it's dangerous to go alone! take this. (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} loss4words) wrote,@ 2009-05-27 12:12:00 |
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unplug
For the first time since I wrote Quit, I’m so floored by a mental realisation that I am no longer able to perform my primary function at work.
I’ve long felt that Big Brother, sensationalised news, and celebrity gossip were a means of control by distraction on the part of mass media and the government. Flashy misdirection to keep us occupied while the real business of running the world happened in front of us, all around us. We sit in the middle of it, oblivious. But that was more of an idle passing thought than anything really tangible or pointed. They were useless crap and that was it.
Earlier this month I took two days off and went to Port Douglas, just outside of Cairns. When I got on the plane, I turned my phone off, and didn’t turn it back on again until I was back in Brisbane three days later. I didn’t take a laptop, or an iPod, or a DS, or my 3G card, or speakers, or a radio. I took clothes, a guitar and a pair of drumsticks. What I realised in that time of unplugging was that without my distractions around me to keep me occupied, I was forced to deal with, accept, and live in the reality around me. There was no digital world I could use to extend my reach and escape from where I was. I had to engage the people around me when they spoke, and open up meaningful dialogue; become interested in the things and people that were actually around me. And it felt real - not disposable, or iterative. I was there, that was my life.
"What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." - Herbert A. Simon, polymath economist, 1971.
The world currently produces just less than two exabytes of new, unique information a year. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes. One billion gigabytes. We will produce more unique information in the next five years than has been produced in all of human history up to this point. We live in an information age where bits, not bullets, decide the outcome of elections, protect our money, and keep us safe in transit. This is unfathomable - we cannot grasp exactly how much data is out there. And it’s only going to get more. We laughed in Back to the Future 2 when Marty Jnr turned on 16 channels on his flatscreen TV but it’s not much different to having two IMs, a movie, 10 firefox tabs and your phone on when you get home after work. We are so overloaded with information that we have forgotten the world that’s actually in front of us.
"A body can only react as fast as it takes a signal to move from the brain to its extremities"
In ages gone by, with ships being the only method of international travel, it could take 8 months for any new piece of information that was discovered to reach the other side of the world. The global information pool, the sum of all human knowledge, could therefore only increase at a very small rate. With the laying of undersea intercontinental cables, this changed but they were so expensive to use that every day people didn’t have access to them. You still had to traverse communication channels to get things transmitted. With air travel it changed again, but the real money was optic fibre. Plug in some routers, develop a scalable non-centralised communications protocol and you have information freedom. For the first time in human history, individuals have the ability to quickly and easily add anything they learn to the global information pool. If I figure out a way to use my iPhone as a remote control for my car today, tomorrow it will be online and on Tuesday, someone in the UAE will have done the same and have it playing a video of a dancing cat at the same time. The rate at which we, as a civilisation, as a race, are learning has increased to the point where it can be considered instantaneous.
With an infinite increase in the rate at which information is being added to the pool, so increases the amount of information we are presented with daily. Every day, everyone we know updates their digital presence with new photos, statuses, quizzes, comments. Is this information essential to our survival? No. But we treat it as though it is, and we feed off it incessantly as if it were ambrosia, filling our thoughts and attention with who just ran into someone in the street and Which Jap Car Are You?; and somewhere along the way we have mistaken these things that we add for a meaningful contribution to the world around us.
Orwell predicted we would become enslaved and controlled by things we hated - repression, military force, big brother. However, I have a feeling that it was Huxley who was right; instead we have been subdued by things we love, slaves to facebook, twitter, online gaming, cable television, a different Big Brother. We have become so involved in our own expression of the trivial that we have forgotten what original content is. We praise people for making parodies and in doing so, promote metacontent over actual content - real contributions to the world. We talk in quotes from things we like, references to other things that were funny, and then mistakenly think that it means we are funny.
None of these sites or technologies are evil, or even bad. Information sharing is responsible for the development of the modern world. I probably wouldn’t know any of you if it wasn’t for the capital i Internet. But the way we use them has become something of dependency instead of freedom, like accepting a microwave tv dinner instead of cooking for yourself. We live through them rather than use them to live our lives better. This is not about not using technology - I love technology, it is my job and one of the things that interests me most. Without the internet I wouldn't have contact with a number of people who are absolutely indispensable to me. The meat of my point can be summed up quite simply:
"Do what you are doing."
So unplug. Turn off your phone. Get home from work and go see a friend. Call someone you haven’t talked to in a while and ask them to have dinner. You don’t need to check your facebook, or your twitter, or your tumblr, or your phone, or any one of the other hundred things in your life you’ve become a slave to. What they present is not necessary to your survival. The only thing that matters in your life is your relationships with the people around you. They are what is important, they are the things that will comfort you when you cry, they will keep you safe at night and keep you happy enough to keep getting out of bed and going through the pain of work just to see it through to the weekend.
