ambient

Blogs aren’t that interesting anymore. Actually, it’s more accurate from a marketing perspective to say that blogs have become or are quickly becoming mainstream.

I feel rather lucky to have followed the earliest bloggers. I myself am an early adopter of the medium though none of my blogs were ever “successful” as success is commonly measured. They did, however, give me a chance to practice my writing and communicate with my friends and family through important times. For those reasons, I will likely always have a blog of some sort and for now it lives here, and this one isn’t going anywhere. I just don’t write here nearly as often as I used to on Sacking Rome.

Several trends are beginning to interest me. One, with the mainstreaming of blogs we are seeing new levels of text commodification. It’s almost as if the excitement around text itself, or at least prose, has fizzled out in favor of new mediums such as on demand video, games, music, and social networks.

There does appear, however, to be one new entrant on the text frontier. It’s what I call spasmodic, terse broadcasts of useless information that somehow matters a great deal. Twitter exemplifies this service. My description of this service is not to say that the medium itself is useless or not important. On the contrary, I was absolutely blown away by what the service represented - nothing short of the closest thing to global telepathy in a network-based emulation of spritual connectivity that we have right now. It is precisely the mundane nature of the messages on Twitter that makes it such a fascinating application.

But I digress. Back to the new mediums. (I use the Anglicized plural of medium here to distinguish the word from the loaded term “media” and to demonstrate fealty to McLuhan’s assertion that the “medium is the message.”)

Marshal McLuhan was more prophetic than he would have ever realized when he made his two most interesting, in my opinion, observations.

The first is that with the commodification / mainstreaming of text has come the next evolution of the human societal mind: post-text, or post-literacy, as he calls it. He says of this evolution

“we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.”

So, he’s not entirely optimistic about this transformation but the new post-literate culture that he envisioned can be seen coming to life in our video games, social networks like Facebook with its viral fetishes and, offline, a renewed resurgence in religious fundamentalism and xenophobia.

The second is really an offshot of the first and it is that the dominant medium of society (or even any individual) shapes the cognitive channels of the mind (whether collective or individual). For the last 500 years of Western culture, text has been the dominant medium.

It is mind-boggling how quickly that dominance is being dismantled by Generation-Y and the stragglers of Generation-X. It’s very possible that Generation-X will be the last American literate generation. That is not to say that future generations won’t be able to read and write. What it means is that that ability will no longer be the defining characteristic of intelligence, education, or incentivized behavior in society. Thus, new patterns of thought will emerge in the next 20 years that are utterly alien to all previous generations still alive.

Mike Arrington writes about the ugly place that Silicon Valley has (once again) become now that stupid loads of venture capital have been flooding in for the last two years or so.

Ugliness / greed aside, this particular bubble (if it is one) is interesting. One could look at boom / bust cycles as a matter of exuberance vs. boredom. The last time it all came crashing down, I personally believe, is that people just got bored. Sure, all of the petfood.com stories turned the entire era into a joke but there was, as we must acknowledge, an incredible amount of innovation that occurred. Then all the money went away and the engineers got back to what they do best.

In the following years, innovative services like Flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia and, of course, Google were developed. Much of the innovation that we hear about today happened during the downturn years between 2001-2004. If this cycle is indeed nearing an end, I wonder how long it can possibly last. We are just on the cusp of what will be an entirely new generation of technology-driven innovation and services — everything from scalable, interesting virtual reality to major, disruptive (at last) in human-computer interfaces — and it makes me seriously doubt that this next downturn will last long at all.

We are also faced with a set of serious crises - namely, the effects of global climate change and disgusting food / farming practices - in the next 10-20 years. Say what you will, and I certainly have, of that capitalist optimism (some would say delusion) in the face of adversity there is something about crisis that brings out a lot of talent and enthusiasm for making things better.

Finally, back in the internet / tech realm - a lot of the core technologies we rely on today are getting a little long in the tooth. Consider email. Does anyone think that we will be messaging one another using the same tired old protocols and client interfaces 20 years from now? It’s past time for revolutionary thinking about how we do not just email but web servers, operating systems, HCI, and data management.

Here’s to the next downturn.

