Technology

wl 9.jpg
Originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

I came across this today. I almost don’t want to post the address because I don’t want to promote it. But you need to know what I’m talking about, so here goes: http://snipurl.com/theinternetwalk

Once you’re got past the patronising American voice explaining the amazing world of the ‘innernet’ (a world of which we are painfully aware as without the joys of the innernet we wouldn’t have to suffer rubbish like this), you are led on on some kind of walk to what one might imagine are beautiful places: a beach, and, if they worked, a city and mountains. But no! In the world of Nokia you can’t look up; you’re permanently glued to your screen, and of course you can only experience life through it. A cute little crab runs up to you? Quick, look on flickr, Wikipedia, snap it, tag it, send it; live through buttons and clicks and forget the world around you.

What have we been reduced to if we spend most of our time staring at our feet? Clickety-click, headphones on, ring ring, buzz. A hundred years from now will we be able to focus on anything more than half a metre from our faces? But this is progress, they say. This is the future, this is how we are evolving. This is achievement.

How can machines represent the future? Looking backwards in time, the only common thread running through it, from swamps to slums to Silicon Valley, is life. Giving machines such importance in our lives takes away our power as humans. We forget that we’re so much more than machines, and that’s why we’re better than them. What machine could write poetry, compose music or make sculptures on a par with what humans can achieve?

While machines are only capable of existing, we can go one better. We can see, smell, taste, feel, speak, read, understand; we can live. If we start living through machines, humans will become incapable of experiencing the world in any other way but in terms of a set of pre-programmed functions.

A final word to the people that make these floor-wipe viral things: don’t close people’s minds, open them. Nobody wants to see their world reduced to a pair of shoes and thumbs clicking buttons. People are not machines that buy machines. I think if companies appealed to people’s existential connection with the world a bit more, instead of the materialism that seeps constantly out of every shop window, we’d be living in a much nicer place.

Nature

p 16, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

There’s something odd about using a digital camera to photograph nature. It’s so man-made, so black and static and hard: everything that nature isn’t. The image isn’t even real in the way that film images are. Instead of light and molecules, everything depends on pixels and sensors, and the finished product often doesn’t even make it into existence like negatives and prints; all you see is more pixels on a screen.

Put a pixel under a microscope and all you see is a pixel. But put a leaf or a strip of film under there and you’ll see elements, molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, energy. In this sense digital photography is a simplification of reality. How permissible is it to reduce the physical world we inhabit to a single dimension; to create something virtual from something so real; to condense all the richness of the world into blocks of light? Isn’t that doing it a disservice?