The Hyperion Chronicles
“Currently carrying a torch for Nick Drake”
Editor’s Note: Back in March I ran a pool for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. I had no money to give, but I promised to write a column about whatever the winner so desired. “ Mineral” won, and he asked me to write about the paradox of the Internet bringing us closer together, and yet isolating us as well. This led me to think of all sorts of great paradoxes, and perhaps this will start a series. To pay off my debt, I have written the following essay. It may not be what Mineral wanted, but I wasn’t sure I had that much to say about the isolation, so I chose to approach it this way instead.
#358 THE INTERNET PARADOX
It could be argued that the first truly unifying force in human history was language. Preceding that were the need for food and shelter, familial bonds, the desire to escape danger, etc. However, these desires could be more accurately called instinctive drives, and most mammals share them to a varying degree.
Whatever rudimentary communication other animals employ, it most certainly involves the present, give or take a few minutes. There were no jackals coming back to the pack: “I almost caught a gazelle THIS big!” In other words, you really had to be there.
With language, however, communicated thought could be stored; compartmentalized in these blocks called words and used again at a later date. This may seem basic, but it was extraordinary. Suddenly, the future could be planned and history could be recorded, even it was only about last night. Of such things are civilizations made.
The next big step was written language. Permanence could be added to the ideas and concepts unaffected by memory and human chicanery. Though undoubtedly lying preceded even language, the mere possibility that words could be recorded in a permanent state allowed for civilization to surge ahead. Accumulated knowledge could be more easily passed down, plans could be drawn up, and mothers could leave messages for their kids on stone-age-equivalent refrigerators.
As proof of how monumental language was, look how long it propelled humanity without any other gigantic unifying force. True, there were agriculture, nations, discovery, and many others, but these more often invited competition rather than unifying people in any cohesive way. (The competition is itself another paradox, but that’s for next time.)
One could argue laws and jurisprudence unified people, allowing most to live in a society that would become more prosperous and free from harm. While this is true to an extent, a rational analysis would conclude that Codes of Conduct came about more likely to simply allow human interaction without tearing society apart at every little snag. (So, too, were the goals, or at least the reasons, for Economics, Social Rank, and other demarcations.)
Though an offset of the printed word, a special mention must be made for books and especially newspapers. A book allowed a comprehensive set of ideas and thoughts to be collected. You could read it. I could read it. We might disagree on its meaning, but we both still have a large amount of information otherwise inaccessible.
Newspapers furthered the access to knowledge exponentially. Within weeks, sometimes days, the general populace could hear of events across town, across the country, across the world.
This obviously leads to the telegraph and then the telephone, things most people today pull away from (apart from teenage girls, anyway). While we may feel squeezed by our inability to escape the modern machine and be truly “incommunicado,” the impact of these two inventions cannot be overstated. Weeks and days were now reduced to mere hours, and the areas we could monitor increased dramatically, to virtually cover the globe.
To back up a minute (or several thousand years), Art cannot be discounted in this equation. As early as cave drawings humans were able to convey a subtlety of emotion that even the most incisive story or words often failed to denote. To speak of beauty is one thing: to capture its essence…there are no empirical studies on this (how could there be?), but it is possible Art played as large a role as language to propel humanity forward.
This leads us to the photograph, which ushered in the age of subversion, moving us from critical analysis of information to passive intake. The reason for this is the principle sense of humanity: sight. The eye takes in the image, and the brain interprets this as real. Modern science suggests this system is in fact a rather inaccurate way to catalogue the true nature of reality. The argument, however, is moot, as thousands of years of development do not vanish on the whim of quantum physicists.
Because the brain interprets the eye’s “data” as real, photographs brought a giant leap forward in the casual assumption of truth. While many people naturally consider the written word to be generally true, there is at least a learning curve that allows for critical analysis. The photograph “saw” reality, so it must be true.
Interestingly, a photograph’s mechanics involve pictures an image much more artificially than most realize. The camera “captures” things not there and misses things that are (not to mention color and size distortion, two critical elements to our perception and decision-making process). Nonetheless, despite its faults, and the lure of passivity, the photograph allowed us to see things otherwise impossible to reach. To hear of a battle, to read about the casualties are one thing, but to see the bodies lying prostate and motionless on the ground…that is something else entirely.
