Taking Stock
Worldwide there are 5 billion searches a day. More than 300 million photos get uploaded per day.
Our world has been copied to outrageous proportions. If the world would vanish and the net remains (by some star-trekky astrophysical postulate), would the world still exist? At least, as we know it…. Or politely touched up?
All Used Up
Perhaps, your little left toe has not been uploaded yet! Hurry now! Or can the world exist perfectly without that stub? Without the whole of you even? Including the very memory of you…? Plenty of others more or less like you available from Instagram, surely? Besides, we’ve got Einstein and Poincaré, Dalí, Miró and Cézanne. All in all, I’d say, let’s call it a day! The databank seems complete by now, project finished? Are we missing a landmark? A foolish hill? A trivial lake? Have we not every tributary of the Ganges on satellite at least? Every termite hill, even? So, okay tomorrow, another day, another ant-project on it’s way, but hey, we get the picture of where that’s headed right? So what are we still uploading for? Waiting for that mutant porcupine that lives on plastic?
Celebrate, Come On!
Oh, party-pooper me; we're not compiling a composite reproduction world; making a fraudulent almost-real collage; or assembling an encyclopedia of what life was like with our snaps and shots! We are celebrating this fest that is life, coming at us again and again and again and again.... Still, a tad disturbing that these are my first thoughts when failing to decide on a new wall-paper.
Head Back Down
I think I might just go for lime-green, it came recommended to me recently as a great new coat for a jaded bedroom. Maybe it will put me to sleep before I even sign in and find more to overwhelm me and make me rain on everybody's upload parade....
Photo: Stockalper Castle - Emblem of Upper Valais
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Overwhelming and so easy to be sucked in, to see what's being uploaded and some are most amazing, and here I am with real world about me checking out your upload ;)
If i start thinking about others and what they have done, i feel like i should stop living, because all the things i want to do is already done by someone else. All the photos i want to upload is already uploaded by someone else, even all the photos i want to take. So by experience i found out that it's better not to search for what others have done, at least not as much as we do now. And another thing is searching for ourselves, finding our selves, maybe i do like the pictures i take, even if it's an exact copy of someone elses work.(i used photo as example, could be said for every aspect of life)
Your text makes me think about why, when it comes to a possible future for humans and they will travel to the stars in spaceships, this time could be understood as a kind of transition pain. In such a future I could easily see myself as a ship's crew member - Startrek says hello - and think about the teething troubles of the Internet. In this sense, it is still a child, a very small one that is growing rapidly but is still in its little shoes.
Although my present heart hurts because the technology isolates us so much and I experienced an opposing imprint, I cannot help but find it fascinating. The times of physical exploration seem to be reserved for only a few people, and there I have to ask myself whether I was capable of such things at all. Out of the security and comfort of the Western environment, the uploads of pictures and texts remain. These are a space of their own. You can use it and marvel at it or criticize it. Both is certainly justified.
We all suffer more or less from our modern lives. We have so much freedom (of course still limited), we perfect everything always further and further. But we do not find satisfaction. Unless loneliness, isolation and sorrow can be satisfied differently. If one believes the writings and proofs of past scripts and paintings, we would be thrown back on a much more arduous life. I think then I'd rather live with what is now ...
In a way, the many uploads from all corners of the globe replace travel. It doesn't really work either, though ... . Millions of people who can afford to fly undertake journeys that used to be reserved only for kings or for daring adventurers who sometimes lost their lives.
Would the photos be a perfect holographic replacement (again like the holodeck of Star Trek), would we stay at home more?
I see beautiful films from strange places, it fills me with wings and inspires me. In fact, I don't need to travel to Japan if I can watch "Japanology" on youtube. I am happy that there are formats like this. They show me a world that could be far more beautiful than reality.
I would never have found such pearls in a library and if I did, then at a time when there was no Internet.
There is no stopping it.
I agree with so much you say here.
For people with living imaginations the internet cannot do much harm.
It keeps us busy from eating up our own minds.
yes, very much so. Every thing can be taken by its qualities. It's a matter of choice, on what I like to concentrate, I'd say.
HaHa! When my mind has nothing more to feed me with, I go and look somewhere else. True.