Is it ME? ...

[Christopher O'Brien]

Does it seem strange to you that the tools of our reality appear to be highjacking our time? For instance: How much time do you spend on the 'net every day? I remember when there was no 'net. Are we creating a "programmed" breakaway Internet-based civilization, or is it being created for us? Ok, we're tool using primates, but (IMO) it's as if (the control structure of?) our reality is stealthily supplying more than enough time-based diversion to keep "us" otherwise engaged from the most important issues we face as a species. Fight or flight. There is an "evolutionary imperative" -- a need to emigrate to the stars in order to survive. If, so, what about the billions of humans who aren't plugged into this meme socially and politically? Is a looming 'net-based cultural blind-spot? How will we transit our depletion of Gaia's natural resources and continue to grow in a "capitalist" fashion? How soon will we be able to mine helium-3 on the moon and transit to a cleaner source of power to propel us mere humans out to seed the stars? Rhetorical questions, of course...

 

[SolarSailor]

The singularity cometh!

In all seriousness I would suppose that humans are already becoming cyborgs due to the mobile phone. If you think about it, it is a device that is almost always with us, it gives us an on demand connection to an information resource and allows distributed communication between other "cyborgs". Maybe it is simply the next step in human evolution, as we have always been a tool using species since the day we rubbed sticks together to create fire. Or maybe as David Icke says, it is to distort our waveform reality from beyond the moon. I tend to think it's the former rather then the latter.

 

[Randall]

(But) Isn't it strange how the tools of our reality appear to be highjacking our time? Ok, we're tool using primates, but it's as if the control structure of our reality is stealthily supplying more than enough diversion to keep "us" otherwise engaged from the most important issues we face as a species.

uhhh

OK I'll bite. I think it has a lot to do with placating the masses with tools that provide instant gratification. Instant communication, instant entertainment, instant banking, instant food ... etc. Without all that what would we focus on? Maybe that big mess they call the Tar sands, or Fukushima or the giant garbage patch in the middle of the Pacific, and the list goes on.

 

[boomerang]

The impending Age of Lessness dovetails well with Huxley's "Brave New World."

 

[Charlie Prime]

For thousands of years new technologies have been used for both good and evil.

This phenomena has always been part of the human condition.

In the 16th century some scholars believed the printing press would destroy civilization because it allowed people to engage in mass communication without government control. Some physicists of the 1920's were certain nuclear weapons would eventually destroy mankind.

I believe Transhumanism is the same. Some groups will use it to enslave others. Other groups will use it to liberate themselves from slavery. Some groups will choose to stay human. Other groups will choose to split off and evolve as machines.

 

[Wade]

My thinking is somewhat along Charlie Prime's. I'm not so sure that the internet isn't any more of a time stealing tool than subsistence farming was for our ancestors. Actually, it probably did start of a a diversion but in frightenly quick time it became an indespensible commodity. If the Internet is currently just another tool/diversion it may also become a fully integrated part of us, well, some of us. A neural network that will dictate when to make that left turn, to take a pass on the next McDonalds because it's too full and use the next one down a couple of blocks away. look out for that jaywalker up ahead...and at the same time scolding the jaywalker (if he is among the "plugged in") and if we are running late this wired-in personal organizer will pm our supervisor to advise IT that we are running late.

I wonder if some of us go that path, is it likely that we could become almost Spock like with our wired-up sensible, logical selves constantly coming into conflict with our emotional selves.

What would happen to us when we go "off-line"...perhaps while sleeping...and our human consciousness is unencumbered by our pragmatic self, would it try to overcompensate for being marginalized during our waking hours ?

Chris' s thread title is tres appropriate I think because it's a question that the people that are living in this time could be asking themselves "Is it me?"

 

[exo_doc]

Hardly anyone stops in their tracks, looks around at their life, and asks themselves "What am I doing?"
Or
"What is important in my life, and what's not?"
"What am I wasting my time on when I could be doing something meaningful, with a purpose?"
"What am I doing that makes a difference?"

Is facebook important?
Is that new video game important?
Is watching inane videos on youtube important?

