Posted by Stephen Pusey on December 11, 1996 at 12:30:51:
From port166.dialup.inch.com
This is hyper-transit. Our histories, knowledge and cultures are being robotically dredged by programs that ceaselessly tour our newly laid electronic canals for any deposit of information. The accumulation found in this interstitial flux is percolated through database engines and served again through a dislocated osmosis to posterity. Will this ghostly palimpsest, the product of indiscriminate and mindless research, be the resource of a new generation - as books are replaced by e-text?
In this milieu, all cultures are brought into a transparent zone where they are made chronologically equivalent and ethnicity, multiculturalism, and historicity become irrelevant. Our perception of spatial hierarchy changes, irrevocably, and we no longer distinguish the center from the periphery. Or rather it no longer matters. The real, the symbolic and the imaginary are amalgamated in an overload of information that spills out at terminals around the world. It is no longer a question of the dominance of Western culture, or even of multi-cultural dilution, but of transactions that elude geographic, historical, political, and time-zone limitations. Our immersion, and interaction with graphical interfaces both accelerates and normalizes our potential as transmitter-receivers, yet dulls, or makes obsolete, our retentive abilities. Our locations and cultures have been telematically connected and our accumulated skills and imagination are embodied in the plexus of this network, not just in isolated exchanges. There is a sense of transparency, and of production and existence at the interstices of informational systems.
It's an old fear - a worn question - but what do we become when we entrust the function of our (long term) memory to a machine? Perpetual creatures of the here and now?
