Taking Control of the Digital World

This is the final Real Time column, and I'd like to use it to consider what I see as a dominant theme of our digital age, one that's emerged again and again in this year's columns.

That theme is this: Wherever possible, we are taking control of our digital lives. When we see a new gadget or service that offers us greater control, we adopt it with disorienting speed, consigning old ways of doing things to oblivion and refusing to go back to the way things were. By taking control, we're becoming better organized, more efficient and better informed about what interests us. We have many more choices, and the kind of power over our time that was the stuff of dreams not so long ago.

But in taking control, we also enter a new world, one in which long-established business models have been rendered useless, and the old social interactions and rhythms of life have been replaced by new ones that aren't fully formed. That's an uneasy feeling, as if everything we took for granted turned out to be built on sand. Moreover, as with so many technological advances, the ability to take control is driving pressure to come along or get left behind.

You can see this change at work in the way we consume information and entertainment, how we shop, and increasingly how we communicate.

For years we bought albums and the occasional single. (And groused that albums increasingly seemed to be a couple of singles and a bunch of filler.) We built our social lives around network-TV schedules, making sure that we were home for "Seinfeld" or "The X-Files." We got our news from a daily newspaper (we were generally loyal to one, occasionally picking up another if a headline caught our eye) and an evening-news show of our choice.

For more and more people that's now a portrait of a vanished world.

Once the digital-music revolution gave us the ability to buy single songs (or, too often, to steal them), we took control of how we consume music, rejecting albums and upending the music industry. Once the DVR gave us the ability to find TV shows easily and record them without fussing with videocassettes, we started watching when we pleased, stopped caring which network a show belonged to and skipped through the ads that pay for free TV. (And if we missed something, we looked for a streaming clip online the next day.) Once the Web let us find and read news whenever we wanted to, we turned our back on print papers and the evening news, replacing them with a patchwork of stories derived from a dizzying number of sources, some of which didn't exist just a few years ago.

Many of us now listen to music, watch TV, and find news in radically new ways, and we aren't going back -- it increasingly strikes us as absurd to buy a CD to get one song, stay home at 9 on Thursday nights because that's when a show is first broadcast, or get our news from a single source. Do we care that our choices have thrown whole industries into chaos? Not in the least -- after years of doing things media companies' way, it's our turn. They'll do it our way, or get replaced.

It's not just entertainment. The mall, grocery store and bookstore now compete with Web versions of themselves, ones that let us shop in the middle of the night and have things sent posthaste to our door. We expect all these retailers to compete on price and customer service, to deliver quickly, to take returns, and to do whatever it takes to satisfy us.

And it's not just commerce. Once our friends and family knew our phone number and called us on our home phones -- but people who were neither could look us up and do the same. Now we increasingly carry cellphones instead of using landlines, and we don't want our new numbers listed. We don't see the need, because even though we have phones all the time, we're also reachable via text messages and email and social-networking sites -- and in many situations we're coming to prefer those communications methods to the insistent, one-size-fits-some summons of a ringing phone. Sometimes we don't need to communicate directly at all -- we drop by our friends' Web pages, Facebook profiles or MySpace outposts to get the latest, and update ours so they can do the same.

Soon enough we will take the next communications step, establishing a single link for those who want to get in touch with us. That will cement our control over our personal communications, and we'll decide to be findable again. Those we're close with will be able to reach us most anytime, with their communications funneled to wherever we are in whatever form we choose. Those we don't know will be able to send us a message, but we'll decide what to do with it, and what kind of access to grant.

We've taken control every time we've had a chance to, but not without regrets. We worry that our local paper will disappear, that our mom-and-pop businesses won't be able to compete with Web entities, and that withdrawing into online communities will undermine our real-world neighborhoods. In taking control, we wonder if we're also making a smaller world for ourselves, one in which serendipitous encounters are less likely and our opinions reverberate in online echo chambers of our own choosing.

And as has always been true with technological advances, the ability to take control drives the need to do so. Just as voice mail went from a curiosity to a must-have, cellphones and PDAs have made it so we're increasingly expected to be reachable -- on our own terms, perhaps, but reachable. Soon potential employers will find it odd, and perhaps even suspicious, if we don't have a Web page of our own -- and we'll feel compelled to have one, for fear that otherwise the information about us scattered across the Net will give the wrong impression. At least within the boundaries of mainstream tastes, those who sample only the TV governed by real-time schedules and the music available in physical stores will find themselves in an also-ran world of limited choices before too long. Add it all together, and those of us who haven't already opted to take control of our digital-era lives will increasingly feel compelled to do so.

To be sure, most of us will be perfectly happy in this new world and glad to have control of it, just as we've been pleased to find alternatives to solicitors' dinnertime phone calls and holiday-shopping crowds and unlabeled videotapes of uncertain age. We'll have regrets, but for the most part we'll be too busy to get caught up in them. And soon enough even those will be softened and erased. We'll be hurtling along to new wonders, and will struggle to remember that things were ever different.

Thank you to everyone who read and wrote over six years and 248 columns -- it's been a privilege to bounce ideas about technology off you, and I've learned an enormous amount from your questions, thoughts and criticisms. Share your thoughts with me and other Online Journal readers, or email me.