Joe Moody’s Web Adventures

Like the endless rows of the newest super-center, a new world of influences, distractions and empowerment have emerged unique to the digital society.

Just as the catcher’s mitt, or the hammer, or sword, are physical enhancements, the computer is a mental enhancement. Old fashioned tools empower physical abilities. The computer, a powerful extension of our mind, enhances and even changes how our minds function.

The difference in the digital mind is that it thinks more abstractly, from more perspectives:

• Computers enable us to interact without physical limits. Our office desk is available anywhere on our wireless laptop, people interact from anywhere on Internet chat rooms or online games.

• Today’s digitized movies are potent examples of how non-existent beings imagined by a storyteller can appear as real as sunlight.

• Before the digital clock was the face clock: pointers moving around the dial of a face clock were a much more physical representation of time. The digital clock is a numeric representation of time with no beginning or end.

• Before the CD was the phonograph record: its needle riding along the mountains of the vinyl disk, compared with a compact disk where sounds (and now images) are stored as electronic bits and played back by a laser beam.

• Before the computer was the typewriter: its set of metal stamps punching ribben into the paper, as compared to Microsoft Word, software made up of code.

• Before the cell phone was the rotary telephone: each digit of someone’s phone number dialed manually, compared with a voice activated Motorola.

We exist in an entirely different rhythm of time and space. Realities can be simulated, distances shrink with Internet connections, time warps in the wireless network. Our own neural networks, which created the digital networks, cannot help but be influenced by our own creations.