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panicinthestudio · 5 years

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Yes long, posts like this happen now and then.

It’s occurred to me during the late nights like this that all of this is armour. That people aren’t growing further apart directly because of technology or that we’ve thicker or thinner skin about things around various issues--they are barriers we’ve put up. Some of them are more subtle and others are quite literal, in general it seems like a jumble of all the things we’ve aggregated, conscious and unconscious cultural design.

Things like emergent wearable tech, beginning with portable music moving to the discreet and miniaturized, ballooning into smartphones, watches, tablets, influencing portables, and integrating into shoes and clothes. They are things that seem to build up a type of tech that tracks, covers, and are held relatively close to the body by mimicking the existing barriers that we’ve become socialized to accept, but with a sensory interface that has become pervasive.

The effect of people sealing themselves off psychologically is a mental, emotional, and physical one. It’s easy to see why VR, robotics, and direct digital to physiological interfaces are prevalent and actively being researched again. We are easily drawn in to a very solitary space even when we’re communicating with people. One such symptom is verbal and written communication becoming especially tangled with short forms like text and audio into video, gifs, emoji, and even carrying multiple conversations simultaneously across platforms.

Screens draw the vision with imperceptible flickering business and cool light; on the tactile side we have touch, cursors and brushes, and textual inputs that give real and simulated feedbacks; while our brains are stimulated with a boatload of written, generated, and created works that bombard us with almost everything possible we could want to experience visually, audibly, and intellectually. And when novelty runs out there’s the minutia of something else to follow.

Is it any wonder how quiet some places and public transit can get? People withdraw to a favourite or new album, fandom, an episode of something topical, the news, gossip, a book without pages: the person’s physical location (and really, the object of interest’s physical dimensions) stop mattering. They could be in bed, on vacation, or on a space station, and it wouldn’t matter.

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What it reminds me of is when road rage became a media sensation. Not the strange fascination people had and still have with hair-trigger bursts of violence, but because it was the reaction of people being shocked back into the present moment.

Consumer vehicles in the 1980s and 90s through to now have developed with this immersive design language and technology in mind. Enhanced and assisted controls, refined transmissions, state of the art audio and digital displays, climate controls, sound dampening, and other functions that conceal and seal us in a physical and psychological bubble that distances us from the reality that we’re moving and controlling vehicles, passengers, and sometimes more weight than we want to think about moving at legal speeds.

That is not to say people are less responsible, aware, or responsive; something unexpected happens and it breaks though causing a instinctual reaction of panic or anger like being startled awake or a hypnic jerk.

With the way we are starting to understand less obvious sources of stress and fatigue from sources like diet, lifestyle choices, existing life and social/economic circumstances, but particularly technology and sometimes what it’s shielding or depriving us, I believe there’s a link to those situations with the unbridled comment rage and obsession people have on social media.

Streamed 24-hour news and content cycles, work, leisure, pleasure, entertainment, and social interactions have been forming digital niches for decades now, and new ones appearing all the time. Ballooning echo chambers enhance the polarizations of a compressed world of social, cultural, political, and economic difference; worlds that are continuously in contact, exchange, and clashing with each other while on the same dimensionally flat and virtual space. This doesn’t dismiss any of it as superficial and immaterial when they can actively grow and connect to create real life experiences.

In a way it begins to explain outgrowths of popular culture like binge-watching, idol culture, virtual spectating and e-sports, media/intellectual property franchising, even the soft pop adoption of things like spoilers, trigger warnings, social justice and opposing reactionary movements. Sure, there’s older parallels and similar roles in older media and interactions, but now there’s an increasingly tense breach. On one end, the intense desire and ability to immerse beyond personal limitation to an new extreme (with multiple perspectives, narrative outcomes and specific situations as in video games or a concert, psychological or altered experiences, the perfect persona/character to leverage creative obsession, moral superiority in an expansive argument, or an entire creative work all at once), with overload to the point of exhaustion or degrees of trauma.The latter explains the loss of enjoyment, hyper-critical, and lacking sense of novelty when confronted with so many choices, highlighting where we have very few options and issues beyond our ability to cope.

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It ties into less direct phenomenon like cultural appropriation, plastic surgery, expansive popular body modification, as well as self-referential culture like hipsters, memes, and faux social “irony”. Cultural appropriation, misuse of cultural property, and plain prejudicial racism highlight the clearer and the ambiguous borders of cultural protectionism blockades. Depending on the context and severity, it can also illuminate the complex dynamics of where advantages are, who can effectively claim ownership, and who feels entitled to abuse and take. There aren’t pointless fights and returns to the consistent experience of threat of loss or lack of respect to a less powerful community identity.

Tattoos, piercings, surgical mods and manipulations continue as traditional sensory, cultural, aesthetic, and ritual experiences yet have been tuned very differently. Appropriation of social purpose, conservation of styles as well as techniques and designs, purpose, narrative, or communal resonance can become secondary to aims of achieving a sense of conformity, visual/functional manipulation, producing or enhancing ambiguity, and intentional divergence. Literally embedding a sense-barrier of a design that draws attention, repels it, or visually/mentally/functionally changes

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People have become less particular about how they want to react or deal with situations. Apathy and affected uncaring becomes part of a circuit of actively, over-invested and corresponding counter statements. It’s a world where we’re bombarded with filtered and unfiltered, poorly fact-checked opinions that stack up and we replicate them in a race not to be accurate or correct, but to rebuild the crumbling barriers as they fall.

#state of the world #writing #works

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