Let’s finish this journey where it started with James Burke’s original proposition for The Day the Universe Changed…
“Your world is a reflection of what you know today. Change the way you think, by introducing new ideas, and you will change your world”.
Now consider this old advertising truism…
“Reason leads to conclusion
Emotion leads to action
Action leads to transaction”
Sure ideas fuel your dreams but it is your actions that change your world. So it is your actions, and not your ideas, that really change the way you think.
Each subsequent wave of the MobCon is changing the way we think but not because of the ideas we encounter and connections we make in our daily journeys online and on the phone but by the devices we employ to undertake the journey.
“You are right our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” – Nietzsche
The original Ctrl OCVZXS machines with their save and undo buttons offered us the ability to go back in time and start all over again. Here was a virtual world where our mistakes no longer proved fatal. However this magical ability to save and undo came at a price. The price was to limit our imagination to the capabilities of the device.
It was to prove a Faustian bargain. Where pen, paper and conversation once provided an infinite forum for observation and the exploration of ideas and dreams we now limited our imaginations to the finite capabilities of the Crtl OCVZXS time machine. That most quintessential of all human activities, Design, devolved into the mash-up as we spent more and more time searching, compiling and editing than imagining, contemplating and problem solving.
The reality is that after more than 30 years of interacting with the Crtl OCVZXS time machine we have modified our behaviours and expectations to the point where we believe the virtual worlds we are creating by connecting these Crtl OCVZXS time machine together are just as important, if not more important than the real worlds that we inhabit.
Today the Crtl OCVZXS time machine not only plays a part in forming our thoughts it also consumes our much of creative energies. The question is, having limited our perspective to seeing the world through the “Google eyes” of the Crtl OCVZXS time machine, are we still capable of having an original thought outside of the Hyper Connected Virtual GroupThink that is the Zeitgeist of our times?
“That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” - Nicholas Carr Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Today we are seeing a new breed of intelligent, hand held devices that have the potential to blend the virtual and the real worlds into a single eco system.
These intelligent mobile devices will no doubt continue to modify our habits and our expectations, our ways of thinking and seeing the world. They promise great things.
Let’s just hope a world of instant mobile intelligence and virtual hyper connectivity is what we all dream it could be.
[Updated 19-11-2010]
Further Reading
“What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.” – The Next Web - Newsweek in 1995: Why the Internet will Fail.
itjourneyman
March 4, 2010
Thanks for all the great posts. Very informative and certainly food for thought.