What's this?
The following note is a reflection on Digital Infrastructure, written as part of my classroom discussion in the UC Berkeley course The Hidden Foundations of the Internet
The way I understand digital infrastructure can be summarized in two words connection, and augmentation. The idea of connection alludes to softwares such as instant messaging and social media platforms, but I also use it more broadly to refer to the connection of ideas. Connections in the form of hyperlinks come together to form complex networks of thoughts and ideas, and manifest in the extreme as knowledge banks like Wikipedia. Augmentation, on the other hand, refers to the benefits (or, consequences) of everyone and everything being connected.
I think of the benefits I enjoy as a result of this connection: being able to connect with friends and family, regardless of where we are; being able to access (much of) humanity’s collective knowledge with a simple query; and swathes of other tooling that make my life easier. But I - and many others - can’t ignore the consequences of this hyperconnection. The data highways we have built enable the rapid spread of information, which can be used to send emergency alerts, potentially saving lives. But these same highways can also be used to spread misinformation, and they can be utilized as a channel for increasingly-pervasive surveillance systems to operate on.
This connection and augmentation that digital infrastructure provides us, is — I believe — a net-positive. However, it is important that we consider and work to become more aware of how it can impact our emotional well-being. Being tapped in to these information highways can be very beneficial, but we should be conscious about what sort of information we are consuming, and we must fight to make these information highways more sustainable.