Digital Engagement: Personality Is The Context Of The Text

• Main Author: Diane Spencer-Scarr
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Akron Press 2015-12-01
• Series: Proceedings from the Document Academy
• Subjects: digital-technology; tool-use; personality; digital environment; social memory
• Online Access: https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/docam/vol2/iss1/13

This paper examines digital-technology as a tool and an environment with the individuals’ personality at the intersection of the two: Its impact on social memory and the unbound document. With the ubiquitous embedding of digital networked technology in society and the emergence of the unbounded document, humans increasingly obtain information by grasping snippets of decontextualized text sourced through non-human entities from globally dispersed databases that have stripped out context. Then in a Kafkian way humans’ have to <em>build from the middle</em> to make sense of the information snippets. The paper explores how the inherent nature of the individual can be amplified or diminished by the technology and concludes that only through awareness of the digital-engagement process individuals can hope to resist or appropriate technology to their advantage. It highlights that custodians and gatekeepers of the unbounded document carry a far greater burden, as their awareness has to extend to society and the scaffolding of social memory.