INFOBESITY
by Cybil Scott“Since the world is evolving towards a frenzied state of affairs, we have to take a frenzied view of it” -Jean Baudrillard INFOBESITY It appears my generation, the Millennials or Generation Y as we are now being coined, is caught in an in-between state. Born in the 1980's, we were brought up in an environment with minimal analog technology, but instead of reflecting on the slow growth and change of society at the end of our lifetime, we are riding the digital wave and witnessing the changes as they are happening. We have fundamentally different values and attitudes than the generations before us because of this factor, and the generations that come after will have grown up with the interface of technology having catered to their every need since birth. And frighteningly, the ways in which these new technologies function are also becoming more alien to us. The average person, myself included, cannot explain how their cell phone works if they were to take it apart, let alone explain how it can access the wealth of man's knowledge with the swipe of a finger. A short eight years ago someone would have had a hard time believing what we can experience now. It seems increasingly frustrating though, to make sense out of all the information we have available to us. What are we learning when we are constantly bombarded by opinion, false information, facts, and irrelevant information? Everyone can contribute their voice to a cause which can be made real and accessible to others via the global platform of the web. It is like attempting to navigate an avalanche or an endless sea of gray. It seems that with the more the things there are to discover and know, the more previous thinking is unlearned. Decisions become harder when more options are available. Can we keep up the pace without adopting a schizoform view of the world? We are just beginning to understand the repercussions of consumption saturation. Not only do we experience it during our time online, but this sentiment naturally begins to transcend into other areas of social interaction. Claire Bishop, a contributor of ArtForum magazine and art historian suggests in the article Digital Divide, that the endlessly disposable, rapidly mutable ephemera of the virtual age and its impact on our consumption of relationships, images, and communication articulates something of the troubling oscillation between intimacy and distance that characterizes our new technological regime, and proposes an incommensurability between our doggedly physiological lives and the screens to which we are glued. (1) A screen's purpose is no longer for obstruction or division; technology is now allowing us to directly manipulate the increasingly transparent surface of the screen via the interface. An interface is defined as: a surface forming a common boundary between adjacent regions, bodies, substances, or phases. This 'soft' convergence is increasingly becoming the principle place of interaction, and not with the actual 'machine' itself. The software is designed by programming code, invisible to the average user. Keyboards are merging into the body of the screen, ceasing to physically exist. Finger swipes and hand motions command the surface. We filter, graze, skim and forward. (2) And what is it exactly that we are looking at during our rapid inspections? It is the conglomeration of global culture and information which is thereby disseminated and presented to us for speedy dismissal. Are we becoming increasingly less able to pick out relevant and meaningful information in the post-internet age? Or with the over-saturation of images in our culture, is everything now becoming less meaningful? In a recent work by Thomas Hirschorn, this new habit of insatiable and passive consumption of content is investigated by Bishop. It is not that it comprises a digital video of an iPad, but that it shows us, with horrible vividness, how we consume images today and how images consume us. A finger scrolls idly through photographs of dismembered and decapitated victims of war and terrorism. This aloof, distracted consumption is galling because it mimics the manner in which we share innocuous pictures of our family and friends, parties and holidays. It reminds us that photographs are no longer intimate fetishes, crumpled at the edges, stuffed in a wallet, but a publicly exhibit-able stream of information, existing in a repetitive glut (we take tens of photos where previously one would have sufficed). The work speaks to the character and speed of image consumption today, as well as pointing (literally) to the lost materiality engendered by the touch-screen interface, signaled by the moving finger. Politically, it uses images that mainstream media self-censors as too distressing, whose potency would presumably engender opposition to US military intervention overseas, but which are nevertheless available on the network, for a price, at specialist sites that trade in a pornography of violence. Through the connections that this work extends into the world, we start to understand what we are becoming through digital technology.(3) In the past, physical objects were taken out of one context and placed into another for significant readings. Now, in post internet culture, it seems the image object is now the readymade king. The act of re-purposing aligns with procedures of reformatting and transcoding—the perpetual modulation of preexisting files. Faced with the infinite resources of the Internet, selection has emerged as a key operation: We build new files from existing components, rather than creating from scratch. Artists whose work revolves around choosing objects for display (Bove, Johnson) or who reuse previous art (Ołowska with Stryjeńska, Simon Starling with Henry Moore, Ryan Gander with Mondrian) are foregrounding the importance of selection strategies, even when the outcome is decisively analog. Questions of originality and authorship are no longer the point; instead, the emphasis is on a meaningful re-contextualization of existing artifacts.