Have you ever had an idea? A thought that you just knew? You didn’t have to think about it because you knew it. It was something that had been going through your head for a while, and you didn’t have to name it, you didn’t have to define it, you didn’t have to qualify it with anything, you just knew it. Like gravity, or a treadmill machine, it just all made sense without needing to be explained how it worked or the processes that were shaped together to make it work. Have you ever had one of those?
Then, one day, you’re reading a book, and out of the blue you find out that the idea that you had, the one that you didn’t have to think about at all, the one that was so easy and simple that you thought everyone knew why it worked, it had a name. Someone had studied it, defined it, showed all the reasons for and against it, and based their entire academic career describing something that you just knew. I just found one of those, and the term is Hypermodernity.
The basic idea around hypermodernity is that it’s a way of understanding or looking at society that is based on a belief in humanity’s ability to understand, control, and manipulate every aspect of human experience by a commitment to science and knowledge by using new technologies. It says that we have more ability to improve our individual choices and freedoms by informing ourselves with all the possible information at our disposal (including knowledge gained from technologies such as the internet and wireless capabilities). It pretty much sounds like everyone who critiques contemporary culture’s relationship to the digital world.
It also says that things are changing so quickly (enter technology, interwebs, wifi, iPhones, etc) that history is not a reliable guide anymore. If you can gain so much knowledge with your phone today, how can you trust someone who had to actually write their thoughts down on a piece of paper and mail it to their friends. The individual itself becomes the one who decides the history based upon the information that they are able to glean using the technologies at hand. And they are able to take this information that they have gathered, synthesize however they need to, and put it back into the world however they want (enter personal or daily blogs) in order to allow others to use their information to instruct the histories of others.
What this leads to is a an excess of meaningless events caused by an acceleration of history. It is argued that this excess of historical significance, rather than leaving us secure and agreeable, makes us even more passionate for meaning. An excess of ideas and artifacts from the past clutter the cultural landscape but are selected and reused to create an even greater excess of ideas from which we are able to understand even less about the world than we did before we started. Redundancy and duplication saturate the psyche and start to hold sway to perceptions.
The first thing that comes to my mind is the personal and interconnected series of blogs and posts that proliferate the internet (this blog excluded, of course). I know many friends with blogs, and I know a few friends with many blogs, some personal and some public. This proliferation of the need to express and display to anyone personal thoughts is at the very heart of this idea of hypermodernity. And, it is argued, that this proliferation of knowledge and place, the shrinking of space into a hand held device, leads to a soulless homogeneity.
But the better way to describe the idea of hypermodernity and some of the pitfalls of the concept, I believe, is to talk about some of the basic ideas using apps from my iPhone. This ubiquitous piece of hardware has become, to some, a salvation, a bastion of everything that is good and right in the world. I’ll admit, I would be a little more lost in this world if I didn’t have the crutch of my iPhone. But I’ll also admit that the very presence of the device owns and kills a possibility for the unforeseen, imagination, and the unknown, which are qualities that are akin to magic and the chance, two qualities that should never be abandoned. There are times when a lack of information actually leads to much more rich and vibrant conversations about whatever topic is being discussed, and having information at ones fingertips destroys the chance for these dynamic experience.
Not to continually knock Facebook, but need we say more when it comes to the proliferation of useless information disguised as personal data? This social networking device allows for the appearance of a personal uniqueness and the semblance of a connectedness with “friends” who can read and be kept aware of your every post and position. Images can be added and links to information can be posted as a way of informing your friends about your personal, social, artistic, or metaphysical views. But they are also links to this increased knowledge base that is is grounded upon creating information and knowledge that is entirely self referential or redundant via a platform that appears to be personal but is entirely homogeneous and uniform. This application, and others that are similar, are used to increase the amount of information that proliferates through the internet, information that anyone can create and which few regulate.
There are many applications on the phone that accentuate the proliferation of videos that expand the perception of what is out there in the world, including YouTube and multiple video surveillance applications, but the one that I believe approaches the realm of hypermodernity the most is HowCast. The app is basically a catalog of videos that explain how to do things. Topics range from making a grilled cheese sandwich to making a citizens arrest to writing a haiku, and are explained in sometimes comical two to four minute stylized videos. Again, this increases the amount of subjective information that becomes injected into the internet and the world, where the video maker becomes the expert in explaining how the world, or at least the topic of the video, works.
Another aspect of hypermodernity that is created by this abundance of technological and spatial awareness is the expansion and contraction of the perception of space and the experience within it, and this idea is best exemplified with the GoogleEarth app. This technological breakthrough allows for visual representation of anywhere in the world (or as much as the governments want the world to see). It allows for a hyper-increase in the idea of knowledge of the geography of a place. But it also adds to the shrinking effect of hypermodernity by creating an entire world that can be observed, some would believe experienced, all through satellite imagery. It is the epitome of the idea that hypermodernity compresses space and changes the scale of things so that the world can fit onto one’s phone. But this compression looses the experience of the real that happens when a place is actually realized.
Added to this compression of space into your phone, certain apps compress the urban landscape and locations around it into a database, linked with maps, to help the individual navigate themselves through the world. Using the GPS coordinates from your phone, Yelp locates and links you to places that are close to you, including categories for food, gas stations, movie theaters, bars, coffee and tea houses, and banks. It then maps all the closest places from those categories and links you to a Yelp site that includes business hours, reviews, and contact information. All the information that you would need to decide where to go is included at your fingertips. These social sites intend to connect the iPhone user with all the information needed to make an informed decision about where to go with their lives, but in doing so they compress the space of the real world into the space of the phone and give real ownership in regards to decision making up to a select few people who choose to engage with the technology.
And to take the idea of compression of space one step further, there is an app called iStar. Using your iPhone’s GPS tracking system, iStar tracks your coordinates and phone positioning to show you the planetary map of wherever you point your camera lens. This compresses the night sky, the galaxy, even the universe. All within one app, everything that exists becomes compressed into a phone. Don’t drop that phone when that app is on, we could all be sucked into the largest black hole the universe has ever known. Kinda scary, actually, if this compression worked in the physical sense, but just because physical compression doesn’t really happen to the universe it doesn’t mean that our idea about the places that we assign a value towards won’t become altered in some way.
And these are just the most obvious of the applications that lead to the proliferation of hypermodernity. Web sites, of course, do the same thing, and blogs help to create the white noise that is information along the information superhighway. And the more ways that we can spit in the ocean the more digital glitter falls from the sky.
But the main point about hypermodernity that keeps coming back to me with every example is this: the accumulation of knowledge, and knowledge gained by either subjective or technological means like the ones mentioned before, only distances the individual from the actual experience of a place and of the knowledge and information that could be gained from direct, visceral contact. All the increases in technology, all the advances in the way that we gather information and display it is, in the end, creating an idea within the mind, a notion. And if there is too much information flying around all at once, there comes a point where it all threatens to become merely noise. Void of contact and more than anyone would want to siphon through, the increased amount of sheer data, without a means to make it valid and important to an individuals life, will become the exact opposite of it’s intention. It will make experience and existence become saturated and eventually inert.
This is what I hope my art will counteract, this growing distance between individuals and the projected and extracted history that ties them a sense of place. The trick is to take all these tools, all these amazing ways of being able to communicate and understand each other, and use them in ways that actually facilitates a connection and communion among the users. The challenge is to use future developments in ways that actually make a lasting and deep effect on the understanding of others that may be different than what was done before. This is the purpose of a tool. And the goal of a creator.
No comments:
Post a Comment