Allspace in a Notshall

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”.