The Future, in Negatives.

In Jeanette Winterson’s book ‘The Stone Gods’, it depicts a far future where ;

Everyone is perfect, and Fixed (in our era ie plastic surgery). Choose any age you want to stop at and your looks will remain to be so. Nobody ages in terms of looks. Celebrities are now ultra humans with even greater enhancements.

The government have gone from destroying papers and rescinding passports, to freezing assets and stealing your cash, to finally being able to erase all records of your existence. You can’t purchase anything. You can’t travel. Your rights to function normally have basically been taken away.

Human intelligence will soon be taken over by the evolution of Robo Sapiens, who can remember anything. Even what you ate 2 years ago on this day.

Cars are replaced by solar powered transport with a personal ‘Summons officer’ onboard.

Men are having sex with children because they are no longer gratified with having sex with women as they all look the same. Paedophilia is being seen as how we look at homosexulity now.

Red dust pollutes the streets and you have to wear a pollution filter mask.

Yet another planet is dying under the hands of man-kind.

The truly frightening point?

Everything mentioned is possible.

The obsession we have now with plastic surgery may not yet be on a large scale, but we are getting there. As long as our fixation with beautiful and attractive people continues, ways will be created to cure that fixation. The scenario Winterson depicted may be extreme but the consequences could still apply.

We have also always mulled over how everyone, as long as they are connected to their phones, or can be found online, will soon be tracked by a singular large system. With every passing bit of technology advanced, that will soon be achievable.

And what about human intelligence? In class, we talked about how google is making us stupid. Now imagine google in a robot with level of intelligence beyond anything we can imagine. Would we still bother as much as to our own minds if there’s already such an alternative?

Oh and the problem of parking summons and parking lots persists in the future too, sorry drivers.

What I’m trying to ask here is, are we running ourselves to self-destruction?

Could we be too caught up with the changes and advances technology has brought to our lives to see the bigger picture? For what it’s worth, shouldn’t we all take a few million steps back and see what is going to happen?

Quite a sober last post for NCT, but ever since I caught the show ‘Minority Report’, the future has seem slightly disturbing and reading Winterson’s book has elevated those crazy thoughts.

Then again, who knows what the future could really bring. There could even be a hippie revival again where we swear off all technology and its influences around a campfire at Woodstock 2.0.

One last thing- you have to read the book, or any other books by her. =)

Attention, the new evil?

We’re living at a time when attention is the new currency: With hundreds of TV channels, billions of Web sites, podcasts, radio shows, music downloads and social networking, our attention is more fragmented than ever before.

Those who insert themselves into as many channels as possible look set to capture the most value. They’ll be the richest, the most successful, the most connected, capable and influential among us. We’re all publishers now, and the more we publish, the more valuable connections we’ll make.

Pete Cashmore – CEO & Founder of Mashable

There’s a old saying that goes ’Money is the Root of All Evils’. So  if ‘Attention is the New Currency’, does that make attention the new evil? 

This wouldn’t be such an issue a decade ago. There wasn’t anyone out there to give you attention for no reason unless you’re a mega celebrity. However, with some social networking sites having more users than an entire population of a country, the potential of having more than 500 people viewing your daily activities is highly achievable.

Under consumer behavior literature there are a variety of different self-images.

1. Actual Self-Image  (how consumers see themselves)

2. Ideal Self-Image (how consumers wuld like to see themselves)

3. Social Self-Image (how consumers feel others see them)

4. Ideal Social Self-Image (how consumers would like others to see them)

Taking this behaviours into the context of social networking sites, it is  highly possible for Point 2 &4 to  be carried out through social networking sites.

So what does all of these ( ie attention and image ideals made possible by social networking sites) encourage?

The manifestation of narcism, image issues, superfluous personalities and behaviors, and changing dynamics of relationships?

Personally speaking, its a Yes. Yes. Yes. and Yes. Rationally speaking, it could be a Yes, Yes, Yes and No.

Being monitored or let’s put it in a less stalkerish sense, being viewed with interest has its yin and yang, black and white, good and bad sides.

Before I go on, I would let you know I am not going to rant on the bad side of attention. Everything I listed and everything else that has been said about the self-absorbed quality social networking sites encourages has been discussed time and time again. Yes, attention could be the new evil, or in fact it already is.

