Hypertrail. Herlander Elias
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and the hypersociality. In the end, it is all but a game. Moreover, it has to mean something to us. Nowadays, we are fond of meaningful brands because these are the ones we are willing to connect us. However, we are just making a small mistake because we forget that we are taking brands as sign of the future. Yet, if brands are the future that means a corporate future, the kind of what science fiction dystopia have warned us about, some way "We have no future because our present is too volatile" (Gibson apud Hoepker, 2011, 230). Furthermore, volatility is a feature that indicates everything is futuristic, and it means tension, motion and suspense, too. One of the images of the future we have so much into is cyberspace ―“Cyberspace: it sounds like the future was supposed to be" (Bell, 2007, 2) so, it is important to stress that behind these words every visionary has been hiding over the last two decades. Kevin Kelly for example is sure we are in the age of “Protopia”. We are consuming prototypes, images of the future like Fred Polak proposed. Our concern with the pioneering images and concepts has led us to absorb the trends and discourses of today’s mediascape faster. We are so into future that cyberspace became a historical concept. Technology is disappearing between the information and us and all we have is User Experience (UX). Following this trend, we have to agree with Dave Burwick who thinks that it is all about “interfacing with the consumer” (apud Meyers & Gerstman, 2001, 117). These days the concept of interface is crucial as it rules out the bridge between user-consumer and a brand, person and a platform, individual and a corporation. So we are doing so many things on the platforms that our present is still too volatile. We are assimilating a media feature for our own. Kelly reminds us that “we’re stuck in the short now, a present without a generational perspective” (2016, LOC 228-5810). However, we have to add something to this fact: if we do not have a generational perspective it is due to the thirty year generation gap that had been narrowed to the two year cycle. Hence, we are not formatted anymore by the laws of anthropology or culture or sociology terms. Instead, we have absorbed the two year cycle that actually matches the information technology cycle. According to this, everything changes entirely in just two years, but there is more: now all generations are welcomed to the fold, because in this day and era everybody, regardless of their age, has access to the very same media. Nobody is left out.
Now, the future is branded. There is no “the” future or “a” future. There are only “futures”. Each brand follows, develops, promotes and sells its own vision of the time concept of “future”. Author Kelly says that “we will be endless newbies in the future simply trying to keep up” (2016, LOC 180-5810). As a matter of fact, it may even be true. But while we try to thrive and to keep up, we are actually doing something. We are “becoming”, and becoming what? We are becoming what the brands we follow have designed for ourselves. In Bauman’s perspective “Anticipating future trends based on past events becomes more and more riskier and, oftenly mistakingly (…). Liquid life is flow of restarts" (2007, 8). Thus, this fluidity is becoming mandatory. However, we have to keep in mind that even if the past is not anymore what sells the most when compared to the future, we have to say that everything we do online, and mostly on social media, is becoming past. The past is actually useful. It is not outdated. On the contrary, the old is the new “new”. One thing is certain, to be savvy will be one of the most important attributes for near future. We need survivors for this predatory environment in which future narratives are controlled by corporate brands. We need new heroes, people with new abilities. In Pink’s regard:
“The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people—artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers—will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys” (2005, 1).
This means that a revolution has been triggered in view of the fact that once were attributes of media personnel, such as being empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers, now they are resources we all need. This assemble the armor we need to thrive in the new world. “We still have not left the era of the screen” (Manovich, 2001, 115), but the issue goes deeper than this. The problem is not the screen. It is the images. We should not forget that the new media image is something the user actively gets into (Idem, Ibidem, 183). Images have become addicting and engaging, and virtually they transmit dreamscapes, as well as they have become a tool for brands to connect with us. Peter Lunenfeld gives an answer to this by defending that “the computer is a dream device" (2011, xiv). It means that while everyone used the computer as a tool, it actually was an instrument, a reservoir for creatives and not just for accountants or office clerks. What gets weirder is that we are role-playing with all things computerized. “Over time, such performances of identity may feel like identity itself” (Turkle, 2011, 12) hence, the computer or any gadget like a smartphone is an evocative object of psychology. Moreover, the computers connected to network, social media and cloud “What was hidden in an individual’s mind became shared” (Manovich, 2001, 61). It is interesting to point out that the save icon has gradually being replaced by the share icon in most software and apps. In the book
La Bombe Informatique,
Paul Virilio (1999, 24) claims that there is the invention of a great optic of replacement or a work of art of a horizon of substitution. So, it is important to highlight this moment when we speak of the forgotten concept of the 90s : « hyper-reality » (Baudrillard, 1996, 64), though it stands attached to some degree to vertigo hyper-reality means that images have been leveled up to a new degree. We can understand it better if we look at what Bruce Sterling said on an interview (Bosch, 2012); he described design fiction as “not a kind of fiction [but] a kind of design. It tells worlds rather than stories”. Hyper-reality is this new regime of imagery that is part how the new world is built. It is not just fiction; it is world-design, too.
2.Vision, Self And The Cyber-System
Paul Virilio is famous for speaking about “Vision Machines” (1994). In consonance with his point of view, we stand prisoners of machinery designed to redirect our vision. From painting to photography and to film, not to mention new digital platforms, we are bound to look at images and screens. However, at the same time, these vision machines were gathering us around them, so did evolve the war machine with drones, surveillance, CCTV cameras and so on. Ultimately, we could say that vision machines are based on warfare strategies and tools alike. The system we deal with today seems to be ludic. Some speak of the “the playing self” (Kenneth J. Gergen in Frissen et al, 2015, 61), and indeed, games as a culture is thriving but most games seem war simulations. Behind the scheme, the grand scheme there is something “dialogic (…)” (Hartley, 2012, 8). Once, we were all mass society and mass media children and now we are digital audiences, and we are engaging in an aggressive manner with hyper-real images. The new dialogue means that we are under control. Whenever we go online, we remain under control of the once so-called “cyberspace”. We are leaving behind us a hypertrail thanks to the way computers and digital devices, generally speaking, perform around our data. Data is the new oil. Still, “the computer helps people to create experiences and offers them spaces” (Lunenfeld, 2011, xiii). The word computer will soon be outdated, as it does not describe anymore what stands around us. We seek the new arenas, the new games, the new spaces of consumerism. Brands are in charge now. In the meantime, it is true that “We live in a golden age of new mediums” (Kelly, 2016, LOC 2823-5810). Technology, economy, politics, aesthetics and culture in general have evolved so much that even science fiction is no longer focused on the future but rather in the present. We are a full range of product owners. We own brand ecosystems so that we keep online and hyper-connected, “nobody has a single equipment or screen” (Solis, 2014, 4). The system we enjoy most is the one that seems like a “solid platform” (Kelly, 2016, LOC 427-5810). We do not want to deal with computer problems or digital mayhem. We just want to face information. And the latter has become, much like the hyper-real images, a “transnational object” (Winge in Lunning [Ed.], 2008, 60). Nations have given in to a global culture and digital media, and globalization rendered obsolete local discourses. In this new grand scheme, we must either blend, shift or change. We cannot stand still. After all, “An economy and a society built on the inventive, empathic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age” (Pink, 2005, 1-2) has the upper hand. Moreover, there is more to say;