Digital subdivide, lack of communication between “wired” and “unwired”

By “digital divide”, we usually mean the opportunity to gain access to the new informative tools non–equally shared out to the population of the planet. It commonly refers to third world peoples who are not able to use new information technologies (such as internet) due to an evident lack of means, but I’ll leave to others such examinations.

What I would chiefly like to focus on, also taking as a starting point the remarkable article by Prof. Pauletto on technology modifying human relationships, is a further subdivision this time between people having the same chance to access the new media, that is between those who use them as a complement to their life and those who still regard the new informative tools as something alien and not functional.

Playing on words, we could coin a new expression: "digital subdivide" meaning item of subdivision between people belonging to the same culture and having the same opportunity to access the new media (Italians, for example).

I took as a starting point the apparent and constantly increasing complexity of daily human relationship between two different categories: those who keep not using the new information tools such as internet or make an irregular use of them, and the so-called “wired”. More precisely, the “wired” is a person who “needs” being connected, who uses internet for quite any purpose: for information retrieval, for banking, for trips, for work, for everything.

Out of personal experience, being the writer a “wired” as well, I happened to verify the existence of strict analogies in personal relationships between me, friends, colleagues and normal people (from now on called “unwired”). The unwired regards the wired as “weird” or better “not normal”, not only for the maniacal desire of being on line even without any particular reason, but for a different way of mentally relating to those simple issues which can be topic of discussion with friends, relatives and one’s own family.

This totally different way of looking at life and approaching common problems produces a substantial and all the time more pronounced incommunicability. It happens to me, it happens to my friends and collaborators. It’s too much to be nothing but a coincidence. This difference between “wired” and “unwired” is generally explained with the far larger amount of information stored and processed by the “wired” on a daily basis, but it is not like that.

Wired mind vs. unwired mind

As a matter of fact, I noticed a surprising analogy between the relation between the processing methods of the wired and the unwired mind and the substantial difference between an Excel sheet and a relational database. Let us venture to resume some basic differences between the two mental processing modes:

• Amount of information stored on a daily basis
  • Unwired: hundreds
  • Wired: thousands
• Validity time of stored information
  • Unwired: 2/3 days
  • Wired: 10/20 minutes
• Processing of non significant information
  • Unwired: deleted.
  • Wired: archived.

Thus, to the “unwired”, the “wired” person is a weirdo because he/she is constantly busy at retrieving and storing information apparently not useful, nor relevant. Information may come out of a chat, a webcam, an online paper, a professional site. This is of no importance. His/her mental attitude’s main features does not consists in distinguishing reliable information from unreliable ones, discarding the latter, but in cataloguing pieces of information without apparent determination and with growing greed. Well, it actually looks a little odd, except for the fact that it is just with this dynamic that a relational database builds a Business Intelligence system.

Data value

To a common person, the information value is an intrinsic part of the information itself. To a “wired”, it is not like that. The value of information is given by its possible connections with other ones previously stored or still to be stored. This might explain the reason why the Wired has a nearly maniacal desire to be connected and to absorb pieces of information. An apparently trivial and useless piece of information stored today, might be the basic junction between hundreds of other pieces previously stored and from these connections between reliable, less reliable or clearly inaccurate pieces of information an unquestionable truth might come.

Importance of data

This also explains why the “wired” does not discard anything beforehand, not even petty or irrelevant pieces of information; simply because a single, insignificant piece might be crucial if interpreted according to time and correlations. The “wired” does not even judge. A piece of information is only a piece of information. It is not indecent, nor correct, nor improper, nor immoral, etc.. in itself. It is a small piece waiting to be related. This mechanism also exists in informatics and is called data-mining, an analysis mechanism operated on relational database by those Business Intelligence systems which support firms in decision marketing and company shared knowledge.

Digital subdivide

Therefore, the entity of the individual impact of information technology is as important as digital divide. Even if it does not properly separate the planet population, it is starting to divide people within the same culture, due to a substantial difference in the dynamics the mind uses to process information, a difference comparable to the one between an Excel spreadsheet an a relational database and that unavoidably comes out during a normal family conversation or a quiet friendly chat.