By now the phrase "information revolution" has begun to whither in its significance.
We hear it so often that it is just taken as fact, and then forgotten.
This should not be so.
This "revolution" is not fading, rather, it is just beginning, and it is the responsibility of my generation to realize its full potential.
As a part of this era of exponential technological advance, I feel that I have a role in defending it against those opposed to change and the enhancing of society through digital means.
The roles of media and technology in this age are intense and important, for they will be responsible for the creation of a new way of thinking.
As it stands right now, the Internet is a prime example of the changing mindset of the new America and the world.
People are interacting not only more efficiently, but at an ethereal level, where to age-old prejudices connected to appearance are removed.
In this way, communication is held between two "essences", without bodies to hinder them, and the strength of the mind is left to cope by itself.
[1] [2] [3] [4]
It is in this way that the minds of a generation will be expanded, making us think at a heightened level.
Brain power is what media and technology are all about.
We are fed with information and images that enable us to think faster, make more connections, and produce more complex thoughts than were possible before.
[5]
We are no longer contained by the boundaries of reality, but instead we are ruled by the limits of our own imaginations, making the fantastic possible.
Science fiction, movie special effects, computer animation, all of this is attractive to us because we see it as possible.
These kinds of images feed our imaginations, giving us ideas and fueling our creative abilities to produce a society that is equally without bounds.
Our culture is being changed from black-and-white to Technicolor, with technology adding the next dimension, that of the mind.
|
|
|
[ 1 ] samira:
How would you say this is effected by people creatingg fictious bodies that line up with their sense of who they might like to be, etc? I think that yuour point is interesting,, but the room for play with one's body and physical identity has always interested me... |
|
[ 2 ] cgroom:
Not be dramatically cynical, but I think this is the problem itself. What do people do when their minds are free of physical limits and they can instantly gratify their every interest? View a lot of porn (which is sloppy and full of contempt) and browse sites which, at best, only present one quick and easy-to-digest idea (c.f. everything on Memepool). I'm starting to think that people's best works and most original ideas come when working within, or in reaction to, tight limits. The tragedy of the information age is that we can see just how banal everyone else's dreams can be. |
|
[ 3 ] laura:
Hear, hear--working within limitations definitely produces the most original and exciting work. And it's damn hard to set limitations for oneself. |
|
[ 4 ] cfanjul:
this is one of the things that has most frustrated me with the net (and also bookstores) - there is so much to consume, where to begin? there is so much material to be synthesized that, if we were capable, we could perhaps make connections and break-throughs and such, but in reality, we are simply overwhelmed. which is one reason that i feel myself moving away from the internet, while younger generations are perhaps learning better to deal with the massive jabberwocky of data at hand. |
|
[ 5 ] samira:
Is that true or do we simply get over stimulated and get to hide behind those images, which protect us from really having to think? |
|
cfanjul:
as per the recreating of body images online, i can't say that i see it much. but it would be an interesting manifestation of expanded imagination or desires - if you could recreate your image, what would it be? and why? and how would you use it to influence others, or to live a different sort of life? the advanced role-playing skills involved point to the posibility of living out an alternate life, down to the details. when you interact with someone and they visualize you (however you may present yourself), that has a certain power and affect that you can play with, whether by removing prejudices or giving you access to other avenues of interaction. this is nothing new, of course, but interesting in its place in a more popular medium. that said, most people you run into online are now more business-like or else recording a life rather than creating one. as for overstimulation, i think that is probably the case - when i wrote this, i was fevered with the idea that ideas could feed more ideas indefinitely, but that was before the explosion of accessible information. now we have lots of resources, which is a double-edged sword, but it still seems that our brains are being trained to deal with more, faster images. this, however, can lead to either more shallow consideration of those images, or occassionally, breakthroughs of connection. look at the movie "pi"... what do the lunatics of our generation look like? |
|
brantley:
I guess something that I'm interested in with the internet is the fragility of this whole "you can be who you want to be" thing. I mean...do people really leave their bodies "behind" -- or are you able to figure out someone's class (if not race and gender) by parsing their language and their use of it? How much of our identity is coded not only into our selves, but into our self-presentation as someone else? |
|
laura:
I'd be willing to argue that self-presentation, with language making up at least three-quarters thereof, is in fact our selves, esp practically, and esp in people who think more than twice a day. |
|
samira:
Brantley, it seems to me that there is no way to leave those aspects of us behind. I cant imagine a world in which I was not female, and can't imagine that I could successfully present myself as male, at least not for an extended period of time. That said, I think that what is interesting about the web, but also what is problematic with CGF '95's idea that it lets us move past those boundries, is partly that we can't, as you point out, but partly that it makes us think that we can. |
|
cfanjul:
indeed it seems that people are trying more to present their *real* selves, by recording their daily lives, or using dating services, or reviewing things that interest them. there is no interest to escape themselves, but rather to express themselves. |
| Add comment |
|
|
|
|
laura:
I put most of my reply up in another posting because it seemed too long for comments (though Scott pointed out that the discussion gets spread out awkwardly that way, and I think he's right). What do you think about these things in '02, Chris? |
|
j_moody:
Yeah, I'd be interested to know how your current viewpoint includes both the distopian as well as the utopian elements of technology, Chris. I think both have to be balanced to get a realistic view of things. I think the human spirit will adapt to whatever technologies we must deal with. Human beings will also often resist new ways of thinking and being b/c they seem to threaten old structures. Some Greeks were antagonistic to the advent of the written language b/c they said it would destroy the oral tradition, ruin the memories of students and that the written transmission lacked many of the most important elements of the oral transmission (emotion and meter and gesture, etc.). I would say that much of their distrust has been borne out, but at the same time an incredible wealth of knowledge and culture is available to us through the written word that may otherwise have been lost. The cultural forms of an orally transmitted culture are pretty much dead, though, and have been for centuries (except in Africa-- kudos to the Africans?). The written form also was conducive to private contemplation and the production of works that owed more to an individual intellect than a group sensibility. New possibilities were opened up by the new technology. If we want to talk about the "essential" part of us, then we could consider Reason and Language themselves to be technologies that only incompletely transmit our essential selves to others-- whatever the medium we use. I don't think we can get away from some intermediary technology-- we are tool using animals-- but the question is HOW do we use it in our best interest and what are the implications and ramifications of that usage. There's always good and bad as the fallout of new technology. Rambling. |
|
cfanjul:
(this is indeed an interesting test of the skein format... perhaps it's not the best for extended discussion, rather than bit-wise commentary.) boy, what do i think now: i don't know, which is why i wanted to ask y'all. i am disappointed by the way that the internet got co-opted by commercialism (as useful as it certainly is), but as a means of communication of ideas, it has done an admirable job - look at how many people have published their own lives, or discuss the ideas of others. but as far as making people live more by mind than by physical world, that no longer seems important. so i ask you: have you ever felt like the internet let you live more as a mind? have you seen an example of that feeling? |
|
cgroom:
These are important questions. I guess to me what's key about the internet is that it's core technology -- instant distributed decentralized data transfer -- IS the revolution in our society. Two hundered years ago, information moved at horse-speed. Fifty years ago, information moved instantly, but only between two parties. Now, one source can advertise itself for however many people are interested, for anonymous information dispersal. The upshot is a new mentality of ubiquitious information, the idea that all worthy ideas shall be archived and accessible. This does not change consciousness, but it does mean that questions can be answered faster -- if you know the right question to ask. It is only half-jokingly that I refer to "consulting the oracle of Google." |
|
cfanjul:
chuck - this indeed addresses and gives better words to one of my ponderings: has the net assisted us in finding a new form of consciousness? the answer seems to be a blaring "no." the original essay was written in a time when the potential for anonymous information dispersal didn't seem very important, at least to me. it was a time when people were feeling out email and chat, and figuring out how to "be" inside of the medium. people figured it out, but it wasn't as mind-bending as it seemed like it might have been. |
|
sprice:
Regarding the abundance of information, I think that one of the most important challenges that the education establishment faces now is learning, adapting, and teaching various methods for dealing with information. It's the 'meta'-level... information organization is going to be coming out of the two-week "study skills" unit and into a full-fledged interdisciplinary field. When an (over)abundance of information is immediately available, a "good education" becomes less a matter of memorizing the periodic table of the elements than of knowing how to find a trustworthy source for that information. At the same time, that easy access to facts may aid complacency more than genius-- if you're not forced by the task of memorizing the periodic table to see patterns, connections, gaps, then how are you to know what new questions to ask? And you can see this quest for new approaches out on the web-- one of the hotspots right now in digital media research is in building flexible, intuitive tools for visualizing information. Check out The Brain, cubiceye, or Dynamic Diagrams.
Regarding "have you lived more as a mind", I think that in some very limited senses, I have. Has it raised my mental life to some sort of primacy in my life? No, and public transit in particular reminds me daily how physical my world is. However, during my junior year at Swat, I started writing in hypertext (using storyspace), and I soon felt more comfortable writing hypertextually than I did linearly. It was important for me to be able to tack a note onto whatever I was writing so that I could look into an implication, or to be able to track down some source that I needed to reconsider. I'd link to websites that were mildly interesting, since there was almost no time or energy cost for doing so, and I'd go back to them later. There is no easy physical analogue for what I was doing. The physical labor of copying down all the citations, tracking down the books or magazines, arranging and rearranging post-its... I wouldn't have done what I did. As I got more accustomed to the medium, I started to find my style, and at that point I felt like the technology underwriting the web let me live more as a mind than I had before. What I had in front of me was more me and my style than I could have achieved before.
Regarding Joel's good point about the different values of different media, there is some very interesting work out there examining the effect that widespread literacy has had on Islam. A speaker came to Swarthmore in fall '00 (as Sharon's excrement was hitting Palestine's fan) and described how before widespread literacy, religious leaders in each community were often among the few literates, and were therefore trusted to relate the teachings of the Qu'ran to their communities. In so doing, they would inevitably adapt the teachings to the current context. As more and more people could read (and write), 'conventional wisdom' froze. What was written down ages ago was still visible, intact without context or reconsideration. The net result was an explosion of fundamentalism, and increasing radical fundamentalism-- since anyone could point to parts of the Qu'ran (and the same is said for Leviticus) that were essentially ancient law books, and say "here's the word!" without regard to context. For all that the web is making more information immediately available, more current, more dynamic, the persistence of data and the ease of archival is going to have some interesting repurcussions. (sheesh, is this the longest skein comment yet?) |
| Add comment |
|
|