The irony of the fact I'm posting on a facebook-like website does not escape me.
We all need our off time, down time, entertainment, distraction from routines of life. Besides, The Paracast isn't like other websites because I actually learn things on here.

My point being, is this internet "break-away culture" mostly concerned with instant gratification and pseudo human interaction, or is something worthwhile being done?

To me, something worthwhile means curing diseases, solving world problems and social problems like poverty, hunger, war, unemployment, .....creating new works of art, writing the great American novel, helping the elderly couple down the street with yard work or grocery shopping.

So is part of the world culture becoming a bunch of poser fluffy airheads with no meaning to life except fulfilling that next urge to watch kittens?

 

[Burnt State]

When farmers worked the land with their families for most of the waking hours of the day, every day of the week, they did so out of necessity. No one needs to go online and play angry birds, 2048, plants vs. zombies, and similarly, no one needs to update their twitter, instagram, check their facebook, fakebook, or their crack cocaine app book for any good reason, really. These tools are all about self-obsession and narcissism - forums can fit very snuggly into that space some could argue, though there's always the quality of unique conversation and dialogue…

The bits and bytes and tweets, licks and likes, however, are just a quick hit off of the touchscreen pipe and all have much more to do with Huxley's SOMA than any other drug i've seen. The invisible net carries people to the moon and back as hours dissolve through the day, while bodies sink deeper into couches.

Make no mistake about it - we are in an age of mental slavery and the technology freely leads us there. Program or be programmed. Or at least consider leaving the tech off and go for a walk, read or write a book, make some love or music but at least take the headphones off and crawl out of that digital cocoon for a while before you become a reptilian.

I see many youth daily, heads down, thumbs on the screen, texting about the latest emotional jab to knock them around. Like doctors on call, many are online for many of the waking hours of the day, tilling barren digital soil, getting themselves worked up over not much, and often destabilized and off task because there's a rumour going around about them, or a best friend's just posted an 'unlike' on their new selfie. There's a lack of deep drinking at the conversational well for this generation as they sip on 140 characters or less at a time - their whole emotional universe revolving around a single sentence of compressed lingo. Their addictions cause them to reach into their pants for the phantom buzz as they pocket dial yet another emergency call by accident. They don't even know how big the emergency is or even understand how they slipped accidentally into the digital well.

Brave New World indeed. The consequences of this instantaneous world view, aside from incredible issues of low self-esteem, stress, distress, depression and increased suicide rates also include a lack of critical literacy and the ability to sell them almost anything. When you have to work hard to survive and subsist, you tend not to waste your most precious resource - time. But kids today…jeez…(am i showing my age?)…some of them seem to be more than just a little lost.

 

[flipper]

Yes definitely it is you. We should not spread the infection of capitalism to the universe. We should not infect the universe. as we have been infected:
"I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilisation on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet," Mr Chavez said in speech to mark World Water Day. (March 23, 2011)
No Cookies | The Courier-Mail
Stay at home. Do not foul-up other peoples nest. Do what you think is best at home.

 

[Tyger]

So is part of the world culture becoming a bunch of poser fluffy airheads with no meaning to life except fulfilling that next urge to watch kittens?

Oh-Oh-Oh! Them's fighting' words!

What I have mused about is how separate our experiences now are. There was a time when everyone was listening to Fibber McGee and Mollie on the radio. Or watching Sid Caesar and Lucille Ball. Or watching Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights. Somehow, mass communication was a 'group event' - with a definite 'text' that could be referenced reliably in every-day life and most people would know what was being referenced. We would all sit down and watch Lee Harvey Oswald being shot, or the moon landing, or any other number of cultural events - such as television shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Saturday Night Live. Not to mention just 3 news outlets actually doing investigative reporting.

Cable began to change that 'groupiness' - and the Internet has completely shattered the 'oneness' of information in favor of fads and rumors. I am of the opinion that it has and is changing how we are 'ruled', or governed.

People's shared experiences resulted in strikes and Union organizing. Splintered experiences - and ersatz experiences, at that - such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Zombies - just has to have been chafing the human experience for decades. Internet is just one more additional 'refinement'. Far harder to find our humanity - and each other - midst all the underbrush.

Yet it's not all bad - just very, very different now.