(4) Young artists such as Trisha Baga and Helen Marten explore this potentiality. Baga takes the social condition afforded by the digital revolution as a primary subject.(5) Her work could be said to foreground distraction as a methodology: With an approach to narrative that recalls the logic of browsing online and hyperlinks, she allows herself the space to drift, notice and find.(6) Marten's work is often discussed in terms of the digital realm, yet her amalgamations of image and object – where one becomes the other, objects as image, image as object – and their relationship to language often render ‘dimension’ irrelevant. Marten’s work sits within a certain lineage that includes Isa Genzken’s architectural accumulations of pop-cultural ready-mades or Rachel Harrison’s combination of objects, images and handcrafted forms. Also relevant is Mark Leckey’s work on ‘Long Tail Theory’,which Marten’s writing recalls, in its collage of image and linguistic associations. Leckey’s 2009 performance-lecture Mark Leckey in the Long Tail conceived of the Internet as the site for a never-ending connection of minor associations via images while, more recently, he has discussed ‘techno-animism’, which he describes as the inanimate ‘coming to life’, as the objects around us begin to communicate.(7) In terms of 'rhizomatic' association, in 'A Conversation' with the curator Tim Dixon (which was meant for an online environment), the artist Jack Brindley (RCA MA graduate 2013) elaborates on the new cultural methods of distribution in terms of online art. Culture is a complex system, like an ecological chain, both feeding on and into itself. The traditional modes of dispersing art have drastically altered and the way we access art and has had a fundamental impact on its relationship with capital and where it sits in relation to society. The increase of low-cost authoring tools such as blogging sites on the internet have allowed many to produce, publish and disseminate knowledge and culture. As a result there is a blurring of the boundaries between the producer and consumer and the public and private.(8) Anything from headlines in a news feed, advertisements, media, etc, these “image objects” all have the potential to foster drifting associations. Linking things together is now becoming a key cultural aspect of digital life. Recently I have noticed an enabled option on Tumblr for “endless scrolling”. I think this is rather poignant. When does one subjectively arrive at the point of too much browsing or information saturation? Humans can handle various stimuli and tasks, but when we are faced with the biggest exposure to information in human history, what is the criticality for consumption? This wealth of knowledge is easy enough to access (in developed countries) and because of this attachment, we worship and devote ourselves to the devices that bring us this content. Our devices are our pacifiers, and the subject matter on them is endless. Appeasing our sense of boredom, they are the things we turn to at a moments notice. Spare time is spent with a quick check on the phone or computer, yielding to the universe of virtual notifications and alerts that we must attend to. The world of online distraction is only in its infancy stage, but it fast becoming a real presence. SPLINTERING As the world wide web was created by Tim Berners-Lee only 23 short years ago, what will the future of digital living bring? Will we be forever lost in meaningless associations? Perhaps, the issue should be addressed that by living virtually we are losing not only our privacy, but our true and authentic self. This concern is especially present now that many people are choosing to reveal themselves on social media platforms. Andrew Keen, an internet entrepreneur and author of Digital Vertigo, offers that rather than uniting us between the digital pillars of an Aristotelian polis, today's social media is actually splintering our identities so that we always exist outside of ourselves, unable to concentrate on the here and now, too wedded to our own image, perpetually revealing our current location, our privacy sacrificed to the utilitarian tyranny of a collective network.(9) Dalton Conley, an NYU professor of social sciences describes the people of our digital age as 'intra-individuals' -fragmented souls always caught between identities, possessing 'multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously.(10) Rather than the coherent and centered individual identity of analog man, therefore, the intra-individual 's plastic “self” reflects the perpetual flux of social media's myriad streams of information.(11) It is worthwhile to note that some interesting paradoxes arise through the use of technology. It creates separation while allowing us to be simultaneously connected. To live virtually we must become isolated and detached from the physical world around us. Increasingly, we feel somehow worthless if we are not receiving feedback from our online encounters. Opening up your browser to reveal an empty inbox is strangely disheartening, along with a lack of social media notifications. The man who is his own image in the digitally networked world is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, and the more completely visible he appears, the more completely invisible he actually is. In this fully transparent world absolute unreality is a real presence and the completely fake is also the completely real.