I’ve been thinking about the disposable and temporary, transient and ephemeral. Something to do with watching Douglas Coupland’s lecture at the Memory Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery last month. Plus some other stuff I’ve been thinking about. I love Doug’s novels, although I bet a few of them feel pretty dated now.
Watch Doug Coupland here
http://thespace.org/items/e00019bj?t=wcdv
Doug talks about how our brains might be “planned” by the content we put into them, people used to think through linear narratives, like books, now we think like the internet, non-linear, spidering from link to link and outsource our memories to the cloud of information available on devices. i.e., he doesn’t need to remember telephone numbers anymore, because the cloud holds them, so he can use that brain space for thinking about stuff (world peace).
After listening to Doug I started thinking about the feeling that everything is happening at once that occurs when you are exposed to the infinite information of the cloud. Without the perspective of living too much in the pre-internet age I have to surmise that the rapidity, or rather the instantaneousness, of the cloud means that you have the potential to know everything there is to know all at once, if only you had the brainpower (and the bandwidth) to do it. So we are living in an age of a-temporality. As Doug says, “all fashions seem to exist at once at the moment” he might be right, and it’s an interesting thought.
It made me think of post-modernity. Maybe because here at the end of the post-modern era everything has the same value, high and low, old and new, this might chime with the age of the cloud where everything is available at once. The internet behaves as a place without hierarchy when you interact with it (roughly speaking) and no class of culture or information (even incorrect information if those Sandy pictures tells us anything) has a higher or lower status. So if everything is on a level playing field what do you do next? Start creating your own hierarchies and orders? Yours would be different from mine, how democratic is that. Yet perhaps this is why there are no major political movements or artistic movements to speak of. (I’m putting Occupy to one side for the moment because I think it is a different type of beast)
If everyone curates their own hierarchies of interest, information, cause and belief, how would we get sufficient of us together whose priorities match up to start a movement, or a revolution?
Wanna start a revolution with me?
