an architect displays a design on paper that has been generated by computer, and which could be consulted directly on the screen. With time it is possible to acquire the habit of communicating without paper. Even fax paper turns out to be obsolete in the face of the modem/fax that enables messages to be sent and received directly from computers.

Once the network between students and professors has been established, progress is made at a different pace. One immediate benefit is the reduction in accumulated pending tasks. We begin to resolve problems without feeling overwhelmed, because work does not accumulate, it is processes in parts. We are always connected in the digital network, we are always on line, so that we form a permanently open system of communication. With one enormous advantage: digital messages do not interfere with rest or work. The addressee will consult them at the most suitable moment. But the reply can also be immediate, if necessary, when the two parties decide to meet on-line simultaneously. It is hard to transmit this digital dialog without experiencing it.

This book has been written in such a way, and was often worked on day and night. One of us is a night owl (preferring to work at night) while the other is an early bird (preferring the early morning). This electronic dialog was not just a telephone conversation between friends or an exchange between authors who share many ideas. It became a new format of virtual presence between distant communicators whose messages lasted and took on a life of their own. The book took shape gradually as the months went by. It never disappeared into a drawer, it was always present, on line, at our disposal in digital space. We have in total written hundreds of versions in the greatest tranquillity, without hurry. Possibly the result does not sufficiently reflect this persistent and detailed task, steadily knitted together. But by working together in this manner we have experienced the development of a project in "digital time"