Homo Cypiens. Herlander Elias
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Copyright © Herlander Elias, Author, 2018
All rights reserved. No excerpt whatsoever of this edition may be reproduced, recorded on a archive system, or be transmitted, in any way, or by any means, whether it is electronic, mechanical, photocopied, saved, or of any other kind, without the explicit permission from Herlander Elias.
Author: Herlander Elias
Translation & Proof Reading: Herlander Elias & Ondina Pires
Cover Design: Herlander Elias
Tablo Publishing - Australia
ESSAYS PUBLISHED
.(2018). Cloudpunk – The Digital Fifth Wave. Tablo, Melbourne, Australia / Apple BookStore / Amazon / Barnes & Noble
.(2018). Cloudpunk – A Quinta Vaga do Digital. Lisboa, Portugal: Fronteiras do Caos.
.(2018). Homo Cypiens 3-3: Massive Dynamics. Tablo, Melbourne, Austrália / Apple iBook Store.
.(2017). Homo Cypiens 2-3: The Moving Frontier. Tablo, Melbourne, Australia / Apple iBook Store.
.(2017). Homo Cypiens 1-3: And The Connected World.Tablo, Melbourne, Australia / Apple iBook Store.
.(2017). Cloudpunk – A Quinta Vaga do Digital.Tablo, Melbourne, Australia / Apple iBook Store.
. (2016). Brandware – Quando as Marcas e os Meios Digitais Colidem. Tablo / Apple iBook Store / Amazon.
. (2013). Post-Web: The Continuous Geography of Digital Media. Odivelas, Portugal: FormalPress
. (2012). A Galáxia de Anime: A Animação Japonesa Como New Media. Covilhã, Portugal: UBI - Livros LABCOM.
. (2008). O Videojogo e o Entretenimento Global: First Person Shooter. Lisboa, Portugal: MediaXXI-FormalPress.
. (2007). Néon Digital – Um Discurso Sobre os Ciberespaços. Covilhã, Portugal: UBI - Livros LABCOM.
. (2006). A Sociedade Optimizada pelos Media [The Media-Optimized Society]. Lisboa, Portugal: MediaXXI-FormalPress.
. Elias, Herlander (Ed., 1999). Ciberpunk – Ficção e Contemporaneidade. Lisboa, Portugal: Dist. Sodilivros.
1. Commitments and Parts
Currently two types of extreme behaviours prevail, that of individualism and that of collectivism. In relation to the first one, that of individualism, we should include the strong hedonistic burden that is always present in the most varied aspects of daily life because all people want access to everything in an easy and pleasant way. However, the mega-social and interconnected state in social media has repercussions on the level of social events, since everyone wants to know everything about everyone. We are indeed more and more engaged, intertwined and entangled in a piecemeal life, though it seems to us more socially based; each person has access to his part of reality, to his fragment, but by contradiction we are at the same time linked to the “whole”. We are simultaneously alone and in social mode. We are victims of a strange massive dynamic that absorbs and promotes everything. Thus, on the one hand there is access to the collective state, but on the other hand we are increasingly alone and committed to brands and subscription services. Our bias, our angle of vision of reality, has limits, amplitude and predictable state. We are always anticipated by companies and machines, software and platforms that seem to know everything about us. It seems impossible to stay objective in a world where subjectivities reign online as in the posts of Facebook and Instagram, for example. People write on more blogs, comment on publications, and edit videos, but there is no objectivity in this objective world of machines and digital media; there are opinions because everyone has ideas to share, and most people “find” something to spread in the social and technical world that is the Internet. Moreover, what is happening is that we are obliged to do what is characteristic to do in this new milieu of our time, the Internet. This is why this era is called “Mediacene”, because it emerged after the Anthropocene (the men era), in terms of social and technological performances. We are, in short, homo cypiens, and we face more than ever “Massive Dynamics”.
However, the question that arises in relation to our time is the fragmented way each person exercises his subjectivity in the real. What we have is a state of semi-belonging. From an angle, we are limited to our part of reality, but from another angle we are compromised and and we are seen as nodes in a larger network than ourselves, and that is something that moves alone in a massive dynamic. We are being dominated by the media, the digital, the Internet and machines, overwhelmed by the size of the machine that surrounds us, and we begin to become awaken and receptive to what makes us more human ― the fact that we are sensitive. Nevertheless, everything exists online in large quantities, for example the thousands of friends on Facebook, the contemplation of hundreds of videos on YouTube or the numerous images published in the Instagram by a single person about a given public situation, but it is not by having all these possibilities that we feel less lonely. We are now inside and outside of a digital world of massive dynamics. This macro-medium moves by itself, and let no one deceive ourselves ― we are only “guests”, we are neither pioneers nor founders. The original generation has passed. No one is more than the average user of digital media. Without our participation media continue to function and to register exchanges of opinions and comments. It is easy to lose ourselves in this massive environment. We do not know what to do with so much information, so many people expressing opinions, so many friends online and so many articles, reviews, books and interesting films available through download and streaming platforms. We are so deeply involved in this “massiveness” that our subjectivity, which should guide our angle of participation in the system, ends up fading into endless “everybody think so's”. We are becoming human-machines, homo cypiens,therefore, typical subjects of the cyberspace, something that has become a trend.
We are committed to our view of the world, and in reality our view of the world is not necessarily ours as we are constantly pushed to participate in some “thing” or to buy “things”. Massive dynamics change our private state and our public state. We are too close to the media and we have access to too much data, images, texts in a very short space of time. There is no possible quality of life for those who try to keep pace with the times and the news, with start-up's that arise and revolutionize the market, with killer apps that software developers create and make available in app stores. In McLuhan's way, we are immersed in a dynamic ocean of information that easily reconfigures our past and our present. We know that there is a certain “image of the future”, but in practice, present and past are involved. It is difficult to distinguish them. We are no longer in the “multi”, “poly”, “meta”, or “super”, “trans” or “hyper”, or “giga” era. We are in the “Tera” era. We handle terabytes of information, consume information-based products and we travel to places we have researched. The surprise factor and eroticism have run out. We are simultaneously further away and closer to everything, we are more informed, but still more lost. We are better able to face everyday reality, but at the same time more vulnerable. It is curious that in the era of massive dynamics we seem less and less dynamic subjects. We are assailed by an inertia that Virilio named as “polar inertia”. The massive factor and the dynamic factor are not in us, they are all around us. They are the systemic surroundings: the machine and the mechanism, the digital and the system, the novelty and the consumerism. We are within a structure, a construct that exists by our pseudo-authorship, but nobody knows very well what to do with it other than to add more tiles, more pieces, more parts, to renew and extend the tentacular dimension of gear. However, everything becomes identical, an adding of equivalences.
2. The Equivalence Images
One of the problems of the massive media objects we are confronted with is the fact that many