Homo Cypiens. Herlander Elias
Читать онлайн книгу.
phablets and tablets, we multiply the capture of images at a level such that it is impossible for the subject to be able to deal with the images that he produces. And when we travel we photograph images from the same pedestrian angle, we are in the same places where all the tourists were before us. It seems that everyone is recording the same images and the same experiences. There is nothing new already. The novelty is gone when everyone is in the same place, does the same, sees the same and finally says “me too!”.
Massiveness is frightening as it produces images of equivalence, states of comparison, identical images, brand bodies, pop lifestyles. There is a “sameness” in everything that we encounter online. According to a social network like Facebook all the guys are doing the same. The main idea should lay on the use of the social network to promote events in the real world, and not just to be online searching items to later go where everybody goes. The world already has too many images, and we must not forget that the past is great, if not immense. We need to think about the future. Massive dynamics should somehow prepare us for the future, and in practice it is holding us back because access to knowledge, information and products and services is such that it is overwhelming us. Help us, we are in an overload of information!
There is less time, less space, but media objects have multiplied displaying a certain degree of toxicity in everything that the media prepares. There is also a lack of time to digest the massive dynamics that could catapult us. We are stuck into brands, services, bureaucratic procedures, gadgets, in conclusion, a total mess on the web. We urgently need to rethink our active role on the Internet, as this Internet is massive and dynamic and can not become a sickly collection of mental waste that takes over much of the population. The medium of globality, the medium of massive dynamics is indeed the Internet, and this environment changes the world in general ever since it emerged. Now it is smarter, and uncontrolled in part, but in another way over-controlled. From this observation we have no doubt that one can no longer live without this cyber-world because digital reigns with its circuits, its networks and its pulsating traffic. We are in the age of the network, in the pure age of the network. Everything that exists has a network parallel, an avatar, a representation, an icon, a partner simulation, or an accompanying application. The reality lived individually with its sorrows, joys and solitude is in the process of extinction. What has existed and what exists will always be on the Internet or in the cloud, if you prefer. And who deals with this phenomenon it is us, supposedly prepared for it, we homo cypiens.
One may say that we are in confrontation with the flow media, such as radio, MTV, generalist TV, and social media flow like Facebook and Instagram. There is a certain addiction to this system in which publications and images move massively within the reach of our fingers. This profusion of images seems to generate more information because when we search something more and more recent information comes to light. The massive dynamics has no end. It almost generates itself and manages itself. We are dealing with a mean of means, a macro-medium. The Internet has reinvented itself with some impetuosity and, thus, we are left to enjoy the services we pay because at this stage of the Internet everything is paid. We can have access to everything, but everything comes at a price. Flowing images as well as all flowing information is like an addictive game. This constant flow becomes dynamic, not ceasing to be massive since there is a serious problem of accumulation of images. Too many images compromise memories and experiences. We see and consult so much of other people that we no longer perceive what is really ours. The semi-public space of the Internet has contaminated all the moments of work, leisure and entertainment. Massive dynamics is a monster to tame.
Fascinated by the access to everything we are becoming impassive or curious about the publications and shares of everything that appears in the Internet. Our experience and memory captures those of others. It is difficult, with the passage of time, to actually understand what is really ours and what is not, having the concept of “property” changed with the Internet. What is mine and what is ours are two identical things, which has generated an authorial crisis in our time when massive dynamics collides with continuous recording ― these are very complicated times for authors and creatives because what they produce or create is diluted, the Internet does not enjoy copyright or the right to a permanent place for future memory. For anyone who wants to access the Internet, there is always somewhere a copy of the world, a fac simile, a world-mirror, a carbon copy zone, a parallel world to the real one, and of course a continuous recording.
3. Continuous Recording
Nowadays, it is becoming more and more common to see people recording everything, resulting in a generation of young and elder people registering everything on the network. It seems that there are no “unshareable” things. However, the middle-aged population is relatively slow in doing so because they like to have control over their things. Still, the obligatory thing is to share everything that the individual does. The logic of the network, which is heterarchical, requires that must be more connections than poles, more human minds connecting and interconnecting than individuals in the singular sense. The network is bigger than us. Massive dynamics happens when the accumulation of images joins the continuous recording of everything and everyone. We have terabytes of information flowing from our mobile devices to the network that has petabytes and iotabytes. The flood of information crossing the network is such that the digital applications we use are no longer sufficient. We need other models to handle the network. Holiday images, identification images, surveillance images lead to digital becoming a tameless monster, a real massive archive. There is no way to deal with the amount of information in operation today. What remains is the state of continuous recording, selfies, sequence shots, videos uploaded to the network, advertising promotions and the frenzy of being able to participate in the network with what is “ours”.
Our imagery is corrupted because everything is always within a videographic field, and there is no more off-field. Everything that is imagined by us and that it is an image is kept inside a support, or in the cloud. We are always “inside”. The concept of “outsider” is becoming obsolete. Why staying “out” when it's normal to publish everything and share everything “in”? In this respect, we can infer that the change is related to the fact that we now think that we have the Internet, and that now we are masters of our destiny; that nothing can keep us silent or interrupt. The result is a miscelanea of shares, flows, brands, institutions, sects, political parties and people who want to be famous at all costs. In 1968, Pop Art artist Andy Warhol said premonitoryly in an interview that in the future everyone would have his fifteen minutes of fame worldwide.
The network also begins to accuse a certain redundancy since the younger generations think that it is not necessary to have a literate culture. Books do not say anything to younger generations. However, the problem lays on this fact ― books are the basis of a literate culture, technical culture and art. Without them we would remain in the void. To enjoy a merely audiovisual and social network would be the same as to participate in the construction of something poor and futile. The sovereignty of massive dynamics consists in an increase in the scale of information, in the extinction of the individual, in the redundancy of data and in the access to the digital neoliberalization. The one who can and and aspires to wish, reads. The one who can and aspires to wish, seeks. Those who have no money can not consume. Who has neither money nor demand is not sought, and in this way he is “abandoned” by the digital, by the massive dynamics that passes by.
Anyone who thinks that we are in the stage of the “you” and that now we are “all”, both audience and producer of each other, is right. Yet, we must reframe this ethosin the contemporary thinking. Thought has to dwell on the reality of what is happening now, and what happens now is largely “inescapable”. We face a mirror-system of the real which is capable of propagating itself without solution. Massive dynamics is a crushing logic of novelties and a creation machine of the past. What is in the present is quickly forgotten and belongs to the past, and for the future hardly anyone thinks of it except in terms of consumerism. Consequently, we need to review our procedures for interacting with the real. The real is compromised given that everything that currently is happening has to appear in social media, otherwise if it does not appear then something is wrong. “To exist” and “to appear” became synonymous. What is the logic of existing, of doing things, if it is not to share and “make” appear? This is the dilemma in which we find ourselves. Private space is becoming obsolete. Long live to