Image: Flickr
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Image: DeviantArt, CC
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How could we have lived in a world of constant stimulus, anxiety, and a continual panic-mode engendered by instant communications and information flowing at hyper-speed—faster than the human brain can conceive of or process—without experiencing the inevitable side effects? Capitalism is a mode of thought, not just an economic system, and every moment we spend plugged in to the technologies of its communication we are becoming more attuned to its values.Our technologies of communication influence us as much as we use them. On Twitter, we are sold the familiar narrative of togetherness and communication. And yet, we intuit the truth of the matter: tweets are the base unit of transaction in the Twitter economy which deals in retweets and favourites as social capital. Facebook is chiefly an exercise in self-branding and promotion, though the pretense of representing “our real selves” must be maintained. Note: remember to delete those bar photos you were tagged in over the weekend. Hook-up apps like Tinder allow us to swipe through potential matches at high speed. The digitized visages of potential mates are flattened into the barest semblance of a person as they speed by, barely registering.One is reminded of Jean Baudrillard’s description of speed in the New Mexico desert in America. “[Speed] is itself a pure object, since it cancels out the ground and territorial reference-points, since it runs ahead of time to annul time itself, since it moves more quickly than its own cause and and obliterates that cause by outstripping it.” Have you ever stuck your head out a car window Marmaduke-style? Then you know what Baudrillard is talking about.We need to become re-acclimated to the world of asymmetry and of bumpiness and lumpiness—the world of people.
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