Garrick Jones - Digital Humans: Thriving in an Online World

Paul Ashcroft

Garrick Jones

This edition first published 2022.
Copyright 2022 by Paul Ashcroft and Garrick Jones. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available:

ISBN 9781119879725 (hardback)
ISBN 9781119879732 (ePub)
ISBN 9781119879749 (ePDF)

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For Zsanett, Benjamin, Leanne, Georgia, Leila, and Emma

We would like to thank Annie Knight, Corissa Hollenbeck, Deborah Schindlar, and the team at Wiley who have been so great to work with.

We would like to thank the entire Ludic team without whom we would not be able to row our boats into such interesting ports and learn so much from our adventures together.

We also thank all our friends and clients who have worked, laughed, and cried together with us over the years, as we have brought new things to life, in particular Chris Meyer, Ella Bennett, Simon Brown, Marce Cancho Rosado, Sergio Martinez-Cava Camacho, and Juan Luis Moreno Bau.

Paul especially thanks Zsanett, Benjamin, and Leanne for their love and invaluable support during the weeks and months of being immersed with him in the wonderful world of writing.

Garrick would also like to thank Zsanett for her patience and understanding, along with Michael Uys, Michael Craig-Martin, and Francesco Manacorda for the inspiring conversations and their support.

This book is about the impact of digital on us as individuals and how we organize together to get things done. It is also about what we have learned, in terms of how to make the most of all that digital has to offer whilst avoiding its pitfalls.

The book consists of our understanding of the context of digital humans what is happening and how we understand it. We identify 23 trends that we believe are important to pay attention to. We have researched what primary research is already starting to tell us about what we have learned through the global pandemic. We look at 12 fundamentally new ways that we believe are impacting digital humans and their organizations.

The original version of this book's research was printed before the huge global experience of the pandemic. We have sought to understand the shifts that took place for organizational survival. The conditions of economies grinding to a halt and people being kept at home meant that the only way economies could survive was by adopting digital work. We have sought to update our research with what we have learned through this period and what we feel will be lasting in its impact.

The book is not intended to be an academic thesis or a technical manual. Instead, it is a document of what we have learned, our experiences, and the important principles we have synthesized through working in this way.

We have tried to avoid jargon and to write a book that everyone might find interesting and accessible. At the end of the book, we have included our terms of art. This provides our working definitions for the various technical terms that we use within the text.

It is, above all, a contribution to the conversation about our joint future, in the hope that we as humans will use the opportunities digital provides to create a future world in which we all want to live together.

New technology has always propelled humans forward. Often, we are afraid of it. Take the invention of the steam train. When the Stockton to Darlington Railway, the first public steam railway, opened in 1825, people feared the worst: the human body wasn't designed to travel at the astonishing speed of 30 miles per hour and something dreadful would happen if it did (Britannica 2019). With the invention of the telephone, preachers in Sweden said the phone was an instrument of the devil (Ehrenkrona n.d.), causing phone lines to be stolen or sabotaged; others feared that telephone lines were channels through which evil spirits would enter our homes.

In his classic 1960s book, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan accurately predicted the rise of mass media and the global village. He described how The essence of automation technology is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist and superficial in its patterning of human relationships (McLuhan : 1).