Globalisation &Thought Provoking Entropy | 31 Aug 2010
Digital Homogenization
The relationship to the world that the modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia:
Man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being.-
- Václav Havel
Pl read this fascinating essay by Jonathan Harris -The Renaissance man for information age
Our Digital Crisis
The Internet is causing mass homogenization of human identity, making us all look the same.
We use the same tools and social networks, fitting into the same templates, designed by companies to maximize page views and profits
Most online experiences are made, like fast food, to be cheap, easy, and addictive: appealing to our hunger for connection but rarely serving up nourishment. Shrink-wrapped junk food experiences are handed to us for free by social media companies, and we swallow them up eagerly, like kids given buckets of candy with ads on all the wrappers.
These experiences are sensitive neither to individual humans nor to the human collective, but only to page views and growth (in a corporate, not personal sense).
It is fitting that these companies call their customers “users”.
As we fill in the same boxes, answer the same questions, and express ourselves in the same generic ways, we might think this convergence of identity is a good thing, leading to some kind of global unity or mass empathy. But true empathy comes not from forcing people all to be the same, but from helping people to appreciate their differences.
Our online tools do a great job at breadth (hundreds of friends, thousands of tweets), but a bad job at depth. We live increasingly superficial lives, reducing our relationships to caricatures and our personalities to billboards, as we speed along at 1,000 miles an hour.
We trade self-reflection for busyness, gorging ourselves on it and drowning in it, without recognizing the violence of that busyness, which we perpetrate against ourselves and at our peril.
For the last 100 years—from letters, to phones, to faxes, to emails, to chats, to texts, to tweets—communication has been getting shorter and faster, but we are approaching a terminal velocity.
I doubt there is a shorter means of communication than the tweet, unless we start to make monosyllabic grunts at each other or communicate silently, brain to brain. Brief gestures of communication can be beautiful, but can also be shallow. So what will happen next? Will we stop at the tweet, or will we bounce back in the other direction, suddenly craving more depth? I’d bet on the latter.
But even if we start to crave more depth, we cannot run away to a more primitive time.
The momentum of technological growth is too strong for us to prevent it from defining our future. Like it or not, our future world will largely be digital.
Instead of fleeing to the forest, we must find the humanity in the machine and learn to love it. If we decide the humanity does not yet exist there in the ways we expect, then we must create it.
© By-Jonathan Harris -
Jonathan makes projects that reimagine how humans relate to technology and to each other. Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling.
on 31 Aug 2010 at 11:53 am 1.Denise Moys said …
Meaningful, thought-provoking and hope-giving – Thanks!
on 31 Aug 2010 at 9:14 pm 2.Marie said …
Another great subject from you Ajay.
Thank you so much.
I’m always grateful and thankful to
Michele who drown me to your blog.
Fortunately we are unique in our DNA..
and the great challenge for each of us is…
How can I make myself different ?
I’m already unique, so I can stay like this..
but I have to be careful not to fall into
the system. Using the system to improve our
life is what we should do..
Easy to say.. not that easy to do
This is a link to J. Harris talk on TED
http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_harris_tells_the_web_s_secret_stories.html
Have a great week.
on 04 Sep 2010 at 4:29 pm 3.Nimesh said …
Profoundly disturbing and scathingly true.
I think we are slowly and gradually moving to homogeneity on the surface but deep crevices beneath.