DISCOVERING DIGITAL HUMANITY

A blueprint for adapting to the new digital age.

Early in this book, technology consultant and academic Haymes notes that the digital revolution in the 21st century offers people a chance “to circumvent the imposed linearity of the industrial world, pause, reflect, and play with the worlds we create for ourselves.” The bulk of his treatise concentrates on how one may cope with the seismic shift from an industrial age to a digital one: “The Industrial Age provided few opportunities for the individual to become master of his or her own environment,” Haymes writes. “The Digital Age does,” he asserts, but only if one assumes more personal agency and discards old notions of being cogs in a vast machine. Throughout this work, Haymes takes readers through how one may use technology in thoughtful, practical ways to change their realities, using illustrations and flowcharts at every stage to clarify his points. He particularly stresses that “creativity and innovation occur when technologies fade into the background.” Tech that’s easy to use, he repeatedly argues, will allow people to rethink things that they now take for granted, such as time, physical space, and organizational structures. His thoughts on these issues are consistently passionate and intriguing. Too often, though, they veer into airy phrasing, as when he notes that “Space (and its associated technology) cannot be separated from Time,” but Haymes always manages to bring things back to concrete reality: “Good design can optimize our Time. Bad design wastes it,” he continues. Overall, readers interested in how tech is changing society—and all readers should be—will find a number of thought-provoking ideas in these pages.

A vigorous, if occasionally overly philosophical, treatise on the current era of tech.