Is the role of the human changing in regards to our relationship with information?
The short and obvious answer would be yes, but there is a serious discussion to be had here about this topic. What is the role of improvisational thought in today's society? It seems to me that critical improvisational thought has significantly diminished in the last twenty years, which may or may not be a departure from relatively stable levels that persisted for hundreds or even thousands of years previous. As our mobility to access archived thought increases along with the breadth of information available, we have started to encode less into our minds for rapid recall. What we encode becomes more and more what must naturally be encoded from frequent interaction, somewhat like muscle memory. In order to get deeper into this question, another question needs to be asked and answered...
How does the personal archive, library, and secretary (the computer) change the way we interact? And why did we accept this change, without much resistance, as the way life was supposed to change?
Does our ability to write respond to a core human preoccupation with the tension between the static whole, the stability and permanence gained from a temporally situated event (the snapshot) versus the amorphous flow, the transient, dynamic continuum that characterizes the improvisational interaction with information and the present? The ability to write and record resolves this frustration with the present because it provides an archive of the present-past, that which, from the present-now, we are able to connect together concrete fragments of the present-past. That connection--that ability to refer back to some concrete record of the events of present-pasts, analyze their different aspects, and connect them--soothes our essential human, subconscious anxieties.
It is an unspoken affirmation that our memory cannot, with adequate assurance, tell us why we are here and how we came to this present. And without that ability to explain how/why we came to this place now, we cannot begin to simulate or prepare for the future. Even more problematic is the realization that we will never know what was never recorded and that our reality is a construct of some incomplete archive. This highlights a contemporary social anomaly: the prevalence of simulation in our society has created a temporal fault line, and with this intersection of temporal tectonics the earth will shake.
Do we live in the present?
We exist in the present to record and experience it, yet we think in the past to predict the future. History is the immortalized, but not immutable aggregate of present-pasts. By creating a global space for records of the present-past we are creating multiple, simulated semi-presents. You could say that over the course of human history individuals have always lived in this simulated semi-present; however, with the increased availability of the present-past we are more tempted and likely to consult it, and with an increased ability to interact we are consistently in tension with other simulated semi-presents. Thus as we engage with these fragments of the present-past more and more, they can either increase of decrease the disjuncture between the multiple semi-presents.
It seems that communication is the most efficient way of closing these semi-present disjunctures because humans are preoccupied with preserving or updating their interpretation of the present. The prevalence of improvisational thought has decreased in response to the extent to which the semi-present has increased. (The extent to which the past influences our daily decisions in life). In order to construct the present we are more concerned with the past, and this may be why improv. thought is decreasing and the process of isolating and integrating is increasing. In order for something to effect the present, it must be archived? In order for something to be trusted it must be linked to the past?
How far will we continue with our subconscious human effort to record?
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