April 19, 2001

  • I used to feel this way:

    The "Information Highway" is really so typical an expression of the modern experiment and the American predicament. We in America seem more than any other people to wholeheartedly embrace the highway myth, namely, that paving the broad, expansive, never-ending freeway is not merely a path to, but actually one of the fullest expressions of, the Dream. But just as the auto highway system in America has torn into much of the rich beauty of the landscape, defacing and transforming it into functional yet charmless environs, so too does the "information highway" seem to rip through the delicate constructions of numinous consciousness. With its impulsive push to display and purvey overwhelming amounts of data (perhaps as Carl Sagan might say, "billions and billions of gigabytes of data") in its quest for manufacturing a modern technological philosopher's stone--i.e., a point access to all at once, the Internet appears to serve as the perfect mechanism for initiating an irreverent, leveling, and madcap understanding of the world.

    To continue the comparison, the national highway system has served as a technological surrogate for the wilderness with a unique provision of its own chaos and predation. What could be more of a jungle than a confounding traffic jam? What wildland provides more danger and induces more mortality than the national highway system? And road rage-isn't that sweet? The Information Highway (Internet), too, displays this trait of surrogate pseudo-wilding. Its construction of so many backwatered, if not uncharted, cyberlands appears to provide the new wilderness for us modern exploring-prone websurfers to probe and inhabit. But the degree to which we depend on this psuedo-cyber wilderness for an authentic wilderness experience really bespeaks a paucity of the spirit in the eternal quest to reinvest (experience) and/or reinvent (experiment with) life in its fullness--in the context of all time and space. Using Microsoft's Explorer to explore the Information Highway in a primary and indulging fashion is, at best, a very diminished expression of the genuine quest of the human spirit to explore the untold mysteries of the universe.

    Since engaging in Xanga, however, my outlook has changed:

    the internet is part of the universe.
    as such, it is a microcosm of the macrocosm.
    microcosms recapitulate the macrocosm.
    Recap! Recap! Recap!
    Damn the diatribe, dialog ahead!

    *looks at attitude change*
    *looks at Xanga*
    *thinks: brain on drugs*

Comments (273)

Comments are closed.

Post a Comment

notforprophet

Recent Posts

Categories

The End of Days

April 2001
M T W T F S S
« Mar   May »
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30