Texts without Contexts

Greetings,

You may find the New York Times article linked below worth reading. 

It refers to the ubiquitous Web, capitalized as if it were a capital of a place. It's an artificial state of mind.

I live in Web city where everyone is connected by instant glowing all to brief emotional attention spans. I am too poor to pay attention. Web's impact on personal and social development, reshaping human lives is good, bad and plain ugly.

For example, I'm sitting in a remote sleepy Cambodian town breathing, writing in my Moleskine and typing new human texts because my mind is a computer and the hand is faster than the eye. Electricity goes out. No juice. No power. All the local internet service providers are out of work. Having no internet connections is a profound joy meaning writers get, the joker word in English, writing done.

I've enjoyed many books lately balancing out creativity, sitting in the local market absorbing language and pedaling my black bike. Real paper books like, The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago which won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1998 and now Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami, the Kafka of Japan, among others noted in the Amazon side bar.

What's a side bar? Part of a river bank? A side bar according to the International Bar Association is a bar frequented by people on the side, content knowing their direct bar is indistinguishable from, say a bar not on the side.

A quote from the article. "As Mr. Manjoo observes in “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (2008), the way in which “information now moves through society — on currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality” — has fostered deception and propaganda and also created what he calls a “Rashomon world” where “the very idea of objective reality is under attack.” 

So, what did I do while reading the article? Using my handy-dandy gadget phone I traveled by wireless to Amazon Kindle downloading You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier and The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby. 

As Lanier writes, links and tags may be the most important inventions in the last 50 years. Incredible!

Before closing this entry I upgraded my MotionX-GPS to version 9.4 and added the application Star Walk to find my blind way home in the dark walking along a bridge in a constellation. 

 Texts Without Contexts...read more.

Metta.

An original computer using binary operations.

 

Life > Logic

Greetings,

Lover of numbers, mathematics, and logical contradictions. Life is a paradox. We are a metaphor. How's it feel to be a metaphor, contemplating perception and sensation? Are we overwhelmed by the perceptual data flow?

Look around. You'll see, observe many humans completely insane with their perceptual overload. Their hard wired receivers are overloaded with INCOMING data. It's scary, downright frightening. Pure fear.

Zombies and automatons. Willing slaves to their personally created hell on earth. Their want. Their perpetual state of being distracted. It's all they know, this life of distractions. 

I'm having coffee yesterday with a very intelligent friend. We hadn't seen each other for six weeks. She kept pulling her cell out of her pocket. Reading the screen. Texting someone. Out there. I didn't say a word. I stopped talking when she did this. I just observed her behavior. She never said, "Excuse me." 

Must be really important I figured.

Can you imagine how she may have felt if, during our short time together I said, "Excuse me but you are really boring me. I can't stand it. I need to text someone. I need to use my phone to connect with someone who is not here but I really wish they were because you are boring me."

Text me baby. Tell me about your situation. Your sweet distraction. Text me your insecurity and loneliness. 

Speaking of scary, what's scary is seeing all the crazy Ha Noi motorcycle drivers texting while they zoom along narrow crowded streets in heavy traffic. Talk about a logical death wish. 

Text this: Meditate on the complete cessation of your perception. Of your sensation. Poof! You disappear into bliss. No time, no boundaries.

Maybe it's not the answers we need to ask but the questions we need to know. All this.

"If you don’t know much about infinity, for instance, you are invited to check in to “Hilbert’s Hotel” — which, with its infinite number of rooms, can miraculously accommodate additional guests even when it’s completely full."

LOGICOMIX

Written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou. 

Illustrated by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna

Read more...

It all adds up.

Metta.