Eat when you are hungry.
Sleep when you are tired.
- old Zen saying
These streams of hyperlinks
are turning us into possibility addicts.
To stay sober is to stay fully present with a single idea.
But I doubt even a zen master
could resist the temptation
of the endless electronic more.
A net is just a bunch of holes tied together with string.
The web is just a bunch of possibilities tied together with hyperlinks.
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The ‘all-at-oncess’ of the network penetrates our psyche.
Unconsciously, we want to be in tune with the immediacy of the grid.
A lack of presence is incompatible with our electronic environment.
Detachment is the highest value in a literate culture.
Detachment is absurd when you are connected to everyone and everything.
Our electronic media simultaneously push us towards and tear us away from the roots of presence.
We are torn between two seemingly incompatible sources of now: the ‘here and now’ of the real world, and the ‘real-time now’ of the virtual.
Sitting in front of a computer, staring at a monitor we lose our tenuous link to the here and now all around us.
Trapped in a chair, our body is numb, frozen, disconnected from our thinking and experiencing. Our peripheral vision is turned off. Our sensual landscape narrows and becomes all figure no ground. The crucial mind, body, world circuit - which is the source of all presence - is broken.
But we’re at a turning point.
The tablet is the first baby step towards reawakening our bodies from a long slumber.
Gesture is becoming an interface and a language.
“When a medium is coincident with life, the last refuge for humanism is gone. The long story of humanism — by which I mean the emergence of individual consciousness as a byproduct of our language and literature — comes to an end when we return, futuristically, to doing everything by hand.” - Gary Wolf
The next generation of ambient, tangible, and biological interfaces will begin to truly merge the real and the virtual into a single reality.
The roots of presence will once again flow from a single source.
Physics and metaphysics will become one.
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“[The net] makes the measurement of the self nearly inescapable, and makes the archive the model for the self rather than engaged presence.” —Rob Horning
This was true in the past but
as the dominant metaphor of the web shifts from pages to streams
from objects to flows
our model of the self is also shifting.
When the web was slower and made up of mostly static pages
our identity could be found in our archives.
But now our archives are being buried under a flood of nowness.
Our identity emerges not from the collections of our past
but from the many ways in which we touch the present.
It’s a new kind of presence ...
One that stretches beyond the here and now
and bridges the gap between our real and virtual lives.
Now has become the membrane between us and the network.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody retweets it does it make a sound?
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