It wasn’t long until the still photograph evolved into the motion picture. A movie is simply many still pictures strung together, to give the appearance of real-time. In this manner, the motion picture is even less a measure of reality than a still picture. However, film is also dynamic and mimics life far more than a still-shot. Whatever doubts might have remained about reality in photographs erased with the coming of Motion Pictures.
(It might seem strange to spend a sizable chunk of space discussing the sometimes false nature of what people were seeing. Indeed: perhaps the idea of gaining greater knowledge at a cost of superficial reality might be another paradox worthy of its own discussion. It is included here, though, because of where we are going.)
On the positive side, movies allowed us to “see” other people, other things, other places, almost as if we were there. Now, instead of telling or reading about the battle, or even seeing the still bodies, you could watch the carnage as it happened. The world shrunk even more at this point, as we could all experience the same stimuli now, or at least more closely approximate it.
While many early movies were simply real people and the “news” stories otherwise covered in papers, films soon became the domain of storytelling. I make no distinction between this and “news” in the sense of bringing us together. I would submit that more people share an experience of Hamlet or King Kong than news footage of building the
After movies came radio. Basically, this was a one-way telephone, exploded en masse. Stories were once again a big part of it, but news took a prominent role as well. The time lag dropped to minutes and even seconds as information continued to come to us faster and faster.
Whereas movies were something we went out and sought, the telephone and especially the radio was something that came into our home. I bring this up because the most unifying force since who-knows-when was about to appear, and begin its invasion: Television.
Television did not really invent any new concepts. It took the visual medium of film and added the immediacy of radio. The effect, however, was gargantuan.
Television allowed us to view reality—or the perception of such—in a virtually total passive manner. We did not have to get dressed, trudge up to the theatre and buy a ticket to sit with strangers in a dark room. We did not have to pick up a newspaper and decipher the words and their meaning. We just had to sit there—in our living rooms—and watch and listen to whatever was on.
Theoretically, brainwashing against one’s will is more in the realm of science fiction and third world prisons than your living room, but it is hard to ignore the effect Television had. TV combining all other forms of communication, packaged nice and square without you lifting a finger.
(The square-shape came about to differentiate Television from Movies, when it was feared TV would just be a passing fad. Platonic logic, however, would argue that the Square-shape Form connected with something primitive in us and made us more likely to trust the TV.)
Television bombards us with images. An entire generation spent its formative years—in past ages out in the world—instead just sitting there, watching passively, and taking it all in. We snidely joke about the “Idiot Box,” but in perhaps a more dangerous way than ever, society took for granted the illusion of TV’s reality.
Doom and gloom notwithstanding, it cannot be argued that Television united people more quickly and unlike any other force in history. Shared experience and knowledge was now immediate, visceral, and entered into almost every facet we use to perceive our own lives.
Where were you when Kennedy died? What did you do the rest of the day? The moon landing? The Challenger Explosion? The Berlin Wall falling? 9/11? If you were alive, the odds were you didn’t listen to the radio, watch a movie, or read a book. You watched Television.
All of this has been a (perhaps overly long) way to get to the Internet. First developed in the late ‘60s and ’70s, disseminated through the wide-spread use of the home computer, by the mid to late ‘90s the Internet was on the move, and now it is almost impossible to find a segment of industrialized society not affected—if not ruled—by the Internet.
Like Television before it, the Internet does not bring us anything new. There are words to read. There are pictures to see. There are sounds to hear. You can do all of it sitting in your underwear.
Yet, no one would seriously challenge the assertion that the Internet truly is new in its effect on our lives. For one thing, unparalleled bits of information are out there, awaiting discovery. As with previous mediums, it’s not all true, and sadly many of the same prejudices (promoted by the Television Generation) have crept in and neutralized people’s critical thinking skills.
However, if we accept that this shortcoming will always be with us, we can turn to the positive. I can look up and call someone in
As far as unifying elements, the Internet once again dwarfs everything that came before it. People who used to feel helpless and alone in
Where once the geographical, racial, and societal barriers put caps on who a person could meet in her lifetime, now the lid was off. Friendships, romances, meaningful dialogue were now taking place all over the planet; the only restriction your connection speed.
In ages past one man might have half an idea, mostly never connecting with anyone to help him finish it. Now, there is an immediate way to share ideas, feeding into and off of each other, creating technology and advances at a pace so breathtaking there is no comparable analogy to explain it. Humanity comes ever closer to truly uniting in their ability to share ideas, information, and vision.