 

[exo_doc]

Oh-Oh-Oh! Them's fighting' words!

What I have mused about is how separate our experiences now are. There was a time when everyone was listening to Fibber McGee and Mollie on the radio. Or watching Sid Caesar and Lucille Ball. Or watching Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights. Somehow, mass communication was a 'group event' - with a definite 'text' that could be referenced reliably in every-day life and most people would know what was being referenced. We would all sit down and watch Lee Harvey Oswald being shot, or the moon landing, or any other number of cultural events - such as television shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Saturday Night Live. Not to mention just 3 news outlets actually doing investigative reporting.

Cable began to change that 'groupiness' - and the Internet has completely shattered the 'oneness' of information in favor of fads and rumors. I am of the opinion that it has and is changing how we are 'ruled', or governed.

People's shared experiences resulted in strikes and Union organizing. Splintered experiences - and ersatz experiences, at that - such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Zombies - just has to have been chafing the human experience for decades. Internet is just one more additional 'refinement'. Far harder to find our humanity - and each other - midst all the underbrush.

Yet it's not all bad - just very, very different now.

Good reply. Questions I posed were just meant to make people think, I do not know if technology is good or bad or which degree of both.
I don't think Gramps listened to Fibber Mcgee everywhere he went, nor watched Lucy and Ethel hours at a time.
It's something to ponder, and keep an eye on.

 

[Tyger]

Good reply. Questions I posed were just meant to make people think, I do not know if technology is good or bad or which degree of both.

I don't think Gramps listened to Fibber Mcgee everywhere he went, nor watched Lucy and Ethel hours at a time.

It's something to ponder, and keep an eye on.

Exactly so. It's been a slow 'creeping' upon us. In 1976 there were less than 1,000 people on what would be called the 'internet'. It's the 'invasion' right in front of us - when a conversation can be interrupted for a cell phone text. No one is really where they appear to be in body. The person they are with is merely an interlude in a far more 'real' event taking place in the mind and 'somewhere'. But, of course, that 'somewhere' is not 'real' - and it's only later that we'll realize that.

I'm in education and if ever there was a cuckoo egg in the nest it is technology. An unsightly bird that once hatched requires all my attention, nudging out quality time teaching, one-on-one interaction, nature observations, and so much else. All eyes are riveted on a machine. Children are enslaved in a very visible manner to the machine in the most direct and obvious way: it's not about what they know, but about how accurately they are able to manipulate the machine, the robot, the technology. Wasted time. All for the sake of the profit margin.

In regards to the initial question posed, I experience a trivializing of my time, my life. Instead of connecting with a person in an office where I would see others and be able to converse my way through a transaction, I am urged to go through the machine (computer, internet). Today I needed to deposit a check into my account and I realized that I don't know where my closest bank branch is located - in three years of living here I've not had to come to know my physical bank branch, I haven't had to come to know bank tellers. At the supermarket, I am urged to use self-check-out, not to have a personal interaction with a clerk. The actual use of the internet requires isolation from others - scrolling through masses of information, filling out forms, never dealing with a 'who', never - and so requires more time. The loss of the reference librarian - and those like them at the end of a phone line - is a huge loss imo.

 

[stonehart]

Does it seem strange to you that the tools of our reality appear to be highjacking our time? For instance: How much time do you spend on the 'net every day? I remember when there was no 'net. Are we creating a "programmed" breakaway Internet-based civilization, or is it being created for us? Ok, we're tool using primates, but (IMO) it's as if (the control structure of?) our reality is stealthily supplying more than enough time-based diversion to keep "us" otherwise engaged from the most important issues we face as a species. Fight or flight. There is an "evolutionary imperative" -- a need to emigrate to the stars in order to survive. If, so, what about the billions of humans who aren't plugged into this meme socially and politically? Is a looming 'net-based cultural blind-spot? How will we transit our depletion of Gaia's natural resources and continue to grow in a "capitalist" fashion? How soon will we be able to mine helium-3 on the moon and transit to a cleaner source of power to propel us mere humans out to seed the stars? Rhetorical questions, of course...

