Is there anyone in a first-world country who doesn’t know what a download is? The world has become such a connected place digitally, with computers everywhere and the Internet enabled on everything. Digital technology has so thoroughly saturated modern culture that it’s easy to forget just how amazing it is. People today can connect to the Internet, initiate contact with a computer thousands of miles away, initiate a transfer of data, and three minutes later be watching a blockbuster film that cost hundreds of individuals thousands of hours to create…and the viewers can do all this on their cell phones. Who would ever have foreseen something like this?
Even the concept of downloading itself is a stunning one because it so thoroughly circumvents the traditional order of things. In the days of the barter system, one person might bring a goat and another some bottles of milk to market. The two meet face to face and they debate the value of what each has brought. In the end they trade, goat for milk. There’s a direct discussion of the value of tangible goods followed by an exchange so that each can go home with what they need.
It doesn’t work like that anymore, thanks to technology as well as shifting perceptions of how exchange should work. Market exchanges were quickly replaced by shopping malls, which have themselves been exchanged for the Internet. People today turn on a box with a shiny screen which connects to the Internet with invisible wires, exchange digital money which often has no physical analogue and is as much an accepted fiction as anything else, and receive almost immediately the product they sought, which in downloads means a collection of ones and zeroes that ends up producing an animated cartoon or the like. No tangible products, no tangible currency, and no physical interaction of any kind. This is the modern market and the strange power of downloads.