DVD, VoD, Podcast....FORTSETZUNG 1:
ENTANGLED IN THE MATRIX NET
YouTube is a conspiracy theorist's dream, as the number of clips that claim the collapse of the World Trade Center was a setup attest to. This democratization continues on Google Video (soon to swallow YouTube whole and complete its domination), which offers a number of feature documentaries including one called The Net by German filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck. The Net recently screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival, but you can watch it free on the Web as many times as you would like....(-)
I've watched the film a few times, and I'm still not quite sure what it all means, or if it means anything at all.
Like the Internet itself, the bewildering density of information requires careful sorting.
But one idea does jump out. John Brockman paraphrases a quote from Doubt and Certainty in Science:
A Biologist's Reflections on the Brain by J.Z. Young that states: "We create tools and then we mould ourselves
through our use of them."
In the brave new world of Google Video, YouTube, MySpace, et al., what does this mean? If we create technology and then become what we have created, have we now succeeded in making Jackass World?
(-)
The ability to transfer information of all varieties -- good, bad, and more often really silly -- raises the question of the evolving role of the Internet. How did we get here, and just exactly where are we going? If we're all open-system neural nets, hooked into some vast social network of goofy videos and other assorted fripperies, are we, like little old Keanu, plugged in and tuned out? Does the Internet really represent a borderless cyber-world of global citizens partaking of the ultimate, free-to-be-you-and-me democracy, open to all voices and all viewpoints, however silly or dangerous.
And, what if, as Mr. Dammbeck hints in his film, it's not quite that simple. The history of the Internet itself bears witness to the strange collusion of hippie-style counterculture with what author Fred Turner, in his new book, "From Counterculture to Cyberculture": Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, calls "Cold War-era military-industrial information theory." Mr. Turner's book traces the same slice of history as Mr. Dammbeck's documentary, but offers a different interpretation. Stewart Brand, like many of the originators of the modern digital era, came of age when communication was quite literally about saving the world. Where this utopian impulse went is another topic, but, as Mr. Turner notes in a phone interview, the many users of MySpace "have yet to form a political party."
It is easy to write off someone like Mr. Kaczynski -- he was pretty crazy, after all -- but just because you're crazy doesn't mean you don't have a point, as some critical thinkers, most notably Bill Joy, co-founder of Internet titan Sun Microsystems, have noted. Dangerous Ideas is also the central theme at the 10th annual POP!Tech Conference (Oct. 18-21), at which many of the world's pre-eminent thinkers (everyone from Richard Dawkins
to Brian Eno) will be posing some tricky ethical questions about evolving technology.
So, are you being controlled by an elite group of cyber-hippies and ex-CIA military types without
even knowing it?
Or, as Theodor Adorno believed, lulled into a state of passivity and pseudo-individualization by pop culture.
Or are you part of what Marshall McLuhan heralded as the new dawn in which "we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned."
Or as Morpheus said to Neo, "The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. . . . It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."
I'm starting to feel Keanu-ish again, staring blankly into space, saying, "Whoa . . ."
DOROTHY WOODEND, in: theglobeandmail
October 14, 2006
der komplette Text ist zu finden unter
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061014.wcolumn14/BNStory/PersonalTech/#(interessant und lustig ist, dass John Brockman die gleiche Rezension auf seiner Website
www.edge.orgzitiert, allerdings mit anderen Ausschnitten....find out)