Maybe I am out on a limb here Chris but as I see it what we are seeing is the very beginning of an eventual Hive mind.
The problem as I see it is that in the long run if we maintain the economic system we have and the ideas of separate borders then indeed we will have a form of break away civilization.

Maybe I am not explaining this quite as I see it but the idea is that as the technologies centered around interfacing between electronics and biology converge sitting in front of a screen will be seen as a quaint idea. What I see is direct interfacing and in this case the step to a hive mind is not really that far.

Is this trans-humanism? In a way it is as it is interfacing the biological with the technological but it is not digital immortality only an interface.

 

[boomerang]

When farmers worked the land with their families for most of the waking hours of the day, every day of the week, they did so out of necessity. No one needs to go online and play angry birds, 2048, plants vs. zombies, and similarly, no one needs to update their twitter, instagram, check their facebook, fakebook, or their crack cocaine app book for any good reason, really. These tools are all about self-obsession and narcissism - forums can fit very snuggly into that space some could argue, though there's always the quality of unique conversation and dialogue…

Very true. I'm only one generation removed from the kind of farm life you describe, chained to the plow and at the mercy of the seasons. My grandmother drove herself from the farm to town one day in a Model T, had all of her teeth pulled without anesthetic, then drove herself back and resumed work the next day. And much of the world lives this way still. Now-- let my toilet plug up, and I run in panicked circles. Never before in history have so many, materially, had so much. Although it remains to be seen whether the progress is a long term trend of temporary blip. But yes, it's amazing how easily we grow soft and self-obsessed.

 

[SolarSailor]

There are those that listen to the radio, and others that tear the radio apart and learn how it works. My mentality since I was little has been to learn how things work, to myself the internet is a tool that allows me to communicate with different parts of the world instantly. Whether it is on a forum or an SSH connection to some remote machine. When you get into the nuts and bolts the internet is a pretty interesting place, and it is amazing what a bit of 'dorking' with google can find. Information is king in this tecnocratic age.

 

[flipper]

Maybe I am out on a limb here Chris but as I see it what we are seeing is the very beginning of an eventual Hive mind.
The problem as I see it is that in the long run if we maintain the economic system we have and the ideas of separate borders then indeed we will have a form of break away civilization.

Maybe I am not explaining this quite as I see it but the idea is that as the technologies centered around interfacing between electronics and biology converge sitting in front of a screen will be seen as a quaint idea. What I see is direct interfacing and in this case the step to a hive mind is not really that far.

Is this trans-humanism? In a way it is as it is interfacing the biological with the technological but it is not digital immortality only an interface.

I think that those with their hands on the levers of power, weighed the consequences of the information we would gain, against the control they would gain, and decided that that the Internet was a big step toward "the hive" and trans-humanism. Now I have to walk my dog in the country.

 

[Tyger]

So is part of the world culture becoming a bunch of poser fluffy airheads with no meaning to life except fulfilling that next urge to watch kittens?

Oh-Oh-Oh! Them's fighting' words!

My next urge fulfilled!

I don't know about you but I'm really wondering how this drama turned out. [Signed] Fluffy Air-Head

 

[Charlie Prime]

We should not spread the infection of capitalism to the universe.

"the infection of capitalism" Really? Are you really 14 years old?

*(Edited to retract my childish insult. I thought Flipper was being serious.)

 

[mike]

I'm with Stonehart on this, i think the net is the front end of what will eventually be the hive mind, that is the ability to not just swap and share information and data, but direct experience sets.
Ive long maintained that once a species starts to make tools, they are on a path to the point where the tools make them.

The internet is the horse and buggy to what will eventually become a Ferrari.
Which ironically enough still refers to its biological heritage in terms of "horse power"

That its happening is to me self evident, the real question i ask about the situation is, Are we seeing a process operating under its own unguided momentum, or is something driving it
Is it the mindless momentum of an avalanche, or is someone slowly boiling the frog

 

[stonehart]

"the infection of capitalism" Really? Are you really 14 years old?

*(Edited to retract my childish insult. I thought Flipper was being serious.)

Agreed there is intrinsically nothing wrong with capitalism, it is out of control corporate control of our governments at the expense of the people that is the problem.
Not a problem I see being resolved in a hurry or ever to be honest.