School of Life

Unpick the complexities of our digital world and discover how to live well within it. Over the last decade, through digital media, we have crossed a number of significant thresholds: the interconnection of over half of the world’s adult population through mobile telephony and the internet and the devotion of more than half the waking hours of a western generation to mediated experience. Yet little mainstream thought has been given to what these transitions signify for the business of daily living; and what thought there has been too often focuses on grand claims of loss or gain.

This book asks what it means not simply to live within a digital century, but to live well with it and within it. Unlike most other contemporary accounts, it is neither a tale of technology doom nor glory, but a pragmatic guide to what questions we need to ask of the world around us; what it might mean to answer these; and what practical steps might allow us all both to choose and to use the tools at our disposal, and to live within a digital century in as fully human a sense as possible.