The internet is subverting your mind, and you don't even know it.

Because this is my first post on the first blog I've ever attempted, I feel it necessary to preface the experience with a few words regarding philosophy. What the hell? you angrily shout. Who does this guy think he is, coming in here and talking about philosophy? Loser! Jeans-shorts wearer! Expected persecution aside, I want to draw your attention to something that is analogous to a contact lens for the mind's eye. Like a contact lens, it is essential to mental vision while remaining invisible to the very eye it empowers. What is it? A medium. What, you wonder? Are you talking about a necromancer/fortune teller/Miss Cleo type? Tempting, but no. I'm referring to those things which provide means of transfer for any number of things...information, emotion, sound, light, speech, images. I know this is a long post, but if you bear with me, maybe I can make some sense.

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So, here we go. this is it. the big show. You're using it if you're reading these words. You can use it to find a spouse, check the topography of western Mongolia, and pay your electric bill....all in the same 10 minutes. I'm talking, of course, about the internet. More recently, it has become a major forum for social/cultural interaction. Think about Myspace or Facebook. both are huge networks of millions of html/javascript-savvy, information-superhighway-driving, web-cultured,

digital friends of the iGeneration synapsing in one glorious place...NOWHERE. Physically, myspace and facebook don't exist. I mean, that's what myspace is right?...an abstract space created by a voluntary suspension of reality, built on the extension of the human mind. It is only a "space" in the sense that we feel that it is one. Why is it so easy to project a feeling of community, a feeling of realness, towards such an abstract space? I think it's because we ignore the medium. We automatically draw a direct, uncritical correlation between the message (i.e. the stuff on somebody's profile page) and the sender (the person who ostensibly created the page). The medium is overlooked b/c it is usually deemed unimportant, because, afterall, it's the content that matters, right? I'm convinced that humans inevitably draw distorted conclusions when they consider content without context, messages without media. facts with methods. For example, if you look at my "profile" you don't think about the social implications of interpreting the digital version of what I decided to slap together on a pixelated template. nah. if you don't know me at all, you're thinking "Oh. THIS is John", and you make assumptions about me, which is also a very natural and necessary thing to do. B/c it's all you have to go on. Guess what? I'm not even talking about the potential for deception online. Deception happens in all forms of human interaction; it's merely easier to get away with online. Besides, if you spend more than 20 seconds on facebook, you realize that most of what you see there is very contrived and pre-selected to establish a certain persona that the facebooker desires to examplify. Did I mention it's terribly entertaining?

So the point ISN'T that we get distorted ideas of who people really are via online social interaction. This does occur, and intelligent people recognize this possibility. The point IS that we get a fudamentally distorted view of human interaction IN GENERAL if we separate content from medium. It is a distortion on the macro (not necessarily micro) level, which makes it the hardest kind to recognize. It's that whole "miss the forest by staring at the trees" analogy playing out in billions of computers worldwide. In the example of looking at my facebook page, sure, you might have gained some biographical and historical information about me, or read a quote that I decided to post, or saw pictures of me, or read things that other users posted on my wall. But did you consider how it conditions your mind to view human interaction as quantifiable, clickable, and anonymous? Did you wonder about the psychological effects of airing intimate details of your life to essentially anyone who wants to get them? What does online social interaction teach us about intimacy? About friendship? about privacy?

people are real and are alive and breathe and do not exist in categories such as "about me" and "people I'd like to meet". real live people do not exist in an abstract space. Only fragmented, oft-misinterpreted, typically glamorous portrayals of themselves come hurtling through a limited medium (that is to say, the medium of a web-page, which is really quite a clever integration of print and visual media).

okay, I'll step down from my soap box for a second. besides, you're probably thinking "why won't this guy just shut up and quit trying to impress us with his neurotic techno-babble and fancy-shmancy words?" Anyway, my point, if not clear already, is this: a medium (i.e. myspace) filters/contorts/shapes reality in a certain way (as do all media), and it is important to be aware of the ways it does this. what am I talking about?

this post for instance, is not the way I talk to people on a daily basis. If I did, I would probably have no friends and have to resort to finding them on mys...uhh nevermind. also, in the vast majority of my pictures on myspace/facebook, I am smiling. i do not always smile when not posing for photos. no one does that...except maybe an Olson twin. That GK Chesterton quote? It's not really my favorite, but I thought other people would think it was intelligent in a witty/subversive way. When you look at the way I designed my profile, you may make the assumption that I like the color orange a lot. I do not. For all you know, my name is NOT John, I'm NOT a guy, and I DO like the Texas Longhorns. These are all untrue, but I'm just saying...I could lie till I turned blue (my favorite color, incidentally) in the face with few or no consequences.

Things like the internet, myspace, email, the digital-revolution in general change the user's perception of reality. I'm not even talking about the superficial ways it has changed your daily schedule, or how it has made business and information-gathering different. I'm talking about how it profoundly alters the sense of existence. I'm talking about how it challenges a pre-digital revolution perspective of what is real and what is not. For example, the internet teaches us that information is transient. here, until I click a button and go to a different page. IMing and email have deconstructed grammar as well as the way we speak to each other (consider: IM lingo, expressions, and the fact that you probably haven't found my erratic use of "proper" grammar and punctuation the least bit unusual). The digital age has done much to invent the perception of "randomness". now, "random" is quite a buzzword. Myspace and facebook teach us that "friendship" can be had when two people both agree to click "yes" to an hyperlink. it teaches us that the world is completely accessible, at our very fingertips. Distance is relative. It teaches us that "learning" consists of being able to find and collect information quickly through skillful web-navigation. The internet and TV have cemented in our minds the idea that remote world events are extremely, urgently relevant to our lives, when in reality they are not. Even music and art have both changed substantially, having been "digitally-upgraded". these are all radical shifts from even 15 years ago. and these are but a few of countless examples.

thus far, you may be assuming that I'm anti-internet, anti-progress, anti-technology...blah blah blah. nothing could be further from the truth. Change is inevitable, but what most people haven't noticed is how 'Change' is changing. in other words, change isn't what it used to be. it used to be that major shifts in culture and human interaction happened over decades, centuries even. not anymore. These kinds of dramatic cultural changes are now happening in matters of months and years.

this whole post might not make a dime's worth of sense to you. no worries. it wouldn't have made any sense to me either not too long ago. but I hope I've gotten you to think, b/c i know I gained a vastly different outlook on things when someone pointed out to me the way that form (as in, the form of a medium) alters content (the words, emotions, thoughts, facts contained therein). i'm no prophet or intellectual either, so don't expect a new faux-profound observation in every post. time to quit talking.