Without a Foothold Found
— on information
“The environment we live in is no longer connected to the mix of planetary processes which brought us all into being. It is solely the product of human mental processes. It is real but only in the way a theater or a fun-house is real. Our artificial environment is there, and we experience it, yet it has been created on purpose by other humans. It is an interpretation of reality, it no longer reveals how nature works, and it cannot provide much useful information to human beings who seek to see their own lives as part of some wider natural process. We are left with no frame of reference untouched by human intervention.” ¹
In the 40 years since these words were written, with the advent of smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc., all linked in the world-wide-web, the situation has become more intense, and its effects on all our lives more total and profound.
Now, for those of us who dwell in what we like to call “developed economies” or “advanced societies,” our world is marked by comfort, relative personal security, and considerable freedom in choosing how we wish to live. But even more, our lives are intimately enmeshed in vast networks of data gathering, data processing, and, to a more limited extent, data access. We are not confined to our body’s geographical location for our social, artistic, business, commercial, or political contacts. Much of our time is spent surfing the ever changing, never quite understood ocean of the world internet, a realm ruled by huge currents, huge predators, life forms barely recognizable as such. And as our fingers fly over keypads, making innumerable tiny choices, these all are recorded, compiled, rendered as profiles for all manner of commercial enterprises. This virtual self is then the basis for whatever possibilities the internet will then offer us. And, just as we change, our profile will change, what we are offered by way of consumer choices, social choices, cultural choices, and political choices will be altered accordingly by those who profit from providing an unending and precisely targeted stream of services and goods, tangible and intangible.
Eugene Halton described the childhood experience of television:
“by thousands upon thousands of acts of anxiety (an average of three thousand per day) relieved by the purchase of a commodity, which is the basic stimulus-response pattern of commercials, and by thousands of acts of unfelt violence, by endless images of overflowing magical luxury, by a world of disposable celebrities who provide the children who identify with them substitute emotions, the same way that pharmaceuticals promise substitute feelings…. This is the reality of early education in America — mind altering electro-chemical indoctrination…” ²
But the issue is not simply that all kinds of thoughts and imagery have become commodities that swamp us. In the current omnipresence of media imagery, our attention is itself a kind of commodity. Almost 50 years ago, Herbert Simon observed: “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” ³
“The media have not just been organizing human attention; they are the practical organization of attention…Attention is channeled in media pathways that traverse both hardware and wetware.” ⁴
Digital formatting allows aggregation of data, and integration of data points into profile outlines on a massive scale.
“New media lead directly to the hypersocialization of attention through the increasing collaboration among the programming industries to capture audiences, to the detriment of deep attention.” ⁵
Reciprocally, we are provided with access to unparalleled amounts of information which allow us to make contacts and acquisitions unimpeded by physical geography. All usages we make of our personal information devices, no matter how private, are recorded; they become part of our ever-evolving digital profile, our virtual self.
The digital realm is a meta reality, a reality about reality, virtual rather than actual; it expresses constant becoming, constant possibility. Existence here is a momentary concatenation of shifting elements.
It is a world we exist in, every bit as much as we exist in the world of oak trees, old cars, and toilet seats. And we exist in it, endlessly devouring and excreting data.
“Coextensive with the sensuous external world is an information landscape on which money and information move at a faster rate than labor and commodities, always preceding them..” ⁶
Our world is shaped by desire. Human beings, like all other living beings, divide their environment into what is needed (for breathing, drinking, nourishment, warmth, health, comfort, etc.) and what is not needed. Their (our) awareness of our environment is shaped by our conception of our survival. And all our interactions with the elements of our environment are devoted either to consuming what we need and eliminating what we don’t need. Consumption and waste production are the footprints of our passage.
It is the aim of the conversion of existence into data, that our world, our desires can be shaped and directed for the benefit of governments and profit-making entities. As we consume and disgorge information, data, etc., striving to fulfill our desires, we produce an endless and almost seamless spiral of intake and output. Most of the vast expanses of phenomena that we neither use nor discard are unknown to us. They are beneath or beyond or outside our notice. They are uncharted. Until we find a use or a threat in their existence, they will not have names in our languages.
Our engagement with the vast virtual world is animated by a nagging fear of unconnectedness, of being adrift in an unending space where we have no home or place or linkage. In this context, Trungpa Rinpoche once remarked “The cultural or national ego is much harder to penetrate than the personal ego.” The barely conscious assumptions about what is real, what is right, what is desirable, what is good, what is sane, what is beautiful and true that we use to define the world and our place in it, all are often hard to identify and harder yet to see past. Entering that expanse is disconcerting. Again, Trungpa Rinpoche: “The bad news is that you are falling through space without a parachute. The good news is that there is no bottom.”
_______________________
1 (from Jerry Mander Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television, Quill 1978,pp85)
2 Eugene Halton in ‘Brain Suck’- New Forms of Consumption, Mark Gottdiener, ed. Rowman and Littlefield, 2000,p.108)12)
3 Simon, H.A.- Designing Organization for an Information Rich world, in Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Johns Hopkins 1971, p.40
4 Beller cited in Crogan and Kingsley- Paying Attention- Towards a Critique of the Attention Economy- Culture Machine, Vol 13.2012 p.9)
5 (Stiegler cited in Crogan and Kingsley- Paying Attention- Towards a Critique of the Attention Economy- Culture Machine, Vol 13.2012 p.12)
6 (McKenzie Wark- Virutal Geography, Indiana UP1, 994 p.222 )
Douglas Penick’s work appeared in Tricycle, Descant, New England Review, Parabola, Chicago Quarterly, Publishers Weekly, Agni, Kyoto Journal, Berfrois, 3AM, The Utne Reader, and Consequences, among others. He has written texts for operas (Munich Biennale, Santa Fe Opera), and, on a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, three separate episodes from the Gesar of Ling epic. His novel, Following The North Star was published by Publerati. Wakefield Press published his and Charles Ré’s translation of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace In Rome. His book of essays, The Age of Waiting, which engages the atmospheres of ecological collapse, will be published in 2020 by Arrowsmith Press.