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This may be a discussion better suited to one of the media areas, but as I thought it involved a certain level of epistomology and post-pomo thinking I've started it in the Headshop. If the moderators see fit, they may switch it at their discretion.
So my roommate and I were up late last night, talking about media and entertainment, not in the sense that we were necessarily discussing a show or a movie in particular but the mental processes involved in traditional media. It should come as no surprise to anyone here that pretty much before the advent of computers, most mass media was essentially a one-way street, a passive experience, involving minimal cognitive and decision-making functions of the consumer's brain. Although there are hundreds of magazines and books and albums published a month, thousands of newspapers, scores of movies and 40,320 hours of TV programming if you have cable with 56 channels (I realize that's an outmoded number, but work with me here), even not figuring in for redundancy (ie, repeats, movies on a loop on HBO et al, identitical news stories, etc.), nevertheless these all reflect but a sliver of the range of possibilities of human experiences that can be communicated via any of these media. With the advent of computers, a level of interactivity was introduced which encouraged higher functions of the brain, but the computer itself and any software you put into it still only contains a limited number of options you can exercise, and these options lead to pre-programmed responses. So it is not until the rise of the Internet and the introduction of the most random, chaotic element available, which is that of other people, that the increasingly maximum range of viewpoints on reality itself, those of each cognizant individual, become available to the average person. This also involves not "interactive media" in the way the industry buzzword is usually meant, but the most basic form of communication we have available, that of almost realtime conversation. Why is this found on the Internet but not, say, on the telephone? Because in most cases when you call someone you have a pretty good idea who you're trying to reach and what they might possibly say to you. RAW put forth the idea, and I don't know whether it's his own or Brion Gysin's, that "information" is not necessarily entire statements and the larger picture said statements paint, but the inverse of your ability to predict the next concept in any string of concepts that someone states, even down to the level of individual words, thus the power of the cut-up method in Burroughs' works. The Internet's strength is not solely in that it's a new way in which to converse using the written word almost as realtime as the spoken word, but that it is a mass, collaborative conversation between many parties, comparing and contrasting their particular viewpoints on reality, and perhaps then forming a larger, more complete picture of the whole of the "true" nature of reality. (Yes, yes, "what is truth?" Maybe we don't know because we haven't had a tool like this previous to this stage in evolution to allow us to chart it quite as fully.) Rather than relying on both "news" and "entertainment" in the mass media to tell us "the way it is," we are now collaboratively creating a more common picture of reality, even editing that picture in line with our common beliefs. Is it not possible, contrary to both the traditional conservative sawhorse that entertainment shapes mass behavior and the liberal evasion that behavior shapes entertainment that instead entertainment is a placebo via which those things that we would like to see or are afraid to see in reality are played out in the controlled environment of the screen or the page? There, everything usually works out for "the best" (aka the way things "should" be, aka the way they are now) in order to contain such "dangers" to the status quo to a fictive reality where they can be disarmed with some creative scripting, or, more often, just with some fucking deus ex machination. The Internet, resembling something both public and anonymous at the same time, participatory to the brink of pushing its way into "reality," is different: our feelings are not displaced onto some faceless archetype onscreen, but instead we have become the protagonists in our own new story, a feeling the passivity of an "entertained" (read: distracted) had lost, along with its ability to interact on a conversational level with itself. Now, personal interaction on a broad scale has become our new mode of "entertainment," in that this is how we choose to spend our time, not soaking up the unending stream of babble from the TV or, to a lesser extent, magazines, books, movies and radio, but in the seemingly limitless variety the people in the world around us provide. As such, we are also losing our faith in both hierarchical religion and "democratic" government, because we see that both are predicated on investing in a precious few perspectives (which are tailored to appeal to us while keeping us subservient to the structures that keep those perspectives powerful), and instead moving towards DIY, personally-determined ideas of self-governance, self-subsistance and spirituality. There is no one "leader" of this movement; it is the movement of an awakening entity, moving as one not because they were told to but because they sense inherently that this is what they should do.
...Yeah, we were stoned. What's your point? 
Anyone got any thoughts on this? Just the ramblings of two potheads or legitimate on some level? |
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