Editorial of August 13, 2026

Are We Becoming Too Dependent on the Digital World?

Many of our readers were impacted last Wednesday, August 5 by a Spectrum service outage that knocked out local Internet and business phone lines and temporarily interrupted the work of many businesses and public service organizations. Here in our offices, for instance, we were without service for most of the business day, unable to receive e-mails until after 5 p.m., unable to upload materials to our website, unable to make or receive phone calls, and unable to surf the web for research purposes.

Although we found other work to pass the time, this was, in a word, debilitating. Debilitating for us, for local businesses, for area municipalities and for Otsego County residents in general. We’re not going to weigh in on Spectrum service overall here. Things happen. But we will note how absolutely frightening the extent of our dependence upon the digital world has become.

Encyclopedia Britannica defines the “digital world” as the “modern environment shaped by cyberspace, digital computers and global electronic networks—a vast, interconnected sphere where daily human communication, commerce, media, and virtual interaction take place.”

The Internet, our smart devices (computers, phones and tablets), cloud storage, and data systems now shape and essentially control our daily lives. This includes how we communicate with each other, how we work and how we learn.

What was most revealing to us here in the AllOtsego offices—and, truthfully, it should not come as a surprise—was how absolutely dependent we have become on this digital world. Throughout the course of the day, staff members found themselves stymied by the inability to access the Internet. Time and time again, muscle memory led us to search the Internet on our phones and on our computers, only to be reminded that we could not Google, we could not call out, we could not get online.

This dovetails nicely with a conversation we had recently with a friend who works here in the office complex at 21 Railroad Avenue. He bemoaned the fact that not only were hard-copy newspapers becoming a thing of the past, but also hard-copy books, research materials and even possibly our libraries, if things continue along this path. “What happens if the Internet eventually fails,” he asked, and we have lost our ability to navigate the analog world?

In his book “The Invisible Computer” (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Copyright 1997) Donald A. Norman writes:

We are analog beings trapped in a digital world, and the worst part is, we did it to ourselves.

We humans are biological animals. We have evolved over millions of years to function well in the environment, to survive. We are analog devices following biological modes of operation. We are compliant, flexible, tolerant. Yet we people have constructed a world of machines that requires us to be rigid, fixed, intolerant. We have devised a technology that requires considerable care and attention, that demands it be treated on its own terms, not on ours. We live in a technology-centered world where the technology is not appropriate for people. No wonder we have such difficulties.

Here we are, wandering about the world, bumping into things, forgetful of details, with a poor sense of time, a poor memory for facts and figures, unable to keep attention on a topic for more than a short duration, reasoning by example rather than by logic, and drawing upon our admittedly deficient memories of prior experience. When viewed this way, we seem rather pitiful. No wonder that we have constructed a set of artificial devices that are very much not in our own image. We have constructed a world of machinery in which accuracy and precision matter. Time matters. Names, dates, facts, and figures matter. Accurate memory matters. Details matter.

All the things we are bad at matter, all the things we are good at are ignored. Bizarre.

Last Wednesday proved that Professor Norman has a valid point. We are, essentially, trapped in a digital world. The interruption in Spectrum service left us feeling disconnected and helpless. It reminded us that perhaps we should not be so eager to forego our hard-copy resources for digitized versions that may, one day, no longer be accessible. It made us appreciate once again the feel of a book in our hands, the texture of the physical card catalog, now a thing of the past, the smell of old tomes and historic papers.

What are we losing in the digitization of, well, basically everything? Something worth pondering as you hold your hard-copy newspaper this week, or read our content instead on AllOtsego.com. And which version will stand the test of time?