Serialization of the imagination to a non-volatile archive is the human species attempting to preserve itself from an evolutionary standpoint. This was the first leap in the process of evolution from a purely physical adaptation path to one that is virtual.

To the conscious mind, void is the greatest evil. Hard drive failure is catastrophic. Religion was the first attempt at a backup & recovery mechanism (called the afterlife) for the human consciousness.

As soon as consciousness was born - represented as the result of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that serpentine ontology - death became intolerable because it was known.

Death, as defined as a natural process of life, put nature at odds for the first time with a species that nature herself had nurtured (perhaps ‘forged’ is a better word). Only the conscious mind can perceive death and what it means. Thus the quest for immortality was born.

Since that time, the human future has always been a post-human future. For this reason, technology and the promises it offers will become the religion of the 21st century.

I know it’s a sad statement when I discover an author because they have died, but this is the case with Jean Baudrillard, who passed away at the age of 77.

Timing aside, ideas and books do seem to fall into my lap at a time that is almost always relevant to my current interests. As I research the work of this man, I’ve been fascinated by the connection between his philosophy and how closely it relates to my own research topics (although he obviously got there first and is way smarter.)

What is intriguing is how much cross-disciplinary applicability there is between his work and those industries that are dominating the headlines in the high-tech world: virtual reality, web 2.0 and social networking. Alongside the ubiquitous optimism that comes with these fields are the revolutionary changes that are occurring in journalism, entertainment, and the academy.

His followers would find it ironic that I learned the most about him via Wikipedia, at least biographically. However, I felt that the description of his arguments and the following criticism was not so helpful. Indeed, the short bio on the BBC story managed in a few short sentences to capture the more interesting nuances of his philosophy, namely that:

He gained notoriety for his 1991 book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place and again a decade later for describing the 9/11 attacks as a “dark fantasy”.

Baudrillard focused his work on how our consciousness interacts with reality and fantasy, creating from them a copy world he called hyper-reality.

He said that mass media led to hyper-reality becoming a dominant force in today’s world - an argument taken to a provocative extreme in his statement that the 1991 Gulf War primarily took place on a symbolic level.

If this is an accurate portrayal (I should be writing this after I’ve read the man’s books but, what the hell, I’m probably proving his point by not), then his ideas are worth discussion.

There is little doubt that the controversy surrounding his statements that the first Gulf War did not exist and that 9/11 was the culmination of America’s dark fantasy gained him notoriety, but it seems clear that he was not denying the historical reality of those events.

It is their significance that he is interested in, and he seems to claim that the mythological significance that these events have in our society is a constructed one, and it is weaker than what used to pass for significance. The reason for this is because our society, so heavily saturated with the layered interlinking references of mass media and pop culture, that the images these sources evoke have lost their own original meaning without mass media and pop culture to prop that meaning up. How much meaning these elements originally had, according to Baudrillard, would be interesting to discern because the answer could potentially place him more in the camp of conservatives than in the camp of post-modernism. My guess, however, is that he would not have allowed that sort of inconsistency to survive in his work.

Hyperreality is probably the prevailing psychological phenomenon of our society and times and, boy, is it a gold mine. Coming back to my original reason for interest in his work, and some of the things I alluded to in my previous post, is that we are a culture comfortable with obsessed with our constructed realities and the mythology that comes with those fantasies because it’s the closest thing we have to meaning. How else do you survive, mentally and emotionally, in a Wal-Martian, flickering-fluorescent-lit landscape such as ours?

To use his example of 9/11 (this is not intended as a rant - it just happens to be a very convenient and potent case), if one reads the literature of those most galvanized by those attacks, it should come as no surprise that they immediately called for what has come to be known as the War on Terror.

Works like those of Tom Clancy were prophetic in a way that we may not understand until we at least acknowledge the possibility of 9/11 being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Politics aside, this would be a tremendous development in the study of both political science and history.

So, in 9/11 all of the building blocks were there to develop a leviathan political fantasy into a dynamic policy and war machine that continues to consume resources and divide the nation. This political fantasy is a narrative that asserts itself against those who deny its existence. Powerful stuff.

Daniel Rourke had some interesting things to say about all this just over a year ago.