And yet…
All of this marvelous wondrous opportunity right there in front of us…and it is remarkable….
And yet.
There is a growing—alarmingly so—sense of isolation and disconnectedness brought on by this very same Internet.
Other unifying “inventions” of history certainly had their divisive side. However, this usually came about as an inevitable reaction to human nature in its worst sense. The Internet, while surely including that motivating factor, is designed to operate in such a way that encourages this isolation.
All that wonderful information now available? You don’t have to go to a library to find it. You don’t have to go to the corner to pick up a magazine, lift the telephone to make a call, or even peek your head out the door to pull the newspaper off the stoop. It’s right on the Internet.
At least with Television, other people could be in the room. The Internet, though, runs off the home computer (or the laptop, and notice it is not laps-top). By design, these devices were created to be singularly used at any one time.
And thus, the human touch begins to slowly sever.
It began with Television, which allowed us to stay home and take it all in. However, to be fair, most people were already at home. Television at least gave them something to talk about the next day at the water cooler, a way to connect with friends and co-workers without having to resort to the weather. People still actually had to leave home, to shop and work and so forth.
The Internet, though, isolated us at work, as well as home (not to mention the growing segment of people who now work entirely from home, including myself). No longer do you have to leave to buy books, see movies, and even purchase groceries: there are services on the Internet that will do all of these things for you.
Perhaps, this too was inevitable, and not to be overly feared. However, the Internet isolates people in far more ways than just modern convenience. Relationships have never been easy but are increasingly difficult in the Media Age. (With perfect-looking people with funny one-liners and huge
Still, since the breakdown of arranged marriages men and women still have had to get “out there” to meet people. An increasingly large number, however, simply aren’t.
Tired of rejection, hurt, loss, and the pain of failed relationships, many are finding it easier to “meet” people online. Sometimes this leads to actual physical connections (with both heart-warming stories and nightmares for results), but even this percentage ebbs as more and more people find it easier to bypass the physical meeting all together. True, an online relationship cannot afford sexual intimacy, an integral part of most long-term relationships, but here again the Internet has stepped up to fill the void. (And then some.)
Let me bring this closer to home: the reason you are reading this is a contest, won by a man I have never and perhaps will never meet. It is not a bad thing. Without the Internet, I would never know him in this limited cyber-capacity at all. And I am glad I do. Still, there is a “human” connection not present. Will this column make him happy? What would this “happiness” look like on his face?
Running around yelling, “the sky is falling!” is not helpful. The isolation I write of doesn’t make the Internet bad or dangerous as an entity, and it may not grow to epidemic proportions, but may simply be a blip on the timeline of human growth. Or, future advances may solve the problem in a way not currently conceivable.
However, some of these warning signs are scary. Humans have thrived in spite of—or perhaps because of—paradoxes that seem at odds with further development. That may be the case here. It may be a side effect we will have to overcome. But it may be a great problem, one best tackled sooner rather than later.
If you agree, nod your head. I’ll pretend I can see you.
Hyperion
Credits
Thanks to Mineral, for winning the contest and starting me off on this (and, might I add, for talking me into making a website)
Thanks to Bear and Tootsie for Editing and Feedback
Special thanks to Taisie, who fed me chocolate peanut-butter pie when I was dead tired, and gave me the courage to stay and write this
Motto Explanation
One night Mineral IMs me (I’m pretty sure he was a little tipsy) and starts prattling on and on about Nick Drake. I got a hold of a few songs, and I’m a believer. I didn’t realize he was the original singer of “Suicide is Painless” (the wordless version is the M*A*S*H* theme song), long a favorite of mine.
Upcoming
In Movie-Hype, we count down the top ten Super Hero Movies. In Hyperion Thinks too much, we continue to talk about everything. And, come Monday, a new website, along with a new chapter of Fagin Dupree
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The Hyperion Chronicles, MovieHype, and Hyperion X are made possible by the Hyperion Institute for Advanced Callimastian/Callipygian/Kickassian Studies. This column is not sent out unsolicited. If you do not want to receive it any more, or if you just have questions or comments, please contact us at hyperionchronicles@shaw.ca If you are a current reader, please feel free to forward this to anyone, and tell them they can contact us by clicking on the address. And, since I know that no one is left reading, no one will mind if I take off my pants. Aaaaah. That’s better.
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