Electric Dreams
Mood music from Lali Puna:
Hours a day are spent on the computer satisfying curiosities of mine about everything from how to make Italian nougat to the location of the last sighting of a giant squid. And every time I sit down at the computer to “look something up for a few minutes” the hours pass and I wonder if I spent my waking, breathing moments enhancing my being and using my finite time on earth wisely or not. Are my personal energies being used up by a machine or am I creating a small movement in the network I so actively participate in online?
When our eyes peer in to a screen, the vast energy from within us pours out. I wonder how much of that energy is transfered to the machine itself, how much is diffused in to the surrounding area, and how much of that energy is being absorbed in to a network of human connection online? Thus far, by my understanding (and largely my intuitive feeling) every sense capability we have emits a specific energy that interacts with the atoms and energies surrounding us. This led me to a fixation on the last idea left hanging by Mc Luhan in his article The Medium is the Message,”…Our human senses, of which all media are extensions, are also fixed charges on our personal energies, and that they also configure the awareness and experience of each one of us…” (Page 8). He proceeds to quote Carl Jung’s theory that Roman people during the heyday of the Roman Empire existed under a slave mentality because society operated in the total atmosphere of slavery. Nowadays the large portion of America that has a computer and accesses the internet on a daily basis, for work or pleasure, is beginning to structure the way we communicate with others through sites of information sharing. The way we consume is facilitated by online shopping. The music we listen to is accessed through online databases. The way we navigate in the physical world is pre-determined through computer navigation systems. Living in a city I’m not sure if I ever leave a network controlled by computers; A cell phone is on my person and fiber optic cables line my pathways on foot.
