Prologue
“Understanding Media was at heart a prophecy, and what it
prophesied was the dissolution of the linear mind.” It’s amazing to me that in
1964 long before the modern internet could have been imagined that there was
already people thinking that media could change our linear minds. Now in 2012 I
am starting to see direct parallels to his prophecy.
“The technological simulation of consciousness, when the
creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to
the whole of human society.” This to me sounds exactly like the internet. It is
a man made technology that simulates a conscious network of information that we
all create and build together sharing our knowledge with the rest of the world,
and soon everyone of us humans will be a part of it.
“We’re too busy being dazzled or disturbed by the
programming to notice what’s going on inside our heads.” I don’t think that
everyone is dazzled all the time. The Internet to me these days is comparable
to WWE wrestleing on TV. Everything is so fake, and everything is there to
capture your attention, and most likely trying to sell you something. As we
lose control over the internet to Mecha Godzilla corporations I think it will
become more and more “dazzling”.
chapter one
“What the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity
for concentration and contemplation.” I feel so very similar about the
internet. I used to spend much more time on the internet, but I too noticed how
it was changing my way of thinking. I feel like im in a constant struggle every
time I’m on the internet to gather more and more information faster and faster
and faster. I would have no time for contemplation.
He then says “Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects
to take in information the way the net distributes it.” Again I feel the same
way. My brain can not focus on things that take time to digest. I’m way to used
to ingesting media at a constant rate, and I believe that it has effected the
patience of people around the world who are so connected to the net. Think about
how frustrating it is to wait 30 seconds for a youtube video to load.
“We seem to have arrived, as McLuhan said we would, at an
important juncture in our intellectual and cultural history, a moment of
transition between two very different modes of thinking.” I have a feeling like
there is going to be rapid changes happening in the world, and I think that it
will come sooner than we anticipate. The Internet and our technology is going
to take off exponentially in the next few years, and I think that the people
who are able to harness this new power will hold power over people that can
not. I think it will just become more and more difficult to be computer
illiterate in the future.
Chapter two
Friedrich Nietzsche’s friend Heinrich said to him about his writing ball “perhaps
you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom.” And noting that in
his own work, “my thoughts in music and language often depend on the quality of
the pen and the paper.” Nietzsche replies “our writing equipment takes part in
the forming of our thoughts.” If they thought this way about a primitive type
writer how would they feel about computers and the internet? The thoughts of
all the greatest thinkers in history would be blasted with information they couldn’t
handle, while young children are becoming more and more involved with
technology and are more capable of using it than people much older than them.
“over the course of the next three decades he conducts many
more tests on many more monkeys, all of which point to the existence of broad
plasticity in the brains of mature primates.” If other people had taken his
exieriments results seriously in the first place how much further along would
we be in brain research? It seems like I read about a bunch of scientists who
somewhere along the way discovered great things but no one is ready to listen
to them. Maybe his research was just not widely spread enough. Now in the
internet age it seems like sharing news and results of experiments will be instantaneous.
Hope fully that will have a good effect on our society, and poor monkeys
getting their brains inspected.
“The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the
deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases,
the mind essentially trains itself to be sick.” This is really interesting to
me. This is referring to dome kind of depression or OCD, and it makes sense to
me that the more you think about how something is bothering you the more it is
etched into your mind, and becomes difficult to get rid of. Depression as a
disease is difficult to understand, but knowing how repetitiveness of something
can effect us neurologically and form bad habits is making sense to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment