The Digital Era: Challenges for the Modern Mind*

The digital media are the new interface between mind and world. They enable us to gain instant access to an infinitely expandable collective memory system. This is an indispensable breakthrough, but has the potential to seriously violate the ancient co-evolutionary pact between brain and culture which has kept the rate of cultural and technological change within tolerable limits. Traditional cultures, with all their flaws, stayed well within the adaptive capacities of the individual brain. However, the recent explosion of digital culture has placed all forms of traditional culture under serious challenge. The principal challenge is a cognitive one: the economic system is increasingly tethered to a machine-driven agenda that either ignores or downgrades the most basic needs of the human mind. The result is a governance system that is out of control, in which success depends upon fitting the individual mind to a largely machine-driven agenda, rather than vice versa. Three especially serious concerns stand out: (1) how to maintain the autonomy of the individual mind in the context of massive and sophisticated external programming; (2) how to construct networks of trust in an environment of anonymity and manipulation; and (3) how to place the most basic needs of the human mind at the top of our list of governance priorities. The digital media are the new interface between mind and world. They cannot be avoided because they have become essential for survival. They enable us to gain instant access to an infinitely expandable collective memory system. Every corner of the world has been reached by this system, through cell phone networks and the Internet. This is an indispensable breakthrough, but it is also disturbing and disorienting. It represents a massive change in human interconnectivity that comes with intellectual and emotional baggage. All forms of traditional culture are under challenge. It is fair to say that our conception of human nature itself is also under challenge.1 This is a revolution, perhaps one of the greatest in human history, and we are in the middle of it. But it is not so much a political or economic revolution as it is a cognitive revolution. The new media are aimed at the mind. They are interconnected with the sense organs. They * Based on a keynote lecture to the Wallenberg Foundation Symposium on Technologies for Learning in Helsinki, Finland in August 2013