This amount of attention on a single normal human entity is just too much for any sane human being to bear and thus, most of us cave in to it in varying degrees. New sensitivities arises and how you are portrayed to the world now holds even more importance. I could continue in this vein for the next few entries and not be done.

Instead, I would like to focus on the good side of attention, the type whereby might seem bad (since all forms of attention seems to manifest negative behavior) at first thought but has the potential to do good.

The Yang, White & Good of Attention

According to a new study conducted by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder.com, 45 percent of employers questioned are using social networks to screen job candidates — more than double from a year earlier, when a similar survey found that just 22 percent of supervisors were researching potential hires on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Some of you might be protesting, ‘How could that be a good thing?!’ 

Thorny issue isn’t it , getting attention from prospective employers.

Let’s face it, it is now getting tougher to seperate your work life with your personal life and instead of going against it, it’s time that we learn to go with it. Instead of petrifying your employers with provocative or less than glamorous pictures of you getting sloshed at a club, why not mollify them?

The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.
- Sun Tzu

Use their potential attention to shape your Facebook identity, gratify their attention with pictures of you volunteering at a hospice or write witty, thought evoking entries with such depth on your blog they would be impressed with you even before you do anything for the company.

That doesn’t mean I’m asking you to lie.

What I’m asking of you is to be the person you want to be, fulfil that potential and do what you know is healthy and good for you and before long, you would find that you like this new you. I mean, isn’t this in essence what all the self-help books out there are telling you? Well, I’m telling you this for free without the $20 price tag.

 Yet another form of good attention is found in this article here, it speaks of how nonprofits increasingly turn to this medium as a way to reach audiences they didn’t have access to before.

The United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania has been promoting itself on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for about a year, said Joseph DiVincenzo, its vice president of marketing and communication.

The agency’s workplace campaign raises about $50 million for area charities, so the social media United Way uses aren’t going to replace that any time soon.

“It’s not raising us $50 million, but it does put us out there to people who don’t know about the United Way,” he said.

This is the sort of attention social networking site users should seek for, a kind of attention that could serve to benefit byeond stoking your own already enlarged ego. 

Despite its overwhelming negative social effects it does bring, attention doesn’t has to be the new evil, it could be good, has already done some good, and if we take it in stride, even make it to be our advantage.

The Obsession

I have found that with everything you discover you like, it can go from being an interest to becoming an obsession, just because the World Wide Web makes it so easy for us to.

I’m a classic example of this ‘obsessive’ generation. Or you could also view me as a classic victim, but I’m fine with whatever you may deem it to be.

As kids, we were occupied merely by cartoon shows, our collection of toys and maybe play-acting. If there was a show we liked, we caught it daily or weekly. Our toys were taken out, used and abused. Sometimes we may want something badly and whine to get it but mostly we just played with whatever was given to us. All play-acting required was our imagination and furniture as props and the key point of it was to keep it fantastical with the simplest of tools.

 There was no trying to make our toy collections into coveted piles of limted edition merchandises or even buying every series of that particular cartoon in a DVD box set. We didn’t try to bring things to the next level. We were happy as it things were, cause we thought that’s all there was to it.

Our consciousness and knowledge of what the world can really offer has expanded since then, and look where it has got us.

From my growing music collection in my Ipod to my growing camera collection, and even blogging has become an obsession. Since when did having access to 500 songs with a touch of your fingertips become insufficient? And do I really need 4 different cameras and 4 different blogs? Why has making everything bigger and better a part of doing what we like?

Without the Internet, I wouldn’t have discovered that many amount of artists and bands which thus led to me having more songs than I could ever listen to in one normal sitting. The longest bus ride would not see me even nearing the end of my playlist.

I would not have been aware of the differences in cameras if not for the internet, from old film cameras to the modern technologies found in DSLRs. After seeing the outcomes that each camera produces, I found myself just having the need to have everything.

Even liking a magazine has seen me awaiting its latest issue to be out and making sure I got my hands on one even though it would cost more than 2obucks each time round. If I hadn’t seen its pages on the net, no part of me would have been tempted by it merely by seeing it on a rack.

The point is, the internet has made it difficult for us not to blow up our hobbies and interests, especially when everything is within your reach, sometimes with illegal means. There is now no end to satiating our wants and impulses. I no longer believe anything could be just enough and this has become a part of who I am.

Keeping up with the world has become a marathon for all of us. Like a normal marathon, it could either keep you healthy and invigorated, or kill you just by being in it.