Un. Plug.
For the first time since I wrote Quit, I’m so floored by a mental realisation that I am no longer able to perform my primary function at work.
I’ve long felt that Big Brother, sensationalised news, and celebrity gossip were a means of control by distraction on the part of mass media and the government. Flashy misdirection to keep us occupied while the real business of running the world happened in front of us, all around us. We sit in the middle of it, oblivious. But that was more of an idle passing thought than anything really tangible or pointed. They were useless crap and that was it.
Earlier this month I took two days off and went to Port Douglas, just outside of Cairns. When I got on the plane, I turned my phone off, and didn’t turn it back on again until I was back in Brisbane three days later. I didn’t take a laptop, or an iPod, or a DS, or my 3G card, or speakers, or a radio. I took clothes, a guitar and a pair of drumsticks. What I realised in that time of unplugging was that without my distractions around me to keep me occupied, I was forced to deal with, accept, and live in the reality around me. There was no digital world I could use to extend my reach and escape from where I was. I had to engage the people around me when they spoke, and open up meaningful dialogue; become interested in the things and people that were actually around me. And it felt real - not disposable, or iterative. I was there, that was my life.
"What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." - Herbert A. Simon, polymath economist, 1971.
The world currently produces just less than two exabytes of new, unique information a year. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes. One billion gigabytes. We will produce more unique information in the next five years than has been produced in all of human history up to this point. We live in an information age where bits, not bullets, decide the outcome of elections, protect our money, and keep us safe in transit. This is unfathomable - we cannot grasp exactly how much data is out there. And it’s only going to get more. We laughed in Back to the Future 2 when Marty Jnr turned on 16 channels on his flatscreen TV but it’s not much different to having two IMs, a movie, 10 firefox tabs and your phone on when you get home after work. We are so overloaded with information that we have forgotten the world that’s actually in front of us.
"A body can only react as fast as it takes a signal to move from the brain to its extremities"
In ages gone by, with ships being the only method of international travel, it could take 8 months for any new piece of information that was discovered to reach the other side of the world. The global information pool, the sum of all human knowledge, could therefore only increase at a very small rate. With the laying of undersea intercontinental cables, this changed but they were so expensive to use that every day people didn’t have access to them. You still had to traverse communication channels to get things transmitted. With air travel it changed again, but the real money was optic fibre. Plug in some routers, develop a scalable non-centralised communications protocol and you have information freedom. For the first time in human history, individuals have the ability to quickly and easily add anything they learn to the global information pool. If I figure out a way to use my iPhone as a remote control for my car today, tomorrow it will be online and on Tuesday, someone in the UAE will have done the same and have it playing a video of a dancing cat at the same time. The rate at which we, as a civilisation, as a race, are learning has increased to the point where it can be considered instantaneous.
With an infinite increase in the rate at which information is being added to the pool, so increases the amount of information we are presented with daily. Every day, everyone we know updates their digital presence with new photos, statuses, quizzes, comments. Is this information essential to our survival? No. But we treat it as though it is, and we feed off it incessantly as if it were ambrosia, filling our thoughts and attention with who just ran into someone in the street and Which Jap Car Are You?; and somewhere along the way we have mistaken these things that we add for a meaningful contribution to the world around us.
Orwell predicted we would become enslaved and controlled by things we hated - repression, military force, big brother. However, I have a feeling that it was Huxley who was right; instead we have been subdued by things we love, slaves to facebook, twitter, online gaming, cable television, a different Big Brother. We have become so involved in our own expression of the trivial that we have forgotten what original content is. We praise people for making parodies and in doing so, promote metacontent over actual content - real contributions to the world. We talk in quotes from things we like, references to other things that were funny, and then mistakenly think that it means we are funny.
None of these sites or technologies are evil, or even bad. Information sharing is responsible for the development of the modern world. I probably wouldn’t know any of you if it wasn’t for the capital i Internet. But the way we use them has become something of dependency instead of freedom, like accepting a microwave tv dinner instead of cooking for yourself. We live through them rather than use them to live our lives better. This is not about not using technology - I love technology, it is my job and one of the things that interests me most. Without the internet I wouldn't have contact with a number of people who are absolutely indispensable to me. The meat of my point can be summed up quite simply:
"Do what you are doing."
So unplug. Turn off your phone. Get home from work and go see a friend. Call someone you haven’t talked to in a while and ask them to have dinner. You don’t need to check your facebook, or your twitter, or your tumblr, or your phone, or any one of the other hundred things in your life you’ve become a slave to. What they present is not necessary to your survival. The only thing that matters in your life is your relationships with the people around you. They are what is important, they are the things that will comfort you when you cry, they will keep you safe at night and keep you happy enough to keep getting out of bed and going through the pain of work just to see it through to the weekend.
Un. Plug.
