When I was a child, I talked like a child… Just couldn’t resist it. Let’s start again:
When I was a child, back in the late 70’s and early 80’s, there was this cartoon TV show called “superfriends” where all super-heros (superman, wonder woman and so on) fought together against evil. The thing I’d like to bring forward is this: they used to gather in this “hall of justice”, where there was this supercomputer. And whenever they were looking for someone, or needed to know something, anything, they asked: “computer, where is …?”, or “computer, what is …?”. And the computer did dot miss a shot.
This gave-me a rather good and fantastic impression about what computers were those early days. They were those things that knew everything! A little later, I managed to be gifted with my own computer, a 16kb RAM Sinclair ZX-81 clone named TK-85, where I learned to code in what was called “basic”, and also made some first small steps for men in “machine language”. Yes, I tried to ask the computer the next lottery numbers, but never got consistent answers. It was not so super.
Anyway, time has passed, and in a very short time lapse, things have changed a lot. In the mid 90’s, when internet started to be colonized, there was hope it would become something like a new new world. Everywhere people talked about freedom, abundant information and knowledge, “collective intelligence”, and so on. Human beeing would finally transcend itself into something better, thanks to free, easy and effcient access to information and global interaction.
Twenty years later, publicity and general garbage of all kinds accounts for most of internet traffic in bytes, and we, our words, pictures, daily activities and habits — our souls, one could say — have become the main product of a few large multibilionaire cooporations who … who what? Who know everything! Orwell’s “big brother”, once thought of as some crazy Stalin mimesis, has been made flesh. Or better: has been made silicon, and put in a valley.
… and flat earth theory has come back to the agenda! Didn’t we know that excess of light could make one as blind as the lack of it? But fear! It may be worse. Modern ignorance is fulfilled with pride and certainty.
Not few people believe internet is google and facebook! Yes I know. Before there was altavista, and hasta la vista. People used to collect links, and they even used the “favorites” function in their browser!
For sometime now I’ve been trying to fit in the same equation the following observations:
– People use to pray on facebook (at least south of equator, where religion and poverty still work together).
– Some people talk to the dead in facebook.
– Some pseudo-religions, like kardecism, seems to believe that communication may be stabilished between this world and “the other side” through electronic statics, like the girl in the movie Poltergeist.
How is it that this virtual world that seems to insiliconate the verb and all knowledge and where the dead seems to remain has to do with the big Other that, even though it doesn’t exist, it got to? How is it that being online is almost becoming synonomous of being alive? Although…