Thursday, April 22, 2010

Section 3: Big Picture Communication

Sometime after the human race harnessed fire, in what we call the twentieth century, humans started doing some relatively awesome stuff. We figured out flight (...to the moon), started to more fully understand how to treat ill members of our species (...or clone them), and conceptually began to grasp our global situation (...we don't get along, but when we do we prosper). We learned so much from each other that some guy who helped a bunch of other people destroy and larger bunch of other people in a globalizing war decided we may need a machine to facilitate in our information retention and organizational system. Shortly after that desire we arrive at now, here, on the internet.
The massive archive of collective human knowledge and information we hold on our computer hard drives, in our libraries, and in our minds cannot be organized by a single human, but must be organized with the facilitation of communication. Some argue that verbal communication is partially based on the fact that since our eyes are both on the front of our face we have to turn more to see our surroundings. We teamed up and the ones who had better warning systems for predators propagated the survival of their genes by not being killed. Eventually those warning sounds became language, both verbal and written. We express our selves with our body through 'body language' and signs, or by using our body to push sound waves to other bodies' ears, or by leaving symbols of thoughts to be read by others (perhaps in a letter–if it looks like you're writing one to the Paperclip in word–or on a blog). We began to develop ways to extend the range of these visuals and sounds of communication. Now we can leave visual and audio recordings of ourselves or our symbols all over the internet and beam them all around the world almost instantly.
If the goal of human existence is to preserve our personal physical body as much as possible, and to appease it with direct benefit for its actions in a small picture way, then things like Facebook and open source are a threat, because they reject the priority of the body for the sake of the mind. For Facebook, the body is the profile and our physical bodies are simply a part of the equation (as much as a computer is; a middleman), which may at least seemingly undermine society's current opinion of corporeal existence (that it is super important; that can never be ignored, as it is our first mediator to existence, but other mediators like Facebook profiles or our art may be just as influential if not more). For open source, personal credit and monetary benefit may be sacrificed, which also threatens a society of competing individuals. It seems unfair to give away knowledge we individually obtained over time for free, but we may not be giving it for free; in return we expect human betterment which we may personally benefit from.
If the goal of human existence is for the betterment of our entire race (which in turn benefits the selfish being we all fundamentally are), things such as Facebook (with the decorprealizing/globalizing effect of internet profile communication) and open source (super globalized cooperative progress) certainly provide better access to more of the collective human knowledge. Now we must decide: once we break the world down into the big picture mosaic of physics and atoms that it is, do we want to keep knowledge as a luxury and limit access to our individual discoveries or act with our species as one single being? Our 'body' would be the collection of all our bodies, just like our bodies are collections of cells that communicate for a common goal of mutualistic existence; our minds would be all one mind facilitated by communication (like a computer with more than six million hard drives, many of whom have hard drives themselves). It works on an atomic level, and a cellular level, but atoms and cells don't whine as much as humans do. We've made it pretty far as a race that hates itself, imagine what we could do mutualistically.

No comments: