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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
convenience
Suppose I would say that I believe that this move into an ambient world, not a lab –
the world, our streets – will fundamentally alter our experience of being human? “I’ve
seen the Matrix too, my friend” – is what most people would say. All technology
fundamentally alters the way in which humans can articulate themselves through and
with it, thus always creating new links and new experiences. So what would make this
move into this digital territory so special? On an economic level cheap data storage
fosters the acquisition of huge amounts of data that were hardly perceived as data in
an analogue environment (try mapping the trajectory of one can of water through a
store with pencil and paper or “seeing” one crate of Heineken disappearing from a
pallet in Hong Kong quietly at your Rotterdam desk without wiring up the harbour
with weight sensors) giving companies insights into all parts of the life cycle of their
products, thus feeding a database that generates likely scenarios for future behaviour.
In a world where meaning and experience has been pushed firmly to the users end –
making most cleaning products spend more on their packaging then the contents – the
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