Review: “A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation” by Antón Barba-Kay

“Barba-Kay’s central claim is that digital technology is categorically different from prior technologies. It is not just a matter of degree but, rather, a matter of kind.”

Technology is neutral; it is just a matter of how one uses it. We have heard this adage countless times. But it is not true. For one, if we give a child a hammer, we all know what happens: Everything looks like a nail, and we get dings, dents, and holes everywhere. Even a tool as basic as the humble hammer has the power to nudge us in a certain direction—toward hammering. If that is what happens even with simple tools, what about complex digital omni-tools that can do much more than hammering—what do they nudge us toward and how do they form us? Antón Barba-Kay offers penetrating answers to these types of questions and more in A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Transformation, which was released last year with Cambridge University Press. The Deep Springs College professor with a dry wit and a sharp pen takes on the sacred cows of the techno-optimists and challenges the techno-pessimists for missing root causes. He does all of this while uncovering the digital revolution’s effects when it comes to personal habits, community, politics, and more.

Barba-Kay’s central claim is that digital technology is categorically different from prior technologies. It is not just a matter of degree but, rather, a matter of kind. “Our largest problems are all problems in kind—problems intrinsic to the structure and logic of digital technology itself—not in degree,” Barba-Kay notes. This may seem like a strong contention, but I think mounting evidence and our personal and collective experiences confirm this. Digital devices are more than just tools like hammers, books, or telegraphs. They are omnipresent omni-tools of unending use and possibility.

Digital devices predict, change, respond, and connect us to a global network of other devices, people, information, and entertainment, the scale of which is unimaginably massive and beyond anything that could be considered human in scale. Digital technologies have become so woven into the warp and woof of our lives that we barely even notice when we are engaging with them. There has been a blurring of the lines between the digital and the real. And Barba-Kay argues that “this changes everything.”