I’d like to think its all a matter of perception and attitude – knowing what you are doing and not doing just for the sake of it and not getting to the point where keeping up with your obsessions becomes your life.

If you go online everyday needing to know what’s new and then finding yourself wanting to be part of it for no reason other then to nurture this obsessive trait of yours, then that is when you should drop out of the marathon.

Twitter – It’s a Love-Hate Thing

How I feel about Twitter varies on a daily basis.

It is a single entity that  irritates, entertains, frightens, and marvels me.  Somedays, my relationship with Twitter is like that of an old couple who have forgotten why they got together in the first place. NCT and the rest of the Twitter world was begging me to love it, but I didn’t want to agree with the notion that Twitter could be good for me.

I mocked at its mere 140 characters limit. I followed no one, unwilling to give anyone the satisfaction of having someone else read their self-absorbed posts. I even thought its name slightly ridiculous. I had nothing I wanted to say in this portal, believing it doesn’t deserve to be bestowed upon with my pressence. I belittled it, preferring to blog, thinking that it was impossible to squeeze in anything important in a mere 140 characters or less word limit. I basically tried abandoning my Twitter account but I failed.

Twitter won me over.

How?

It could be the fact that I found myself linked to the new marvels and happenings the rest of the world had to offer (once I bothered to follow actual people), existence of things I wouldn’t have an inkling of without Twitter. I was updated in the simplest manner, without the hassle of published media. Friends and acquaintances now played a new role in my life – keeping me current and updated.

It could also be that somehow, I realised, the most important things could be said in 140 words or less.

Take away the clutter of unnecessary words usually found in blog entries, and you are left with the ’stripped’ version and with the facts that truly mattered. With Twitter, I can zoom in on the essence of what a person is trying to say without having to do the usual selective reading which takes on more time.

Twitter isn’t self-absorbed.

140 characters do not give you enough space to irritate your friends with your self-absorption. Instead,  I felt it was a tool that aimed to serve its users – be it keeping connected with loved ones continents away or a company keeping its consumers in touch with their latest promotions. Twitter allows you to go a long way for a tool so small.

And as much as I hate to admit it, Twitter has the cutest ring to its name and nicknames.

Twittering, tweet, twit,  = all too cute. Maybe a little too cute at times, but we can all do with a certain measure of cuteness in this cyberspace world where things are wired, metallic and slightly stoic.  There’s even a Twittonary where, you guessed it, there are more cute words inspired by Twitter.

So here’s how it is.

Somedays I love Twitter in all its 140 words, cute twitting glory.

On other days, I allow myself to not like it, to wonder how a tool like it has worked and then realised this is the future upon us. That no matter how we try to resist, its impossible not to be bought over by such simple, geniustwitterlogy.

What Living Has Shown Me

Everything was thought up of while I was suffering from a bout of insomnia. You might not get it, but it isn’t important that you do, so don’t question me about this. I just want to remember.

1. Nobody sugarcoat things for you when you get old.
2. Only those genetically blessed can be bubble-wrapped.
3. It’s as if they want you to be defeated, and sometimes it’s almost not worth putting up a fight.
4. You can shout, scream or yell all you like, but if they don’t want to hear you, you might as well be stupid or mute.
5. Sleeping can be your worse enemy- its the thing that makes you not want to get up, not the general suckiness of life.
6. The types who wants it all are people who don’t like you but wants you to like them anyways.

I’m trying to make this link to NCT, but I can’t. So maybe this could just be an anti-NCT post, a post where it has nothing to do with NCT. 3 mentions of the term NCT should be enough to warrant this quite NCT-ish anyways.

NCT LESSON 2

The page that didn’t last beyond NCT lesson.

If only it was real. hah, joke, people. Come on, we aren’t thatttt desperate. (If anyone feels the group has real potential, tweet me. … hah, joke, again)

The Web, in more or less words.

“…Still, you had to admit that it was nice to be without a body for a while; there was an addictive thrill in being of no age, no gender, with no past. It was an infinite sequence of opening portals, of menus and corridors that let you into brief, painless encounters, where what passed for life was a listless kind of browsing. World without consequence, amen. And in it she felt light as an angel.”

-Dirt Music by Tim Winton

Just the literary fiend in me popping by to make its snobbish pressence known here.

Hello babies

In all accuracy, this should be my 1583th post. But welcome all the same.