Homo Cypiens. Herlander Elias
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is that it no longer devotes itself to the production of goods, but rather to the investment in ideas, images, services and accesses. The products are no longer important because the immediate economy aims to solve everything based on what happens precisely "immediately". The immediacy of this world is a problem because it does not allow us to stop a bit to think about what is happening. Suddenly, thought, stopping and immanence became a problem in a world of accelerated solutions. Whatever one needs from time tends to become problematic as there is no enough time available to develop theories, criticism, comparison or analysis. The immediate is imposed as a new tyranny in which what becomes profitable is the acceleration in the name of productivity, also accelerated.
The immediate means there is still no mediation and if there is no mediation, then all poles are left without a healthy relationship. As the rule requires that the immediate formula must be applied as the last formula, what happens is that everything that is not immediate seems foreign to us as if it were the time in which there was time, opposite to current times — we do not have enough time to perform all actions and learn everything new — people are ruled by the "immediate". Consequently, mediation is crucial. So, it is necessary to study, analyze, investigate, think, see beyond the obvious, understand beyond the visible, and think in the medium and long term. However, these actions are doomed at the start because the immediate is imposed as a system. It is not something that affects only one individual, but several individuals. In this way, the immediate as a system has turned out to be a systemic solution as well as a system of problems, precisely because there is no time to confirm all the news and the most recent facts, industrial and commercial productions, and so on, we do not keep in our memory "who actually did what". Even when we are helped by the Net and other sources of information, it became almost impossible to confirm everything that is announced and launched in the market and to the public opinion. This means that the Net itself became not an instrument of confirmation of what occurs daily, but instead it turned to be the first cause of difficulty we have in confirming whatever. It is extremely difficult to confirm the truth of events and facts that appear on digital media, web pages, social networks, YouTube and Twitter. There is simply too much media discourse and little time to think about what is happening around us.
At this point, the central question lies in speed. The economy of the immediate replaces the economy of mediation. Once the necessary time has elapsed for reflection, what remains is an unanalyzed speed, a production of unstable reality, a world in which everything is produced quickly because it "has to be" produced rapidly, a world where "not thinking" seems to be rewarding. In this new world the individual is a target. All the political, commercial, industrial and economic messages are intended to confuse the individual even more, who, in effect, loses contact with "the real" reality, because he is barred from access to the true reality. The common individual only knows the broadcasted reality. All that appears in the media are no more than stabilized statements and/or produced facts. And in the face of this the correct attitude is to invest in the time and availability needed to reflect on the contemporary world. Whenever the individual analyzes and theorizes he has a counter-natural behavior towards the system that involves him. The media envelope that surrounds us does not want us to think, it does not intend us to know the truth about the past, and it is not its purpose to have an educated and demanding audience. To know more means to "see" better, to develop a deep conscious of the facts. We, individuals, are not supposed to be able to have a clear insight. It is supposed we follow the tyranny of the immediate economy. According to this new tyrannical system, the issues of the world must be solved "immediately", right "now".
How can we question the new normality of "being and non-thinking"? It leaves us with two possible attitudes: either we stop and think of everything around us, leaving this equation better prepared, or we give in to the economy of the immediate and we become a strange species that consumes and does not think, that reads, but does not know, that speaks, but does not communicate. We become strangers in our own territory. What is happening now is that the presentness surrounding us aims to transform us into tourists in our own environment. We became foreigners because we failed to understand the codes that were the usual ones between individual-system-reality. In the new schematic, the individual finds himself more perversely alienated, for he seems to continue to be well informed, and the system is more "intelligent" because it is used only for the immediate (in the individual-system relationship). Interestingly, in the system-individual relationship, all the information about our online, media, professional and social life is stored and digested by the new digital media. As today's machines know a great deal about us, we are almost foreign to ourselves, for machines know and anticipate results that stun us. What is left is the ability to digest the information and know how to be digested as information. An economy of the immediate is advantageous and we need it, but we must prevent losing our identity to the detriment of it. It is useful for us to challenge a system that has stopped challenging us and only works by distracting us.
5. Constellations of Sense
Knowing that we have to face the difficulties of an economy of the immediate, it is natural we feel confronted with other questions, such as understanding the various senses dispersed by all the media we use. The constellations of meaning are increasing. There is no longer a one-way narrative and the full explanation of the reality that affects us. There have been constellations of meaning that seek to function as explanatory fringes, in which each individual has the freedom and the chance to choose and believe what he or she understands. There is no longer a single narrative of meaning. The senses are now multiple. Poly-semantics has become a problem because as there is no sense of uniformity individuals no longer have in common the meaning of things they consume, read and study. Hence, communication becomes more chaotic, because not only are there more actors in the economy of the immediate, but the senses also have multiplied in such a way that there is not only one way of seeing the world. There are thus many worldviews. For the individual is left over choosing the constellation of meaning that his tribe understands to be the most consensual. Now an individual is a legion, but the senses and meanings are lost in the economy of immediacy. We no longer have time to understand ourselves as well as the social and technical world around us.
Another thing that we find worrying is the fact that we deal with increasingly heterogeneous universes, considering the fall of the great narrative in postmodernity, which functioned as a historical straitjacket. In the present times what we have before us is simply a puzzle. The world is sick, chaotic, complex, and over-accelerated to solve problems. There is a "touristification" of reality. We became tourists in our native environment. Now we can photograph the reality with smartphones, but we cannot think the real; we can have many friends on social networks, but just a few out in the real world. Currently, the dilemma that affects us is that we are proposed to be only observers, little or no critic, and there is no time to carefully observe what surrounds us, because we have only a little "immediate" time to buy a new object, something similar to the experience of the tourists when they visit a foreign country. At a glance everything becomes a souvenir of a reality that never existed. We are more communicative, but we are more isolated; we have more credit cards, but we are poorer; we have more friends on social networks, but we feel alone. Today the subject’s condition is that of the stranger. There is no existential meaning in the present reality because this is not assertive and uniform. In this way, and before the various constellations of meaning, we are in a situation of disconnection from the environment that surrounds us. We are tourists and foreigners, alienated and observant, we are everything but actors. We are not actors. We are players of a game that is already undermined.
It is increasingly difficult to understand reality. On the one hand, individuals do not cooperate, and when we say this it means they do not cooperate in the broad and human sense of the concept of "cooperation", since it seems that this pragmatic concept, both experiential and cultural, no longer makes sense. At the present time, anyone is potentially an adversary. All good-sounding speeches seem to us transcriptions of philosophical and corporate discourses. We are far from genuine messages. The reality with which we deal with is not the same one that is shown to us via media because it lacks meaning, it lacks mediation. It is necessary to reconnect everything, which, moreover, was a task of religions, to religareman to the divine. But the modern world has become too artificial and there is no desire to reconnect the individual, even with consumption. Indeed we are free to consume. We can talk about everything, but no one listens