obviousTue, Aug 5, 2008 Thanks for the reminder of my (ancient) past!
I am at present intensely fascinated by some of the questions you bring up. That thin line between our perceptions and our technologies is one we have very little capacity to express and thus examine. I think when we posit technology we forget that everything from the alphabet to writing and text upwards is a technological extension of our innate capacities. We have incorporated the linear expositions of text, of the word as extended memory, of the printed page into our perceptual schema. We are actually now incapable of realising this reality without them. The alphabet transcends its mere encoding capabilities, it is now a technology incorporated into our thoughts via which we have revealed our world for many millennia.
I think that the internet will go the same way, perhaps even more so. Over the coming decades its evolving structure will encompass us, overwhelm us and subsume us in its depths. We won't be able to posit a world without it because our perceptions will have been built by it. The internet will slide into the background, we won't see it as a technology any more, as an augmentation. It will become more familiar than the alphabet, than text. It will be like language, etching itself onto the microstructures of our brains.
The feedback you seek is already happening. We're just not capable of perceiving that feedback, just as the first purveyors of the alphabet, or the first cultures to emerge out of the technology of text could not see the realities they were capable of experiencing literally evolving all around them.
I think the illusion we have of some sort of control over our fates is greater than it has ever been.
Thanks for the reminder of my (ancient) past!
I am at present intensely fascinated by some of the questions you bring up. That thin line between our perceptions and our technologies is one we have very little capacity to express and thus examine. I think when we posit technology we forget that everything from the alphabet to writing and text upwards is a technological extension of our innate capacities. We have incorporated the linear expositions of text, of the word as extended memory, of the printed page into our perceptual schema. We are actually now incapable of realising this reality without them. The alphabet transcends its mere encoding capabilities, it is now a technology incorporated into our thoughts via which we have revealed our world for many millennia.
I think that the internet will go the same way, perhaps even more so. Over the coming decades its evolving structure will encompass us, overwhelm us and subsume us in its depths. We won't be able to posit a world without it because our perceptions will have been built by it. The internet will slide into the background, we won't see it as a technology any more, as an augmentation. It will become more familiar than the alphabet, than text. It will be like language, etching itself onto the microstructures of our brains.
The feedback you seek is already happening. We're just not capable of perceiving that feedback, just as the first purveyors of the alphabet, or the first cultures to emerge out of the technology of text could not see the realities they were capable of experiencing literally evolving all around them.
I think the illusion we have of some sort of control over our fates is greater than it has ever been.