Has the pace of Digital Technology left ethics and morality far behind? The Digital Revolution known as the third Industrial Revolution is the change from mechanical and electronic technology to digital technology.
One should differentiate between Information technology and digital technology. Digital technology has boosted and rocketed information technology it has given it wings. In the information era 1980-2010 there were a mere one thousand devices connected to the internet in 1984; to a billion projected by 2030 as per John Chambers chairman of both CISCO and the Indo-US Business Council, one of the most celebrated CEO’s in the world.
Ravi Shankar Prasad Minister of Communication & Information Technology says “Digital India is projected to create a trillion $ economy in the next five years. My 27-year-old daughter who is a Digital Marketer never misses an opportunity to tell me that these are the best times for mankind and it will only get better. She is amused no ends when she reminds me “Dad I cannot believe that when you and mom where in college you both did not have a phone at home” (which she calls a landline).
I tell her college was the only place we meet, interacted and communicated —on holidays, vacations, end of terms we would never meet or communicate, like me there will be a lot of parents who must have seen the shock and disbelief on the visage of the child when we tell about the infancy of communication in the early 1970’s., This communication was primarily to have library groups; It’s not like we could Google the poet John Donne and we got a hundred hits and a thousand links… I tell her this digital generation is so sweat-less, charmless, readymade and zombie like. Her reply is we do more work in 8 hours than your generation did in a fortnight, and we know in real time that we are on the right track, I remind her of what Harper Lee the author of the classic ‘To kill a Mockingbird’ had to say in a rare interview in 2006 – “Now 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms I shall plod along with my books”. Parents of my generation would be aware that eye to eye and face to face conversation with their wards is getting extinct.
My daughter who otherwise is an expert in digital communications, is 90% of the time in cyberspace and I have to find ingenious methods to get her to the real world, I concur with Harper Lee that books are a core to keep us grounded in Ethics, Morality and Humanity and more face to face dialogues especially with parents and teachers will help this generation not to have minds like empty rooms and help make them a well rounded digital generation.
Does Digital technology divide us in groups of good or bad? Right or wrong?
Our Ethics and Morality should be concentrated on how to avert large amount of monies being stolen by phishing, how to protect reputations from being tarnished in a matter of hours, how Teleporting and augmented reality glasses are such marvelous devices, how Wi-Fi videos can help individuals, families and communities., It’s time to lay the ground rules in ethics and morality now.
