Homo Cypiens. Herlander Elias
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We are more trapped, poorer, less intelligent, and less agile than the machines we invented. There is a lack of meaning in our minds and in the communities we know. At this moment, the main purpose of those who have the power is to "turistify" everything. The anthropological sites are disappearing to give way to a collection of infrastructures that look more like a shopping center. So, facing this artificiality that vampirically consumes the human being, what we need is connections and more humanism through a technology that enhances what is best in each person, and not one that enslaves us.
In the present time, the individual suffers alone, suffers in a group, suffers as a citizen and suffers as a legion. Nowadays, the individual seeks meaning and enlightenment in everything that surrounds him, whether in digital media or on the Net, but the amount of information deposited in the network is such that one cannot confirm everything. And in the face of this we are in the uncomfortable position of those who do not know who to trust. The past has its subjective interpretations, the present is volatile and the future has become a multi-sensory image. So if the future has several meanings, there is no future, but "futures". This circumstance, on the other hand, also leads us to believe that despite the economy of the immediate based on presentness. However what we have is more "presentness" and this is notorious in our daily lives: no one is tuned, everyone is disconnected and there is no uniform sense. The narrative that kept a connected "whole" was multiplied and we got fragments of individuals, stories of nations, corporate speeches, advertising spots, commercial video clips. There is a lack of coherence, and in this incoherent world we choose the constellation of meaning we want. It does not matter if we choose something special, because there is nothing special anymore. Everything is personalized and specialized, so everything is self-defeating as such. The new homogeny is marked by singularity. We are all so different that we have become equally "singular." We do not know how to communicate, we have nothing in common except the products we buy and the services to which we subscribe. Humanity is more a term with many senses. Today is all "multi". The singular has no future in a universe of multiple choices and in a tyranny of the immediate.
6.Grammar of Images
In our time, everything consists of image, whether text, object, service, product, figure; everything around us becomes something imaginary because it can be photographed, reedited, etc. There is a certain grammar at the image level, as the images have codes, visual elements, links and are part of a matrix. One thing always connects to another. It is surprising to see how we try to understand the fascination that the images exert in us humans, but the truth is that we ourselves cannot live without images. Images are forms of communication since prehistoric times. Images are something mental, first of all, but they also were useful for propagandistic and warlike objectives in the twentieth century. As for the twenty-first century, our problem is different. We are overwhelmed by images. There have never been so many images available, circulating on the Net. This is a regime of images that are in close relationship and that make the bridge to the social networks. Images no longer need cameras or video. The smartphones we own are images machines. Social networks like Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram, without forgetting YouTube, have increased the perimeter of the problem. More images machines lead to the production of images on a mechanic scale.
We should also mention a small detail. Images, whether electronic or not, have their own grammar. That is to say that it is possible to communicate only by means of images, since they have codes and these codes connect themselves with images; linked images are the matrices, and the matrices are the last, the final image. The grammar of the image is related to its structure of meaning. When we see an advertising or promotional image, what does it mean? What codes do you see? What do you want to communicate? Will it stand out from the rest? This is where the problem lies — originality — since everything is image-bearing, our problem is that all images become equivalent to each other. In this way, we do not have images, but rather "the image". There is a macro-image that represents everything and means everything, a kind of image-archetype. The grammar of such an image is either reductive or simply ambitious, but the grammar of the most varied images is exponential and trully interconnecting.
Each image carries with it the germ of its referential universe; the image reports what it is, what it represents, and its portfolio of associations. In other words, the same is to say that an image is a set of links, meaning that in order to understand the grammar of an image we must first understand its connections. The image, then, is what you can connect to. A weak image has only one referent in reality or in the conceptual plane, but a strong image has a greater symbolic power because it is more connective to other dimensions. Images can be divided as follows: connection images, disconnect images and isolated images. The first images are designed to be connected. For example a transmedia film has a narrative that expands in a videogame, or a film can be based on a Shakespeare’s work. The second images are images designed to be turned off. As an example, a photographic image belonging to a particular cultural and / or social elite can only be seen in an exhibition, in a certain group of days and at a certain time. If the temporal frame of a certain image is not transposed, it is inaccessible to us. The third type of images are the isolated images, which in practice are images that will never connect to anything, because they are designed to enter neither the mass media nor digital media. They are almost solipsistic images because they only exist in our head, like our dreams. An example of this kind of images is conceptual design projects before moving from vision to reality. They are images with a "beyond" potential, but they are only a "goal" unless something allows them to materialize. Yet, it does not mean that they materialize, that they translate into something concrete, they only have the potential to isolate or stop isolating, passing from isolated to off-mode or from isolated to connection of images.
What we ascertain is that even the most stealth marketing campaign for a brand of product or service can be recorded and found in the media. The great difficulty of our time is that images are out of control, and for this reason it is difficult to understand their grammar, being simpler to understand the associations between each other or between image and real, and image and dream. Understanding the grammar of the images implies that we know how to deal with their scale, their level of interconnection and also their level of visibility, because eventually even the most hidden image can be transferred to the media. This means that there is a certain difficulty in escaping from the reach of the media. The interconnecting images of our time are connection-images, which validates our position as decoders (or encoders) of the connectors-images grammar.
The greater the cultural background of an individual, the greater his ability to deal successfully with connecting images. The big question is that we need to understand the isolated images on a first level, and then the images already connected, on a second level. Meanwhile, the images do not wait for the ideal frame of time to be perceptible to us. Images flow and their grammar is mutant. We need a homo cypiens, someone from the digital age to understand them.
7.The Macro-medium Era
As we saw before, it is above all in digital media, and not only, but in particular, that images are transformed into connection-images. Contributing to the evolution of this great medium, which is digital, are the connection-images that make use of their scale of interconnection. In this context, and also respecting the tyranny of the economy of the immediate, mass media and digital media merge into a multi-macro multiform that all agglutinates in a single matrix. That is to say, we currently only use a medium, a single medium of communication, and regardless of its formatting, in the end we notice that elements such as "linearity" are left behind to move to a time of "configurations". After all, the macro-medium is this interconnecting medium of multiple configurations. We have many entry points to deal with their narratives, characters, protagonists and antagonists. In this matrix medium everything can be translated from / to any image. The macro-medium is a wise image and a new half-image. Furthermore, it is the first medium that extinguishes the difference between medium and content, media and formats. The macro-medium is almost self-referential as it has its own fauna, flora and atmosphere. Metaphors aside, the macro-medium is simply the new version of what were the Radio, TV, Press, Net and Cloud. The simplification and tyranny of the immediate and minimalist, plus the liberal economy, were intended to create a construct that would simplify the connection between companies, institutions and brands, reaching directly the consumers. And they did it.
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