Moments Have You

So I went to the Coachella Art and Music Festival in Indio, California a few months back.

I waited patiently for the winter school semester to end, and I kept my eye on the prize (an epic concert) day in and day out.

The concert was unbelievable! Well worth the sizable amount of coin it cost to make it happen. It was an amazing experience, one that I hope to never forget. Sadly, memories are fleeting things, and as time passes I’ll lose more and more of the details, the specifics; and one day I’ll only have vague recollections of the experience… wrong! I have SO much more than memories and mental images and recollections… I have Facebook and YouTube
All of the people I traveled with are on Facebook, so we all posted our trip pictures online. Now I have access to something crazy like 1,000 pictures of the concert I never want to forget. As I get older and the time and space between the concert and the here and now grows, one thing will remain the same… the space that the memories occupy in Cyberspace.

YES! I can actually go through all 1,000 pictures and mentally recreate the 3-day concert. How cool is that?

Additionally, by using the video function on my digital camera I captured a moment that sits at the heart of the fond memories I have for Coachella 07′. John Frusciante (the guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers) is an amazing solo musician. During a R.H.C.P. show John will usually play at least one solo piece. From what I estimate to be the 15th row from the stage, I captured John Frusciante performing the Fleetwood Mac tune called “Songbird“.

I pulled my digital camera up to my eye and recorded my view–capturing forever that which I literally saw, and turning it into something I can see over and over again. Now that’s recollection!

Even better than the real thing; In your minds eye you can revisit the things you’ve seen and done, but with a digitally captured image of video you can revisit moments exactly as they occurred in time. Now I have posted that video on YouTube where it sits and waits for me to revisit it as I hold on to the sweet, sweet memories of days gone by.

Amonte…. no!

Sigh* My First Time…

Yeah, I was what you might call a late bloomer.

I didn’t even have an email account until I was 19 years old.

The first time I learned about the magic “internet” was when I was in grade 10 and South Park had just started to become popular among teen aged boys. I went to a freinds house because he told me that he had “downloaded” an episode of South Park. We sat in his parents office watching a tiny pixely screen on his family’s home computer. The jokes were great, the quality was terrible, and I had my first taste of what was to come.

About 3 years later, after being bothered by friends and co-workers for not knowing what “hotmail” or “ICQ” were, I asked my roommate if I could start an “email” account with his computer. I thought it was a bit of a bad idea to have my email sent to his computer, but since I didn’t have my own I decided it was an alright choice. Later I discovered that internet websites, such as hotmail, can be accessed from any computer.

ha…

So… fast forward 7 years and I have become a mid-level internet junkie. I am not into MUD’s, and I don’t BLOG (until now), but pretty much every aspect of my life has an internet based equivalent.

I live away from my family, so I use the internet to chat with them and send pics.

I have a job in Calgary, and I perform the bulk of my duties via email.

I have friends all over the world, and I rarely see them, but frequently interact with them online.

School, banking, media, the stock exchange, family, friends… they ALL have a place on the internet.

How did such a significant change occur over 11 years? Well, look no futher than everyone around you. We did it together. We showed the world that we want to be part of building a new world (Cyberspace), and the world reacted. Every service imaginable is available (in some form) via the internet. I don’t even use the phone book or maps anymore because I can just open up something called “Google” and find everything I need.

How much further can it go? How much more of ourselves, and the world around us, can be stuffed into Cyberspace? Well, we can’t physically enter Cyberspace, so things like medical operations and tattoo’s can’t be done in Cyberspace. We can’t organically grow plants or animals as they appear in the real world in Cyberspace. We can’t make direct physical contact with other people through Cyberspace. But maybe we can after all?

French philosopher, Renee Descartes, liked to talk about a little something he thought up “Cogito Ergo Sum.” Translated to English this says “I think, therefore I am.” From this he later developed the notion of mind-body dualism. In short, the theory proposes that the harmonious connection between the mind and the body is how we have come to exist as we know it. (ha… see the pun?)

Here is where the relation between Descartes dualism and our modern world get interesting…

In the real world the mind drives the body–sending messages to our limbs so that we can walk, sending messages to our mouth so that we can talk, etc.

In Cyberspace the body drives the mind–typing commands on the keyboard, navigating the net with our mouse, etc.

So, if we can think our way through the internet, and interact with people and things in Cyberspace, then I guess that what we have in the here and now is a different type of dualism. The duplicity of our lives; online and offline.

Wow!

I’ll always enjoy that for me personally, this second realm of existence stems from the desire to hear fart jokes and dirty language on South Park.

Amonte–NO!

What is a Spider Pig?

What is a Jedi?

THE LOSS OF THE REAL

Cyberspace is a terrifying place. I know because I live there.

Actually, you probably know this too because you probably ALSO live in Cyberspace.

Other than the lack of tangible physical objects and actual physical contact:
Cyberspace is a place in the world!!

How you interact with this place is based off of your self-defined projection of yourself (often complicated by grammar and typing skills).

I guess the argument could go that “we are based off of a self-defined projection of ourselves in the real world too!” But that argument is smelly because we all know that when travel to Cyberspace we are less inhibited and therefore behave DIFFERENTLY than we do in the real world.

Anyways, I mentioned something about Cyberspace being terrifying, and the title of this blog is all ominous and creepy – “THE LOSS OF THE REAL”. Truth is, I got that title from the article we read called “Virtuality and Its Discontents” … but you already noticed that cuz you did the reading, right?

The article discusses how screens and keyboards have replaced ACTUALLY BEING SOMEWHERE or ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING . This is only possible due Cyberspace’s acute ability to take advantage of the access it has to our minds.

Remember when I was talking about how we ‘project ourselves’ into Cyberspace?

Well, picture something like the light off a lamp pointing down and illuminating a small area, or picture a tractor beam from a Sci-Fi show.

We send a beam from our minds, via our eyes, to whatever it is that we are attending to. This is one part of the psychology behind how we interact with the world around us.
When we are in Cyberspace, we recalculate our level of interaction with the “space” around us and the results are things like: behaving differently (due to less–even no–inhibition), and communicating differently (using stylized text rather than our spoken lexicon).

Basically, we present ourselves differently because we think differently. Quicker!

The bizarre metaphysical connection between our mind-brain and our existence, as part of Cyberspace, is a scary thing. A really scary thing!

We are learning how to interact with the nouns of the world around us without actually interacting with anything physical, all because of a direct beam fusing our thoughts to a location where we can project ourselves. The intangible landscape of Cyberspace.

Sherry Turkle, the author, mentions that “virtual experience may be so compelling that we believe that within it we’ve achieved more than we have”.

I wonder if that is what I’m doing now? Maybe this ‘direct beam’ I keep blogging about isn’t such a scary thing. What do you think?

Amonte – No!

Blogs, Blogs, Blogs –Some are good, some are bad. Blogs, Blogs, Blogs –Ask your mom and ask your dad.

hello!

Do you want to know why the internet is important?

Check this out.

“For Great Justice”

Now you know.

Amonte-NO!