Allspace in a Notshall

I came across an article in The Washington Post this evening regarding technology, its role in our lives and what it’s doing to us and where it’s leading us.  It’s very short but brings up some valid observations.

Technology has drawn us into our interconnected webs, in the office, on the street, on the park bench, to the point that we exist virtually everywhere except in the physical world. Robert Harrison, a professor of Italian literature at Stanford University, laments that when students pass through the school’s visually stimulating campus, iPhones, BlackBerrys and all the evolving devices and apps draw them into their blinkered personal realms. “Most of the groves, courtyards, gardens, fountains, artworks, open spaces and architectural complexes have disappeared behind a cloaking device, it would seem,” he writes in his book “Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.”

Actually, we have become symbionts, says Katherine Hayles, author of “How We Became Posthuman.” Just as a lichen is the marriage of a fungus and an algae, we now live in full partnership with digital technology, which we rely on for the infrastructure of our lives. “If every computer were to crash tomorrow, it would be catastrophic,” she says. “Millions or billions of people would die. That’s the condition of being a symbiont.”

Hayles is among a number of intellectuals who see this dependence as not necessarily bad, but as advancing civilization and, above all, just inevitable. “From Thoreau on, we have had this dream we can withdraw from our technologies and live closer to the natural world, and yet that’s not the cultural trajectory that we have followed,” says Hayles, a professor of literature at Duke University. “You could say when humans started to walk upright, we lost touch with the natural world. We lost an olfactory sense of the world, but obviously bipedalism paid big dividends.”

She argues that this has actually made us more aware of our surroundings because so many devices are driven by their location and the user’s awareness of place. “The BlackBerry might be looking for a local restaurant and a person two blocks away, not overseas. If you’re walking downtown and you can access information that’s been tagged there, that information suddenly becomes part of that location.”

You can read the entire article here.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, especially the last quote; about how you can access information about a piece of space you’re physically residing in at the moment.  It’s called augmented reality and will quickly become ubiquitous, probably in less than five years would be my guess.  Make sure to click that link to the Wikipedia article about it.  You can also read about what Google is doing with their new service Google Goggles.

Do I feel disconnected from nature as this article seems to suggest?  Not at all.  Because I ask myself, frequently, what is nature?  Aren’t we humans a part of nature, no matter what we do, what we create and what we ultimately evolve to?  Is an urban concrete jungle a part of nature?  Yes.  It is, but it’s humanity’s addition to nature.

I don’t believe that we need to reconnect with nature in anyway.  I think that with technology, we are connecting to nature in a way that has never been done before.  Technology itself is neutral.  Technology is not the question here, it’s how we’re using these tools that’s the question.  Technology is just the extension of our senses and that’s the scary part.  We are augmenting our nervous systems and ultimately our bodies.

I think that this evolutionary path of complete technological integration is unavoidable, of course, but I also believe that everything is on track, according to some predetermined or destined goal, but I come to a dead stop when I try to think of what this end goal is.  It could be a myriad of things but I, for one, cannot wait to find out what it is and am also ecstatic to be alive at a time like this.

Found this very interesting article talking about the forefront of consciousness in regards to the internet’s influence and more particularly that of the website 4chan.  Link at the end.

I’ll admit that I’m not a 4chan fanatic but I do visit there occasionally so the article intrigued me enough to spend a bit of time there.  I really like some of the things the author, Jason Louv, brings up in his article.  I’ll post some of my favorite tidbits below:

Yet what the media has failed to grasp is what 4chan can tell us about where we’re headed. The Chans aren’t the freak sideshow of the Internet. They are the heart and soul of the Internet. And they are the ones furthest ahead of the pack, leading us. At this point there should be little doubt that the Internet is mutating the human species into something completely different. Therefore it’s instructive to look at the most extreme, freebased forms of the Internet to see where we’re going — and 4chan is that freebased version of mankind’s new drug of choice.

In the last decade, we’ve seen the increasing acceleration of information (a la Terence McKenna and Moore’s law) heralded as the key to new business development, though it has, in fact, so ruined our attention spans that it is almost impossible for modern man to get any kind of productive work done. We’re too lost in the datastream, too focused on taking in new information to complete a task that takes more than a few minutes, at best. I think a direct correlation can be made, for instance, between the rise of social media and the fall of the economy. The kaleidoscope of the Internet is more endless, more distracting and more mutating than even the most potent psychedelic drugs could have ever prepared us for. And 4chan is the ultimate, final trip.

What is happening here? The escape from the constraints of the flesh? The escape from the constraints of being human? The inevitable purge following the collective unconscious’ information binge? With the Internet we can now erase space and time, erase the restraints placed on the mind by matter. But what for? Once mankind set sail to explore the limits of the human world and to discover the frontiers of the planet. And once mankind plunged into himself to discover the limits, or lack thereof, of his own nature, through inner experience. But this is a new world, one bereft of the luxury of such meaningful activities. And in this new climate, the collective entity known as Anonymous has found a new frontier, and set out to discover the limits of boredom itself, mining the darkness for glittering jewels to bring back to the rest of us.

The thing that I don’t agree with is here is Louv’s assumption that our attention spans are being wiped out. I’d prefer it if he said that our attention spans are changing into something else. My attention span has not withered at all; only now it’s more fine-tuned to move from bits of information to bits of information. The idea for me is to make the conscious decision to engage my entire attention span at my choosing.

I can scan Google Reader headlines at an alarmingly rapid pace, but as soon as I come across an article I feel I should read, it’s just a simple shift in attention span to focus on a single article. I can then switch back to headline mode at ease. This is where I think we’re headed: the rapid ability to process huge amounts of information in order to find the relevant information to us at once.  This is the new evolution we’re currently involved in.  Some people are calling this dumbing-down?  Hardly.  There’s simply way too much information at our disposal to be considered dumbed-down.

Read the article “Lost in the Filth Simalacrum”.