Anyone who follows 90s 'Cyberpunk' anime, or its natural progression at the turn of the 21st Century- mainstream films such as 'The Matrix', should be at least somewhat familiar with the literary representations of 'The Internet', and the possible implications of an instantaneous global information network. When Cyberpunk talks about the future, it throws the cliché idea of 'Flying Cars' and 'Space Monsters' out the window, and deals with the much more harrowing future which infact came to pass. We
don't have flying cars, but we
do have the instant sharing of information. That's much more amazing, don't you think?
Biased as I am, i'm going to use the Ghost in the Shell films and OVA as a basis for this argument: Where lies the importance of individuality in such a future?
It came to my attention today, as a lecturer of mine was displaying the similarity between a picture of a pet pig in "The Times" and his Dachshund, that they have a column called "LOLpets". This really threw me back. LOL"X" is an internet Meme. Since when did such a technophillic phase in the history of cult movements enter the domain of paid journalism? In almost a perfectly natural way, as if drawn on a graph, the X axis of 'humour' slowly sagged as the Y axis of popular knowledge rose. Now, who is the LOL"X" attributed to? What comes to my mind is LOLcats, or LOLfail, and the like. If anybody can give me a concrete answer, then please do. To the best of my knowledge, the collective body of the internet Meme seems to retain shared responsibility.
Such acceptance of 'innovations' (a word i'm using tentatively here) in history was reserved to individuals who went on to become household names. Flemming, Einstein, Luther, Guettenburg, Nightengale, Hoover, Edison.
I'm supposing that this is partly because, their discovery and spreading could not be done instantaneously. News took weeks, even months, to reach some people. Informations was, then, a valuable and hard to come by commodity.
Today, we are exposed in the most open of media, to the opportunity to voice 'our' opinion. As a byproduct of liberal democracy (whose application remains vital for the continuation of a 'free and uncensored' internet). This is, in part, a "Good Thing(c)", however: any views voiced in this way, which come with the stigma of 'from the people', is instantly internalised. Comments, such as those on YouTube or The Independent, give rise only to squabbling, where most people I presume will see in them whatever side they want to see, such is the nature of the uneducated (note: Not "unintelligent", note the distinction) form of debate. Inaccuracies, squabbling, and a poor source of information for those who wish to gain an insight (So rare is it to find someone who cites sources when giving facts- re: this writer's own blog, this is merely opinion)
As is the theme in the
Ghost in the Shell philosophy, the collective entity known as the 'Net', has the potential to remove the role of the individual. One's voice is lost in a sea of futility, awash with flaming on forums, pointless videos akin to what one could see on
You've Been Framed and a new Meme every other day. It has become a substratum of our culture, and an issue that even now, 16 years after its advent, is still a stagmatised taboo in certain areas of research or information gathering. When, truth is, it's one of the greatest inventions of the modern man, and one that paves the way for a rocky, difficult future as portrayed in many areas of fiction. Mankind has to play their hand carefully.
That was a convoluted and overly opinionated introduction, based mainly out of the fear of my voice merely being consumed by the net itself. The internet has its uses, its charms, its quirks. Most of the time, however, one has to be adept enough at sifting through the tripe :)
