Beyond the noise
“At some point life just got faster. Attention span seems to be constantly quickening. This is not the age of information but it rather seems the age of data overload, the age in which we all subsequently get lost within the megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes of images, textual content, music, video clips flowing by each and every day. At this point we’re just consumers, there’s hardly time for anything else.”
A simple paragraph of text, not much structure nor meaning. His eyes still on the screen, green on black, letters on a squared writing area. Few lines of text, result of an hour-long write-select-delete procedure, of dealing with the own ability to find the right words in the right language, or to accept things to be written as mere snippets of transient thoughts. Snapshots of a mental landscape in green/black symbols. Distraction-free writing, as they call it. Difficult a state of mind to achieve indeed, even here in this place that provides a certain kind of comfort, a hideout from what seems an ever-accelerating world getting more complicated in as many troublesome ways as possible. Distraction-free writing… What does that eventually mean in days in which going _without_ distractions obviously is the last thing anyone wants? What is this likely to mean in days of some sort of superficial high speed culture, in days in which a load of cultural exchange or dealing with content seems to boil down to pushing little blue thumbs on images, a hundreds a minute? What is this likely to mean while looking at the world through a browser window, 1,000 tabs per session and counting, some of them emitting music, some of them eventually likely to emit video if one would just pay attention? So to set the soundtrack for this stage – simple as that: Just fire up three, four, five, ten, twelve different YouTube tabs, randomize whatever you find, press play times X, get your headphones, lay back. Maybe it won’t be pleasant but at least it would be a confusing and, thus, well-suited soundtrack to what seems an awfully awkward journey through an unsorted structure of data in which a load of meaning, not even talking accuracy or truth, has disappeared to a dark and abandoned corner, all along with any ideas about signal/noise ratio.
It’s a cold and rainy evening outside. That’s the reality in things, right now.
The green and black has disappeared as he powered down his terminal. Night moves on fast, seems he’s running low on battery despite the dimmed-down display. Never mind. Possibly that’s not the only way to run low on battery. Looking out of that other window, he can see reflections on wet roads, cars slowly passing by, a city preparing for another late winter night. Power off, for now.
It’s not just the terminal that needs a recharge…