REFLECTIONS ON THE INTERNET

A Mr. T S Eliot once said :

‘Where is the wisdom that was lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge that was lost in information ?

Indeed, and that was well before the ‘www’ came along.

Just the word ‘reflections’ seems to clash with the term internet. But this is an attempt to reflect on this ever growing and all consuming internet thing. Despite carefully avoiding its use for a considerable time, only being hooked up in 2005, once having got it on tap it certainly changes things. My use of the internet has never been consistent and remains something that I try and keep under continual critical review.

There is no question that it has its uses and advantages. However there is a definite downside and its hard to put ones finger on it, but its to do with the way it tends to render all other forms of communication diminished and demands almost continual attention. I have a particular dislike, (perhaps more to do with the nature of computers), of the way in which everything that is  accessed through the internet and equally material that is not but comes from the real world but has been turned into a digital form, is undifferentiated and becomes part of a huge, homogonous digital soup.

To clarify, there is a line that someone came up with to define surrealism. It goes like this : ‘ it is the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.’ Noting the fact that the use of a sewing machine as an example sounds curiously dated now, the point is that the surrealists were deliberately trying to subvert normally understood relations between objects by bringing together items that would not usually be found in conjunction. I find with using the internet and a computer to store facsimiles of things that it is almost continually creating just such ’surreal’ relations and it is only with prior knowledge of what exists in the real world and a conscious application of distinctions that the values and meaning of things is retained.

In the same way that TV could be said to kill the life outside it, so the internet could be said to be doing something similar to creative thought. It is unavoidable that completely unrelated pieces of information are brought into proximity by virtue of this black hole called the internet that is sucking in everything : and thus much completely meaningless and possibly damaging material is mixed up with unconnected but meaningful thoughts and images to no definable purpose.

This term ‘information’ itself I have a problem with as there is clearly a qualitative difference between a train timetable, which is information, in any form, and a work of art, which is not, yet they are both ’pieces of information’ once digitalised.

It is noted that one of the biggest internet archival projects is based around recordings of the Grateful Dead, that is any and every recording they can find, no mater of what quality or interest. This is documentation for its own sake. And ultimately all archived material is dead material whether stored digitally or in its original form.  

I do not know quite why but when an anti-virus programme is put next to a photograph taken some years ago that is both familiar and has retained a meaning and then this is put next to something downloaded for a specific purpose, say an image of a recent event, as if they all are part of a sequence, which is all they are for the computer, it makes me uneasy. Perhaps it is my lack of prowess but it would seem to me that even a computer could distinguish between such things and put them in different boxes immediately.

Now this purely time based version of any input is applied to all social media, as far as I am aware, a strictly linear version of ‘events.’ Yet posting a YouTube recording of a song that one happens to listen to and decides to ’share’ is not an event, in my book. Sometimes I think it would be far better if all such actions, which are more like photographs of fleeting thoughts much of the time, were not kept on the record, as it were, but disappeared after say, twenty minutes. Again it is the inability of the device to distinguish between a pop song that you happen to like and the announcement of World War 3 that is disconcerting. And the reduction of it all to a chronological timeframe, that only actually exists in this neat ordered form on ones computer.

There is a strange intimacy, a false intimacy of course, between computer user and computer. The continual requests for reaction that the computer requires, like an infant seeking attention, the stream of messages and suggestions that appear unbidden. It is promiscuous by nature, or rather, by science.

Various devices like Twitter and so on mimic conversation, but in a superficial way, who is one actually speaking to and why ? Is it all perhaps just the flip side of a society which is both highly individualistic, self-interested and privatised in all practical senses but then when 'on line' and behind the safety of a screen one can be ‘open’ and ‘communal.’

The number of times I have gone into a local pub and seen half or more of the people studying their mobile phones and thus partly insulated from communication even by gesture let alone by conversation as they are involved with some remote activity.

One thing that is very much apparent is that use is different in private or public settings. I can only speak of my own use, but would imagine some sort of difference obtains for most. First, there is something that just feels completely different using the intetnet in public. It alienates you from your surroundings, and, as with mobile phone calls, it is conducting what is usually a personal matter in public. This is most apparent if the computer malfunctions. In such a circumstance just being sat next to a complete stranger staring at this uncooperative machine trying to do something that used to be done by more straightforward methods not involving a vast and complicated telecommunications and computerised information system seems close to absurd. The time factor enters in, the clock ticking against you, in a public facility, the sense of being ’cut-off’ if the machine is slow or inoperative. Outside it is either raining or it is not, whatever is indicated on the screen. There may be an irritating person next to you surfing aimlessly, the virtual has impinged upon the actual.

The very fact that programmes appear unbidden which allow almost infinite manipulation of images, and others that allow similar manipulation of sound is somehow worrying. It means that nothing is ever free from being changed, for better or worse. The only way it can be free of this is by remaining outside of the digital maelstrom. Maybe this is the requirement of any truly new proposal, that it shall not or rather cannot be digitalised. It is, after all, only a mechanism, and as with all mechanisms it will have a period when it seems to be sweeping all before it and becoming the only way to do things, but limits will be reached, defects and undesirable side effects will become evident. I was always suspicious, and yet have come to some accommodation but remain unconvinced that there is essential or special value and absolute necessity in this thing called the internet, no matter how much it has wormed its way into our society.

And always remember : Garbage in, garbage out.

Images : top : Portrait of T S Eliot by Wyndham Lewis