{"id":11256,"date":"2016-12-16T23:13:10","date_gmt":"2016-12-16T15:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=11256"},"modified":"2016-12-16T23:13:10","modified_gmt":"2016-12-16T15:13:10","slug":"information-superhighway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2016\/12\/16\/information-superhighway\/","title":{"rendered":"Tripping through time on the information superhighway"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally posted on 1000wordvomits<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

I wanted to write about \u201ctripping through time\u201d. I was telling another friend about this essay that I\u2019ve been wanting to write\u2013 I\u2019ve told maybe 3 or 4 about this, and I figure that after a while it\u2019s easier to just write out what the essay is supposed to be rather than keep talking to people about the essay I\u2019d maybe-someday want to write. I know from experience that sometimes writing about what you want to write is the best way to get started on writing the actual thing that you want to write.<\/p>\n

Where do I start? I\u2019d like to have some sort of clever introduction, but really the first thought that comes to my mind is Facebook, and what a trippy experience that is. The word \u201ctrip\u201d originally meant to \u2018tread or step lightly and nimbly\u201d, and grew to mean a short journey or voyage \u2013 and later on it even meant \u2018a psychadelic drug experience\u2019. I mean \u201ctrippy\u201d in the last two senses\u2013 that it gives you a sort pf psychadelic experience. Something is trippy if it takes you on a journey or voyage, internally, sometimes instantaneously by moving the frame, giving you a new context, a new point of view. Sometimes many different points of view all at once.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what Facebook is like. It was originally meant to be a sort of massive address book, but it\u2019s become so much more than just that. It\u2019s become an endless stream of photo albums and snippets of thoughts and memories, all splayed out together. You can click on a person\u2019s profile picture and scroll through their past\u2013 often a single tap to the left shows you a picture of them from a full decade ago. That\u2019s trippy\u2013 to travel a decade in a second.<\/p>\n

I find it interesting to read my old messages and statuses and look at my old pictures. I\u2019ve often felt the compulsion to just sit down and go through all of my history chronologically, to re-experience my younger days with a more neutral, distanced, dispassionate view, to contextualize all of the mess and chaos through the lens of an older, more experienced, more world-weary me. The past on Facebook isn\u2019t a remembered past\u2013 memories are fallible and constantly edited and modified to fit our present narratives. It\u2019s a recorded past, and it often yields inconvenient bits that DON\u2019T fit the convenient narratives. Things that we said we wanted to do.<\/p>\n

Just today, Facebook\u2019s On This Day feature showed me a friend sharing a video from 3 years ago of how she\u2019d like to be proposed to, and her boyfriend commented \u201cshit, so much pressure\u201d and got 6 Likes for it. A couple of weeks ago, her latest boyfriend proposed to her, and she\u2019s engaged now.<\/p>\n

But Facebook doesn\u2019t allow those old inconvenient memories to decay or fade out\u2013 they\u2019re every bit as bright and clear today as they were when they first happened. Hardly anybody in the history of mankind has had to live with that sort of high-fidelity recording of their past selves\u2013 except maybe highly public figures like Presidents and Kings.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think Facebook was prepared for this. I don\u2019t think any of us were prepared for this. We thought we were just adding people to our superpowered address book\u2013 even adding acquaintances like that girl from the class next door in college that you never spoke more than a few words to. And now you get a constant stream of updates about her life, and you\u2019ll get to see her wedding photos, watch her children grow up, hear about her political views\u2013 all sorts of things nobody ever had to contend with in the past.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also really interesting to look at the pasts of older people, and see what they were like when they were younger than we are today. I find that really trippy. I can go on Facebook and look at pictures of my older colleagues from 8 or 9 years ago, and get a sense of what they might\u2019ve been like when they were even younger than me. I get to see comments and messages from people I\u2019m no longer friends with, people who I miss\u2013 people who continue to occupy parts of my mind not because of any specific intent on my part, but because of the nature of the medium that we\u2019re all embedded in.<\/p>\n

Before mobile phones became a thing, there was a very clear distinction between \u201conline\u201d and \u201coffline\u201d. You went on the Internet to go and hang out with people in cyberspace, the space that is no space, a realm of ideas and representations. The online world has since begun colonizing the offline world\u2013 software is eating the world. Tonnes of things that we see in meatspace have representations in the digital ether, so the phrase \u201ccyberspace\u201d seems awfully irrelevant.<\/p>\n

Cyberspace is no longer somewhere we go to, away from the world on clunky desktop computers with big CRT monitors and dialup. We\u2019re all on the Information Superhighway, but we\u2019re not using it to GO anywhere\u2013 it used to be presumed that it would be like a great library, and we\u2019d be able to access any content that we wanted.<\/p>\n

That dream has been realized. But even the dreamers hadn\u2019t foreseen that we\u2019d want to contribute, we\u2019d want to send and not just receive. We\u2019d end up writing and making videos and communicating with one another, and relationships would be built and destroyed, people would find spouses, find friendships, stalk one another, kill and murder one another, that regimes would be toppled, justice would be sought.<\/p>\n

The Information Highway has led us not to either salvation or damnation, but to ourselves.<\/p>\n

When I think about it, I realize that everything everyone is projecting about VR and AR must be necessarily flawed and incomplete. We have no idea how these technologies are going to be used. People are going to be artistic and talented and improvise and do all kinds of crazy shit. It\u2019s going to redefine, probably radically, our relationship with ourselves, our own thoughts, our own minds.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a hell of a trip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally posted on 1000wordvomits. I wanted to write about \u201ctripping through time\u201d. I was telling another friend about this essay that I\u2019ve been wanting to write\u2013 I\u2019ve told maybe 3 or 4 about this, and I figure that after a while it\u2019s easier to just write out what the essay… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11758,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[603],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/information-superhighway-e1623519737321.jpeg?fit=600%2C563&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-2Vy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11256\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}