THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

BETHESDA, MD — Digital media are transforming how we think, behave, relate, and create. Are we up to the challenge?

"The Digital Era has shifted knowledge and understanding to an interactive, global, anytime, anywhere, multimedia experience with countless sources to explore and test," says communications theorist M. Rex Miller, author of The Millennium Matrix. "This experience is quite different from the intellectually passive experience of watching television or the emotionally distant experience of reading.

"Our minds and bodies will undergo a rewiring to support this different sensory experience," he says.

Miller’s ideas about the future of communications media are highlighted in the May-June 2005 issue of THE FUTURIST magazine, available now.

In "The Digital Dynamic: How Communications Media Shape Our World," Miller shows how media shifts — from print and broadcast to digital — can affect other aspects of human life.

In art, for example, human beings have moved from seeking for the visually accurate to a focus on process, approach, and medium. In the Digital Era, interaction and participation will be essential. "The artist may become more of a facilitator of real-time experiments in altered perspectives stimulated by the content and the observer’s unique responses," says Miller.

Characterized by interconnection, complexity, speed, and technological convergence, the Digital Era will require us to rethink our institutions. In education, for example, it’s likely that self-directed learning will become more the norm using interactive game environments and other technologies.

The May-June 2005 issue of THE FUTURIST featuring Miller’s article "The Digital Dynamic: How Communications Media Shape Our World" is available for $4.95 at bookstores and newsstands and from the World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Ave., Suite 450, Bethesda, MD 20814.

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EDITORS: For more information or to request a review copy, contact the World Future Society at 301/656-8274; fax 301/951-0394.