Getting lost in our new Digital Nation

So, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that our Digital Nation hasn't yet defined its own boundaries.

For class this week, we watched an episode of the PBS program Frontline called "Digital Nation" that explored the benefits and drawbacks of our ever-connected culture.

The episode included educators, sociologists and business leaders who celebrated cell phones, the Internet and other technologies for bringing the world closer together; and it featured researchers who see technology as tearing us all apart.

What I got most out of it is that we really don't have a clue yet what long-term consequences these developments will have on our world.

Sure, it's easy to see the immediate impacts -- students are multi-tasking more and reading less. But to even venture a guess as to any long-term psychological or societal impacts strikes me as completely premature. Today's technology natives may lose all communication skills and devolve back to the stone age. Or multi-tasking might unlock brain capacities beyond what we've ever imagined. But we won't know either way for many years to come.

Of course then, it'll probably be too late to save us.

p.s. The other tidbit I garnered from this video is how frightening virtual reality can be.

In the end, I don't believe that texting, or the Internet will be the death of our society. But I do believe that the real damage could come through the melding of the real and virtual worlds. I fear that the more people defer to a virtual world, the more they could potentially lose touch with their own.

This point was drilled home for me in the video when they spoke about the video gaming centers set up by the U.S. Army. According to the producers, the Army has closed a number of recruiting centers around Philadelphia in favor of "Army Experience Centers," in which kids 13 and older are invited to come to play video games.

Army officials interviewed for the show say the centers are never going to replicate "the real thing." And yet the video also explores how the military is replacing real fighter planes with unmanned drones operated by "pilots" from thousands of miles away.

My fear is that, due to the distance, operating an unmanned drone stands to become a little more than a virtual experience, which leads me to ask, are these video games little more than training for these kids? It's a frightening concept.