Page 104 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

104
INTRODUCTION
Progress in science and technology has shaped a new model of society in which technology is a core element that is structuring and redefining our understanding of the labour market and production, social communications and personal relations. Technology is thus a driver of change that affects all fields and extends to all the sectors of twenty-first-century society.
What might initially appear to be a formal issue whose influence is limited to the realm of tools – how things are done, technological artefacts or “gadgets” – is proving to be a major change that is causing not only superficial adjustments but is questioning and rocking the very foun- dations of our societies and proposing new paradigms that affect personal, academic, labour and political aspects of citizens’ collective and individual development.
Its impact has given rise to changes in how individuals and society as a whole live, think and act. The fact that there is no roadmap for these changes is triggering insecurity and
uncertainty, but new opportunities can also be glimpsed.
However, as Antonio Rodríguez de las Heras points out,
In contrast, it is harder to prepare for a phenom- enon that is not going to expand but rather to change the scene to which we are accustomed. This means that we have begun a critical process: the world as we know it is melting (it is the
effect of the fog of zeros and ones in the digital environment: it seeps in through all the gaps in the establishment) and is not even cracking but rather disintegrating and therefore we cannot shore it
up. We are therefore having to shed that which is already irremediably affected and displays dysfunc- tions before there is any sign of the new scene. And in view of this uncertainty it is necessary
to imagine possible scenes: a way of decreasing uncertainty without dissipating it.1
The world of books and reading is not unaf- fected by this change, just as it was not at other
INTRODUCTION
Readers in the digital age