Stepping out of the wasteland

Another Technodream last night.

This time I was floating amongst a scenic picture of a forest and looking to my left and right there were different versions of me floating passively through the perfect scenic space. My other self’s skin was in fluid motion each working as human monitors for different webpage’s that I had associated identities for. An adolescent version of myself skin pulsed with every heartbeat, etched upon him was my bebo account from my school days. There was another version of me who was a walking YouTube, his face was the video and below him was moving text being typed onto his skin all written by my hand - the comments I have made on that seductive site. Across from Mr YouTube was a banal version of myself, a boring sad eyed, boy with my plain facebook profile running down the length of his torso. Every tagged photo of myself tattooed into his limbs in all there miserable glory. There was MySpace me, stumble me and trademe me. The leader of technological doppelgangers was a body that was perpetually sinking into itself. Covered in new tabs where all my secret wanderings into the world of the web were being explored. His eyes reflected the darkness of my pursuits…the consequences of curious fingers.

Suddenly the background was right clicked, the mouse pointer moved mercilessly towards the properties option and within an instant I and my selves were trapped in the maze of a Windows 95 screensaver bumbling along hitting walls turning with ease only to encounter another wall we were trapped.

In my last dream, the lord of the internet asked me why pursue when I am technology too? Well it would seem that my reliance on technology has resided due to the fact that by an act of what I can only describe as sub-conscious intent I knocked over a glass of water on to my parasitic laptop rendering it useless.

There was no withdrawal period and the world outside the laptop screen has never been so rich in beauty.

Aldous Huxley in Brave New World Revisited quotes Dr Enrich Fromm who argues that "Our Contemporary Western society in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress , is increasingly less conductive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason, and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so called pleasure...Let us beware if defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life, which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting."

Within tutorials for 314, no one has celebrated the technology we are studying. For example we all have admitted to the secret shame of our facebook faux pas and reasons for joining. Mine was to fulfil my voyeuristic tendencies - and I was not alone. Not one of us put up there hand in defence of facebook and proclaimed there love for the site and how great it was. Instead the general mood was one of unacknowledged resentment that pestered our feet like the incoming high tide as we walked along the beaches of denial. Every one of us admitted to the general anxieties that facebook created. We have created this new society on what is and physically indefinable medium and within that society there are conditioned unarticulated codes of conduct that we feel we must adhere too undermining our intuitions of the internet. We perceive the internet to be a free space of unparallel exploration one where there are no consequences and for those of whom to choose it, one can be as naughty as they like. We feel that we shouldn’t have to conform or to have our actions monitored and then put on display, yet, as the internet is developing we have less and less freedom to act privately.

Huxley describes the city as a place where the paramount feelings of the inhabitants are ones of worthlessness and isolation as our relationships to other people are defined by what we do and our objective function in life is aid the construction of a happy society. The internet on first glance offers us a chance to escape from these pressures. It is entertainment that we can control. It is personal and we can sketch ourselves in whatever fashion we like onto various webpage’s and sites. However, the internet is an urban being, a vast city of information where our indents are the equivalent of a single second story window amongst an endless world of complex high-rises. If you can reach meme status for a while you may be a billboard or piece of public art but eventually you will fade out as the attention of the masses is focused onto another something.

The roots of our fascination with stardom and celebrity are easily traceable as our life becomes more and more urbanised. We feel lost and insignificant, just one of billions amongst the ever increasing population of the world. Seeking relief we flee to our computer and partake in the world of the internet where we seek to establish ourselves in this new and promising virtual world. Yet, we have ruined our chances of becoming recognised as we have overpopulated the internet and reduced it to a new society that once your laptop gets wet, seems insignificant and petty.

Why does it seem so? Aside from the anxieties that are tied to our commitment to the establishment of a new online society and those feelings of guilt as we pursue and investigate that which we should not, the internet is a relatively unrewarding medium of which little benefits arise in comparison to the significant and ever increasing time we spend in front of our glowing monitors.

There is no hard work with the internet everything is made so easy that consequently nothing has any value. I consume music over the internet like a gluttonous piglet hell-bent on devouring more than I possibly can as I have but one life and over a lifetime of music. I do not cherish these songs I look at them as instances of minute pleasure amongst a sea of indifference. I do not wait for TV shows to come to me, I watch them in bed for hours and hours digesting whole seasons on rainy and sunny afternoons. There is no feeling of joy as the ads stop and the show continues as there are no ads. There are no conversations to be had either, generally I watch alone and the world outside is rendered voiceless as I sit with headphones on eyes glued to screen in front of me. I no longer have to look hard for obscure one of a kind items that mean the world to me as I sought so hard to find them amongst hours of shopping, I go online type down specific properties of the items I want buy them and then they arrive. Since my laptop has been down the memories of the webpage’s that I frequented have been thrown into the fire. I can’t remember my favourite sites and what that tells me is that in the context of my life they were and are completely insignificant. Sometimes it is better to work for the things you want. There is truth in this, a little bit of pain amplifies the sweetness of your endeavours, rewards remain rewards not moments watered down by their ease and frequency. Unlike the thousands of songs that populated my iTunes, the records that I own that I can smell and feel that I have to maintain and look after, that I have to flip halfway through the listening process are cherished possessions that I truly love. In the technological world we are lacking the ability to emotionally connect to the digital bodies of entertainment that inhabit this lacklustre space.

Nothing that comes from the internet is special anymore because of this we consume and consume hoping to find the thing will be. As a result, the investment of ourselves into the internet is neither a special or significant act. Just like there are thousands of funny as YouTube videos there are thousands beyond thousands of you. It is within our biological nature to be unique but the world of the internet is forcing us to conform to set regulations that force us to perform in certain ways depending on whatever identity or website we are prescribing too. Everything in a sense has been done and we are just copies of copies of some hybridised untraceable identity that we all base our internet identities upon. As the feeling of resentment rises we are slowing drowning in a culture of judgement. Bullies feel insecure and to remedy their own introspective scrutiny they hassle those they deem weaker. The internet allows us all to be bullies, and judge others as we make up for our insecurities. We are just one window in a land of a billion skyscrapers.

Our generation’s ability to empathise with others has also been reduced, but to some relief this is not our fault. As postmodern poets we live in a fragmented society where information is fat and unhealthy with no substantial value. Information is like fast food - easily obtainable. Consequently news is being reduced to that of a meme, it occurs, its partially considered then it’s gone and real tragedies are but blips of entertainment amongst a plethora of other attention seeking media texts. We are lacking a connection with the real and we continue to delve deeper into a world where we forget that people are people not the event we connect them too or the YouTube video that we watched.

Because as we invest more time in branding ourselves, we are creating a framework where one can only perceive of us as our internet pages and the humanity that is inherent to all of us is being reduced due to the parameters of a frequently changing innately insignificant world that is neither rewarding nor relevant.

Like my dream selves my contribution to the internet has already been forgotten. My facebook page is a grave that no one visits and my internet self remains in a walled maze to which there is no escape. The attention seeking intentions that led me to the walled wasteland perhaps have ends that could free me, but, do I want to be freed? In the end I will be tethered to a weight and dropped into the deep dark waters of the internet ocean where I will blink and drown till I am forgotten.