Connectedness

If one were capable of bypassing the privacy security of Facebook would it be possible to click a pathway of inter-connectedness with every person that is logged into an account? Is there a thread of commonality? Further, if everyone was required to have a Facebook page would it then be possible to weave yourself through every thread of the human fabric revealing the connectedness that we all share? It is true that Twitter, Facebook, Myspace all reveal the trivial, dramatic and mundane details of our life but what we also forget that the very surface of things is what makes up our everyday life. Instead of understanding the concepts of a book, you instead focus only on one page, one paragraph, one sentence, one word, one letter and then become so focused on just the shape of a letter it will also become trivial. If all you did was try to concentrate on only the shape of each letter your lens of focus would be so small that you could never understand the bigger picture. I feel that our focus of these technologies is too small and we have to take the blade of grass out of the microscope and instead take in the infinity of the landscape.

It is true that spanning the globe with the ability to communicate immediately has brought us information that is trivial and useless. It has created an even larger evil, by making unreachable people and places more important then our immediate neighbors, family and friends. These people then become objects since they are not important enough to make it in the media. This is probably why America is so obsessed with the personal lives of celebrities. They must be important since they are on T.V. This can cloud our vision to the beautiful world around us, our connection with nature, family, friends and created strangers out of people that we share even the closest spaces with.

Technology, particularly the more immediate technologies of television, internet, fast food and super highways, is blamed for this loneliness that people feel in our modern world. I have been trying to claim that these technologies are only a symptom but not the cause of our social predicament. These technologies are also capable of destroying this objectivity that they are created with quality. Even if we were capable of de-evolution you would also have to throw out the very best with the worst. Would you want to un-watch the most influential movie of your life? When something is made with quality it destroys objectivity because it connects you with humanity.

I do not think this problem requires grand organization or large social planning because this removes our capability of personal quality. We will only become an object of this organization. There may be a need for this kind of uniting in the future but at this time I believe we need to focus on building a foundation of personal quality. Organization would only make us believe that the solutions to our problems are somehow too big for us to take on and too chaotic for our control.

This course has forced me to examine the idea of progress more closely. So my first tweet was “Phordfactory: Progress is the quantitative measurement of cause and effect over time. It is not qualitative and is inevitable.” It was exactly 160 characters. There is no way to somehow go back to the time of before, we can only use the wave of the past to push us forward to the future. To ensure that we are going in the right direction I believe the best way is for each individual to search for quality in their lives. It is an attitude in which you must bring to the most mundane tasks and everyday occurrences. The understanding of quality is inherent in humanity and has been with us from the very first cave painting that Neolithic human scratched on cave wall. Quality is contagious and spreads much faster than objectivity and if each individual brings quality to their lives without the ego or expectation of others it will bring much more fulfillment. Then people will take notice of this quality and see how it has made their dull objective day more connected to humanness. They too will start making choices of quality and the cycle will continue. This is essentially the driving force of art and the reason for its existence. Unfortunately in the age of graphic design art too has become an object. The need for quality is dire.

It is not the technology that is at fault, if it is not useful it will naturally decompose like other trivial inventions only to be remembered nostalgically like 8-tracks, bellbottoms, or tri-point hats for that matter. But I think our arguments about technology’s morality is a false path. Technology is only a reflection of our own humanity and it is nihilistic to think it can be done away with.