I hate the injection of personality into technological instances or common hiccups in modern Internet culture. My heart monitor watch shows me a smiley face while booting up, Github buttons spam "Buy me a coffee!", Reddit says shit like, "Don't panic" when a webpage doesn't load. Shut the fuck up and leave me alone. I am so tired of being surrounded by these pale imitations of reality, like I need to be pacified with pseudo-emotions or meme culture every step of my day.
This is a weird one to explain, and I don't know if it's technically bad, but technology currently allows us to completely change our current stimuli regardless of our environmental conditions.
It could be the best day of your life, and you could open up your phone and literally give yourself PTSD by watching snuff films. It could be the worst day of your life, and you could bring up truly sublime moments to offset it.
These changes are seconds away from each other. If you've ever scrolled through a social media feed, you could easily see both at the same time. Or schizophrenically pop back and forth between them. I'm often laughing at a meme, then seconds later I see a news story about done atrocity, then seconds later there's a cute animal.
In the past, if you wanted things to be different? You had to actually develop talents and put energy out into the universe.
If you wanted to hear some music? Someone actually had to play it. If you wanted to decorate something, you had to actually get the art done. If you wanted to hear a story, you needed someone to tell it to you, or act out it in a play.
Life had a continuous experiential rhythm, and there was no escaping it without social interaction. A beautiful moment was a beautiful moment. It was not reproducible outside of its context.
Now? You can replicate any experience outside of any context, any meaning, any social reproduction. So people start to think of life as discontinuitous. They start to think of the present as something they tolerate while their devices reproduce for them the life they actually want.
This is very similar to Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, but literally for human meaning and memory.
People are treating their actual lives like the accumulation of memory commodities. With the exchange-value being the intensity/desirability of that emotion.
I don't know whether that's good or bad, but it's VERY fucking different than what most humans' lives were like for tens of thousands of years.
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It's time to read McLuhan. Specifically, Understanding Media. His views on cultures and groups with varying levels of technology can be rather unfortunate, but he essentially set out in the 60's to answer the same question you're thinking about. What, exactly, does electronic communication mean? What does it do to people? With our current technology comes this inherent immediacy, and as we get more and more advanced it will become more and more immediate. Electromagnetic communications began with the one-way broadcast of the spoken word, continued with the one-way verbal/visual and the two-way verbal, and has now exploded into an entirely new extension of every aspect of the human nervous system at light speed to every corner of the globe. It's hard to value the effects as good or bad, really. It's all just so different. We've built a culture and a language for 4,000+ years around writing and developed deep roots for how to think about writing. But now, we have moved on. Writing has been transcended. I think what's left to do is pick up the few scholarly tools we have at our disposal for analyzing this transition and exploring how to mitigate the negative side effects and take advantage of the positives. We need to make a terminology for discoursing about the Internet that is as rich and detailed as the way that we study rhetoric and literature.
Maybe so, but people are still quite capable of dividing the reproduction from the real, and will for a very long time
Hence people going to concerts, still fucking instead of just watching porn, etc.
I think the issue is settling for the reproduction
Like I said, I don't know if it's bad or not. And I don't know that people don't recognize it or not.
The point is that the construction of human meaning, of lived conscious experience, can now be isolated from its socially produced context.
You can go see a concert, sure. But music used to be something people did together. Entire musical tastes were developed solely based on what you could find within transportation distance of your house, and no further.
Now? You can absorb entire cultural experiences from different spatial-temporal eras at will. You could live exclusively in an experiential context which is impossible to reproduce where you live.
This is true even in terms of our politics! We absorb Soviet or Anarchist aesthetics and movements and culture, in an environment where not only can it not be reproduced, but the entire culture is utterly hostile to it! That's very fucking weird. There weren't like, Spanish peasants reproducing Aztec or Mayan culture. The concept wouldn't even have occurred to them.
Who knows what kind of organic politics would exist in the absence of this ability, or if it would arise at all. What would our resistance look like without the ability to reproduce all of these dead cultural signifiers?
Again, not good or bad. Just very different.
I see what you mean... and you're certainly not wrong. But I feel like we're missing something, here. Let me think about this.
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