.+Memeshift+.

This was a paper I wrote for a class in 2002. Comment if you like.

Morgan Sully
Sociology 42
Digital Culture & Technology

The universe is an intelligence system, and the elements of intelligence are quanta. And suddenly we understand that the brain is an organ designed to metabolize digital information.
- Timothy Leary, from Chaos and Cyberculture

Our world is becoming a society of data networks. Information is becoming the new currency as more and more of our experiences become digitized and reduced to zeroes and ones. According to Frank Biocca, the Ameritech Professor of Telecommunication and Director of the Media Interface and Network Design (M.I.N.D.) Lab at Michigan State University, “The body is becoming present in both physical space and cyberspace. The interface is adapting to the body, the body is adapting to the interface” (from the online essay, The Cyborg’s Dilemma: Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments). Biocca attributes this to an inborn desire for physical transcendence and the control of sensory experience. Expounding on this notion, Biocca infers that we utilize media to ‘move beyond the limits of body and the sensory channels’ in the pursuit of new realities and new experiences. Marshall McLuhan supports this by saying that technologies and particularly new media are “…extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical…the wheel is an extension of the foot the book is an extension of the eye clothing, an extension of the skin, electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system” (McLuhan, pgs. 26-40,). Furthermore, “…we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression” (McLuhan & Zigrone, p. 272).

With technology providing endless mental and visceral prosthetics, a new artist is born with every download or click of the mouse. McLuhan conjects that, “The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation” (McLuhan, p. 98). We are becoming desktop producers, reality designers, chaos engineers. Even Einstein’s theories of relativity support this notion, suggesting that realities depend on points of view. In Timothy Leary’s Chaos & Cyberculture, Leary formulates that, “Instead of the static absolutes of space-time defined by material reality, quantum-brain realities are changing fields defined by quick feedback interchanges with other information sources. Our computer brainware allows us to perform Einsteinian-spiritual transformations on our laptops” (Leary, 5). However, the wondrous ability of our minds to tap into this is sometimes obscured by the overwhelming monotony of our daily routines. We often lock into patterns which “work best” and then continue with those until they fail or some novel challenge presents itself. Like automatons, we instinctively let our physiological responses to certain schema become our modus operandi. Thus, our socialization often becomes the primary factor in determining our behavior. How much of me is my culture and how much of me is actually me? Our awareness of how much is which is not always distinct. Daily, we are bombarded with ads and commercials saturated with the predominant values and attitudes of our culture:

from day to day
the ones with the money with the right of way will say:
YOU ARE CONSUMERIFFIC!
and will pave the way
to a
calm, fitter, happier, and more productive day…

- a commercialized sort of existentialism puts a great deal of emphasis on the individual and all the needs and wants of the individual. The importance of cell phones,

The Verizon badge for your product-based mania
Lies just over the horizon of material schizophrenia

perfect bodies (thousands of children are malnourished in the country with the world’s most obese people), and bigger, more luxurious vehicles (with 75 acres to the gallon) is preached and promoted in every facet of the media possible. With a vast ocean of new products constantly vying for our spiritual attentions, it’s easy to become confused with what we actually want. This constant stimulation, coupled with our predisposition to operate within the most “efficient” schema, often locks us into very limited patterns of existence. By letting our physiology decide our outcomes, we thus can become very dissatisfied with the seemingly deterministic reality that becomes our lives. I almost want to shut it all out as there is too much. In 1967, McLuhan said on CBC Radio’s The Best Ideas, “One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with”. What are we to do with all this information? How are we to filter through all of it? A cultural schizophrenia threatens to encroach on us. It’s so much easier to just shut your mind off. We already have computers doing so much of our brain work for us, why not just flip on the telly and have another box with a screen reflect back into us what we can and cannot think? It’s at least a little odd I think, that we can so easily lose sight of ourselves when there is an image of us being reflected right back at us off the cool glass of the tv screen…. My response to all this?

fantastic people
in plastic steeples
while out on the steps
lie Vietnam vets
watching red corvettes
speed on by while
the need to buy
will be broadcast
just as fast
as the last
fashion died

but have no fear
for Disney ears
will assist you to Auschwitz
where you’ll delight in the ease at which
you slip into McChicken sandwiched bliss(ed)
out on the Mickey D’s bandwidth
broadcasting non lasting castings of the
latest and greatest of the World T O
which seems to grow with each cast vote
(or was that each fallen tree?)
for tweedle dee and tweedle dum
to thee I snub my thumb!