(12) We are beginning to depend on this online feedback for daily validation. This kind of behavior is ultimately facilitating a false sense of reward within our realities. The contemporary philosopher Slavoj Zizek offers an additional viewpoint. What if what we experience as reality is structured by fantasy and if fantasy serves as the screen that protects us from being directly overwhelmed by the raw Real? Then reality itself can function as an escape from encountering the Real.(13) Virtual reality provides itself divested of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of the Real- in the same way that decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like real coffee without being the real thing. Virtual reality is experienced as reality without being so. Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything-on condition that it is stripped of the substance that makes it dangerous.(14) The opposite side of the coin is equally as disconcerting, for as much as we interact with the screen, there is the possibility of the reverse, described by Žižek. By only staring at the screen where the action takes place is sufficient and that it is enough to observe how others enjoy in place of the viewer, just as a sound engineer inserts a laugh track into a sitcom to do the laughing for us.(15) The real question is, what are we substituting or becoming in order to live this public and virtual experience? What sort of implications can this have? What kind of a world view do people start to conceptualize? Žižek believes that traces of gnosticism are clearly discernible even in today's cyberspace ideology. The cyberspace dream of the Self freed from its attachment to its natural body by turning itself into a virtual entity floating from one to another contingent and temporary embodiment is the scientific-technological realization of the gnostic dream of the Self getting rid of the decay and inertia of material reality. No wonder that the philosophy of Leibniz is one of the predominant philosophical references of cyberspace theorists: Leibniz conceived the universe as composed of 'monads', microscopic substances each of which lives in its own self-enclosed inner space, with no windows onto its environs. One cannot miss the uncanny resemblance between Leibniz's 'monadology' and the emerging cyberspace community in which global harmony and solipsism strangely coexist. That is to say, does our immersion in cyberspace not go hand in hand with our reduction to a Leibnizian monad which, although 'without windows' that would directly open up to external reality, mirrors in itself the entire universe? More and more, we are monads with no direct windows onto reality, interacting alone with the PC screen, encountering only virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more than ever in the global network, synchronously communicating with the entire globe. (16) The truly scary thing however, is that personal visibility on the internet is the new symbol of status and power in our digital age.(17) Spam, Image as junk In The Spam of the Earth- Withdrawal from Representation, the filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl elaborates on the effects of image consumption: Images trigger mimetic desires and make people want to become like the products represented in them. In this view, hegemony infiltrates everyday culture and spreads its values by way of mundane representation.(18) The image/object on the screen is becoming increasingly representational in its original form, disconnected and mostly accompanied by advertisements, endlessly replicated on the screen. Things which are almost completely disconnected from the observer and exist as place holders or signifiers. They do not actually exist in physical form. These are simulations of products; things that are only representations of the real. While these empty images can seem harmless, mostly invisible, unobtrusive or easily avoidable at times, it should be considered that this silent over-saturation is a bigger reflection on what is happening in our society. Image and media consumption are a pervasive form of conscious and unconscious intake. Objects are images, images are signs, signs are information, and information fits on a chip. Everything reduces to a molecular binarism; this is the generalized digitality of the computerized society.(19) Social communication is submitted to techno-linguistic interfaces. Therefore, in order to exchange meaning in the sphere of connectivity, conscious organisms have to adapt to the digital environment.(20) And this digital environment is increasing its “surface depth”. Image saturation seems far more seductive than we want to realize. In After the Social Media Hype: Dealing with Information Overload, Geert Lovink poses more questions and answers to an undisciplined virtual feast. Is there a way out of the self-help trap that we have set up for ourselves? Why should we think of our lives as something that we need to manage in the first place? Take The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption (2012) by California IT professional Clay A. Johnson. The book is about information obesity and how to recognize its symptoms. Johnson discusses the ingredients of a “healthy” information diet and shows how we can we develop a data literacy that helps us be selective about the information we access. Information obesity arises, he says, when consensus in society over what is truth and what is not diminishes, when any odd piece of information can pass as vital scientific knowledge. For Johnson, the parallels between food and information consumption are all too real and go beyond metaphorical comparisons. There’s no such thing as information overload. It’s all a matter of conscious consumption. We can read as many facts as we like, but if we try to add them up, they refuse to become a system. We struggle to keep track of all the information that approaches us, making it hard for most info bits to be properly digested. This is the passive indifference that Jean Baudrillard celebrated during his lifetime, and which has now become the cultural norm. The result is “epistemic closure.” When we are constantly exposed to real-time interactive media, we develop attention fatigue and a poor sense of time. (Johnson says that his over consumption of information impaired his short-term memory.) The info-vegan way out would be to work on the will power—an executive function that can be trained—with the goal of increasing one’s attention span.