Are we becoming sensory terminals?
Jean Baudrillards collection of random thoughts and musings 'Cool Memories is a favourite collection of mine. In Cool Memories IV he talks of the age we live in as one where we have become nothing more than sensory terminals trapped in the ceaseless light of information. Baudrillard said this 15 years ago. But it is as true today and in many ways a defining notion behind how we all communicate and participate in our current world.
This notion suggests that everything we do now seems interrupted, fragmented or part of a larger interruption or distraction, that we are simply trapped in a process of passing on information as opposed to contemplation and amalgamation. Devices record our every emotional impulse or action, we are lost within the machine and we do not ponder it.
Think simply of Facebook, with users posting random videos and comments which express erratic mood changes or thoughts throughout the day. What was once all internal is now external. Think of travel, something active becomes merely secondary to the music we are listening to, the kindle we are reading, the message we are sending or the video we are watching. To a degree this has always occured, but we are more and more wandering souls eyes fixed on the matrix. Reality is a space to move through and not something we see. As we move, we have become still, emotionally lost in the device, inside the medium, contained within the message, clicking away. The positive is that we're all connected, and information reaches us quicker than ever before and we can react fast.
Adam Curtis has refered to this at times in his superb BBC blog located here. Recently, he was interviewed by Mark Blacklock at kulchermulcher on how this very issue of emotional response has shaped our politics and our writing and may in time revolutionise our journalism:
The realism of our time – to use a literary term – is a fragmented emotional one. That’s how most people experience the world, as fragments which they fit together emotionally. The internet encourages that, you flit around that, you experience that in a fragmented way. I notice that story-tellers – and myself when I edit – I find I’m much happier, and my audience are much more happy, with big emotional jumps. They like it and they like filling in the gaps themselves.The sense of fragmentation is fascinating considering I first posted this piece on my blog a number of days ago and already I have added and subtracted sections as my thoughts and perceptions have changed.
Curtis goes on to make some intriguing remarks relating to journalism and its connection to this fragmentation:
New Journalism. I think we’re on the cusp of that. I don’t think it’ll come through television, I think it’ll come through writing, and when it does, people will love it, because they want to be taken out of themselves and then they will buy the product that has it in it and they’ll pay a lot of money for it. So I don’t think that print journalism in the general sense is over. That’s a smokescreen. It‘s because it’s boring and it doesn’t connect.
The internet teaches us that information is ceaseless but life is short and we must pass through it like a laser beam, and so we do, typing away, commenting, clicking ads which generate into infinity telling us who we are, what we should eat and where we should shop. This abundance of data may in the end be our undoing, not the objects which exist in our physical world, but the electric infinity we are drawn into.
I wonder how many of us watch TV while browsing on their netbooks, while tapping on their iphone, or watching a film on their laptop only to interrupt it to find out something momentarilly on Google that the watching of the film may have provoked or that some relation in the mind had provoked for some random reason in those passing moments. One experience is no longer constant, or complete it must function in conjunction with a multitude of other impulses. It almost becomes unbearable to experience one thing at a time. Its true effect on the future of education and how it will influence the changing structure of our brains is yet to be known
We go to real events, to concerts and happenings so overcome by the experience of the real, that as opposed to sitting through this experience and letting it wash over us, we must translate it to some device to deal with the experience. We view the event not through our own eyes, but through an electronic eye transmitting the image to a memory card 'saved for later'.
There is such a mad rush to devour, to gratify uncontrollable urges, urges which beget more and more urges. In the midst of this somewhere may be the loss of a deeper personal knowledge, knowledge of self, and knowledge relating to a defined experience. This was something raised thirty years ago in Jerry Mander's 'Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television', which argued that television would not only impair the critical thinking skills of human beings, but physical and mental health.
If all knowledge is to be held online, in some form of stasis, where do organising groups or individuals turn for leadership, for ideas and expression? We see the ability of Twitter to generate happenings, and events, but at these events who is organising? Does it matter that there seems to be no other clearly articulated message other than change? We cant rely on the machine to produce the result, we cannot rely on ourselves either, if we are nothing more than sensory terminals passing the information on to the next person in the hope that a result will be generated.
Where one could argue that the internet serves a more active role as opposed to television, there are many passive acts occuring within this, and which are often represented by habitual visits daily to the same websites and often a site such as Facebook serves merely as a portal. Although news sources may be diversified in terms the myriad of sites available, or through the blogosphere and other consolidating content sites such as Huffington Post, we still receive the same message that the rolling news channels provide. Even the rolling news channels themselves invite and edit comment from the same public watching simultaneously via both television in their homes or as available streaming online via the internet. Here the two mediums merge and interrelate bringing the communication full circle, we are merely caught between screens.
Opposed to this notion of a loss of personal knowledge, there is certainly room to suggest a sense of a personal journey in a new context, of access to more information and the ability to reach out to more people with inspiring messages - a sense of a new form of autodidacticism. However equally this journey can all to easily give way to the universal nudge to another terminal to answer the question, make the comment or emit the response desired, giving credence to the idea that critical thinking may be lost in the information abyss. We may no longer achieve the state of polymath or autodidact, we are merely the switch between the question and the answer, a sensory terminal.
Whether we're in the throes of a whole new paradigm in how we learn and experience (which will no doubt bring its benefits) is again a common query, but it seems that because there is the option within this system to pass the parcel, no one readily accepts their role as authorial and therefore no one entity really knows the answer, revealing the internet in this respect to embody Barthes' notion of 'death of the author', with knowledge lost in the connections between the nodes.
This is a defining notion for our times and evident even in the current 'occupy' protest movements, which may help point the way or provide solutions to much of this. Yet in some respects even the Occupy movement seems part-time, informed by other distractions seemingly symbolic to the wider public of nothing other than people standing around empty tents with each 'occupier' passing along the 'politics and issues' parcel waiting or hoping for another to act or define, and while this relay repeats the sideshow political games still continue as ever.
Slavoj Zizek in a recent article in the Guardian suggests that this lack of clarity is not necessarily a bad idea, at least something is happening even if we don't quite know what it is. And perhaps definition too soon may even be a weakness for the movement.
Just looking at the recent G20 meetings and the lavish ceremonials and the red carpet photo-ops, which greet our political-celebrities, is enough to make one question whether current world events are really important or as real as we're told by our politicians. Surely if they were, these sideshow scenes would be relegated to the recycle bin, instead of remaining as they are, nothing more than reenactments of prior grand rituals of power and status and seen by many now as farce. But our own developing emotional impulses and fragmentatious actions online both help to sustain and shape these very events ultimately fueling their continuity.
This all appears to be part of the irreversable switch from active to passive which is overtaking everything, and we're all helplessly in love with it and helplessly complicit in the process so that we follow it without thinking beyond it.
This 'saved for later' notion itself the symbol of the event becomes the gratification and not the real event itself (people pouring over the sideshow body language of leaders instead of moving beyond behind it). We have become removed from ourselves as our own voyeurs, so that we are in fact stepping outside of selves, but not looking back upon ourselves and thinking critically.
We rely on something else other than our self to express or record how we feel. Then we watch the video over and over and marvel not at the experience, but at the pleasure of having captured the experience, somehow secretely forgetting that it ever happened to us. Real experiences deleted and replaced with a second hand pleasure savoured in the clinical space in front of the screen.
Peoples lives seem now filled with unfinished sketches.