(a nation a s k e c h e r s^TM fumbling over each other to get the latest definition of cool)

fuck I HATE this country!!!
It’s a worldwide conspiracy, I tell you!
THERE IS TOO MUCH TO BUY!
It seems, no, IS so unjust to instill the consumer spirit
in people who just can’t distill the funds to fund the fun, fun, fun!
of the shop till you drop appetite
which exists in the props of lites, lo-fats, Jenny Craig desserts
get Slim fast Quik and stay berserk
and work for the freedom to buy more things
like the Bon Bon binge nights
With Jon Bon Jovi on TV lights

(is this what we want to bring to the world?)

ADVERTISING = one more dead nigger in the streets
killed over a pair of shoes
for booze or crack (for lack of love of academics?)
so lose the specifics of stereotyped statistics
(which are really just categories of people in Dateline allegories)
it’s all lip service
goin’ yak yak yak
while makin’ you passive
on masses and masses of
“pacified” classes (impressed onto our social so-called consciousness, of course)

Nay, I say!
the cystic fibrosis
of your consumer psychosis
is a tumor halitosis
that hurts my nosis
So I’ll lay the way
I see these needs on TV
being preached and teached
by faceless leeches
making speeches about value and freedom
and freedom and value
at $19.95 a muthafuckin’ pop!

it’s the channels of the rich in the houses of the poor!
there all these windows without any doors
more Coors? whores?
some McWTO folklore for your poor?

THINGS ARE FUCKED UP

In fact…
I’d like to address
the psuedo-truthfullness
of the freedom to express
the freedom to what?
to choose one brand over another?
(My grandad and my mother never told me about what we’d do to each other!)
a personality impression at the Gap or
a soul amongst the stacks?
of prefabricated knacks and kniks
in “our” corporate bag of tricks?

That’s just in our country though.
Our freedom is probably the most expen$ive on the planet.
How much does it cost
To prevent “economic” loss

from day to day
they say they’d mandate
the traits of a saint but it ain’t
gonna stay or stick
with a WASP politic
each day YOU pick
a different way to spend
another gay to offend?
more dependence to lend?
intheformof $money$ tonationswhichcan’taffordtoturnoffthelights to save electricity
(shhh.. maybe it’s because they don’t have any in the first place, stupid)

(your actions speak louder than your words ever can)

begging for an answer
waiting for Godot
But my DSL’s too slow!
so I’ll go be Bo, be a millionaire
It’s that American aire
of high mobility
in stratified economy
didn’t you hear?
you can be celebrity
(or was that supremacy, that I heard off the lips of the body politic)

more prescriptions for each kind of social description and class and group

(Ah, the glories of free trade)
In our TV’s (which give me the heebie jeebies)
in my head, in your head
McTV for everyone!
we’ve done well
with our technological progress
is the impression we manage
is the mipression we manage
is th mpression we mange
is te mi pression w mange
s th mipressh w mange
s th we
s we
we…
we have power.

TRANSCENDANCE AND CONCLUSION

Yet we still have trouble finding where our minds are. The chaos of our minds provides little for the distinction between what is real and what is imagined. We are thus free to explore the diverse avenues of experience, ranging from the simple to the transcendent. In conclusion, it is people, interacting with the productive forces of new media technology, reinterpreting and digitizing the symbols, images, and memes of cultures around the world, guiding the process of informational globalization, a ‘milleux of innovation’, if you will. Manuell Castells writes in The Rise of the Network Society, ‘There is… a close relationship between the social processes of creating and manipulating symbols (the culture of society) and the capacity to produce and distribute goods and services (the productive forces). For the first time in history, the human mind is a direct productive force, not just a decisive element of the production system’ (Castells, 31). We are becoming increasingly defined (or undefined) by our “…capacity to translate all inputs into a common information system, and to process such information at increasing speed, with increasing power, at decreasing cost, in a potentially ubiquitous retrieval and distribution network’ (Castells, 31). It is this immateriality which separates this moment in history from any other before. The future is happening every moment and as we progress further and further into our evolution as a species, we will consistently find ourselves transcending old paradigms to embrace the latest modes of neural efficiency. In accordance with our transcendent nature, we will find our thirst for knowledge manifesting itself in our technology. This is where we are going.

All of my friends have their own airwave now
But godot is waiting for me
There is a child starving in a country that has the most well fed people on the planet
But godot is waiting for me
Everyone is flocking to southern california
But godot is waiting for me
There is a sea of condominiums stretching out as far as the eye can see
But godot is waiting for me
I am so very tired of waiting

Bibliography

Essential McLuhan, Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone
The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan
Laws of Media, Marshall McLuhan
Chaos & Cyberculture, Timothy Leary
The Best of Ideas on CBC Radio (radio broadcast), Marshall McLuhan
The Rise of the Network Society, Manuel Castells