(21) An argument could then be made that formulated “sale-able” images, created as ready-mades, have the same detrimental effect on our psyche just like that of consuming minimal-effort industrially produced food, as it is mostly empty, and actually unhealthy. Pre-packaged, pre-formulated, minimally attended images are pervasive, especially in advertising. Yet this is a symptom of capitalism and mass production on a visual level. In addition to this over consumption of daily distracting material, there has co-evolved paid 'solutions' to this problem. A virtual diet to help abstain from the temptation to consume meaningless information. They are in the form of internet productivity apps or distraction blockers. While some are free, the 'best' ones come with a subscription price. This is alarmingly similar to the pay-for-a-product-instead-of-self-discipline quick fix of dieting fads. Far more intriguing are the actual names of these applications. Antisocial RescueTime Freedom LeechBlock Klok Slife ManicTime WriteRoom DarkRoom FocalFilter FocusMe SelfControl Concentrate StayFocusd Think WriteMonkey WindowBlocker Hazeover Isolator Quiet ifreeface These programs offer a solution but their existence proves they are actually just a symptom to treat 'useless' information overtime, but why is this virtual junk food so irresistible? I think there is more value in trying to understand what these apps are actually trying to mediate in terms of psychological feedback. So, what are we heading for? What are the consequences of unabated “infobesity”? Quite naturally, it is hypperreality. Hyperreality is used in semiotics and postmodern philosophy to describe an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced post-modern societies. Hyperreality is a way of characterizing what our consciousness defines as "real" in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter an original event or experience. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. Hyperreality is a hypothetical communications infrastructure made possible by information technology. It allows the commingling of physical reality with virtual reality (VR) and human intelligence (frequently abbreviated HUMINT) with artificial intelligence (AI).Individuals may find themselves for different reasons, more in tune or involved with the hyperreal world and less with the physical real world.(22) Furthermore, what is the outcome of hyperreality? Maybe it is a schizoform view of the world. Claire Bishop believes at its most utopian, the digital revolution opens up a new dematerialized, de-authored, and unmarketable reality of collective culture; at its worst, it signals the impending obsolescence of visual art itself.(23) Can we conceivably describe this obsolescence? Perhaps it is diminishing subjectivity. It may sound ominous, but its worth a consideration as there could be a point in the future when all human experience is recorded with the use of personal devices, if this process hasn't already begun. Currently, and in the near future, widespread wearable technologies such as Google Glass will ease us into a different way of thinking and experiencing with reality augmentation.(25) Like with all new technology, first there is doubtful opposition (this time being with issues of privacy) but as it becomes cheaper and widely available, concern dissipates just like it did with Apple's iPhone. People have collectively accepted (consciously or not) to appear in anyone's photographs at any point in time, because we all have similar capturing devices. When the private space inside our heads gets smaller and smaller, we will only live imaginatively in dreams and fantasies. And even this is under intrusion. Scientists in Tokyo have begun attempts to effectively predict the images in our dreams with 60% accuracy using brain mapping techniques.(25) What are the philosophical implications when lived experience is recordable, accessible and downloadable? If the potential for past memories to be no longer subjective, this ultimately presents concerns about accountability and brain hacking. It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but we are already calculating how much data a human life is capable of becoming. I think Hito Steyerl provides the perfect conclusion: This is why many people by now walk away from visual representation. Their instincts (and their intelligence) tell them that photographic or moving images are dangerous devices of capture: of time, affect, productive forces, and subjectivity. They can jail you or shame you forever; they can trap you in hardware monopolies and conversion conundrums, and, moreover, once these images are online they will never be deleted again. Ever been photographed naked? Congratulations—you’re immortal. This image will survive you and your offspring, prove more resilient than even the sturdiest of mummies, and is already traveling into deep space, waiting to greet the aliens.(26)
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Pamphlet. Magazine - 2014 -