This is a very good thread, it articulates a lot of my feelings thank you. But I don’t like the title.
I read padraig’s comment about ‘club’ music on the sideways not forwards thread
like there's no there there.
And I thought “there’s no here here either”, and I wanted to take it away from music. So I was going to do another thread, I’d thought it out on my walk into work, the thread was going to be called ‘Here and Now’ and it was going to start with me asking if you’ve felt alive since 2010 and talking about living in London for the last 7 years but not actually being here. The most basic way to explain it is things Citymapper usurping my spatial navigation. And popping in and out of different holes in a metropolis without feeling you’ve moved, and rootlessness.
I was going to talk about mediated time, the idea that the more time we spend in our screens and in the songs, and our series, and timelines of social media,with less slowness, less boredom, the more we destabilise the ‘inner clock’, and gradually we undermine our trust in our inner clock, in the history of ourselves. It also ceases to sync with the inner clocks of others.
And news events never fully settle, they’re continually retold and recontextualised, their significance goes up and down in an epistemological stock market. Collective beliefs are produced but never fully accepted.
We outsource memory, maybe because we don’t trust our own recording and timekeeping, to the internet. And we float the moments of our lives in the stock market of social media too, trade them for social capital, assess their value, build a portfolio, use insights to inform future decisions. And we consume our own timelines, rearrange and we rewrite, maybe something from your past that you thought was cool could be dragged up and cancelled.
I was going to talk about Mcluhan’s ideas of media as extensions of mine, and how there’s always a numbing that happens along with the extension. I was going to mention conceptronica as a failed attempt to enliven the senses, to imbue a now, somewhere... by filling in the weight and mood and texture of the old time and space before the internet flattened and numbed us. Onehotrix’s myriad show was a fully immersive audio visual assault, with even smells. Concept and themed events are attempts to do the same… we are here!!! This is happening!!! Can you feel it!!!
It was going to be really pretentious and exciting, it was going to help me articulate my feelings to people, maybe a woman I fancy, maybe several, speaking of popping in and out of different holes in a metropolis. You could have all helped me to sound smart, and I could make her feel really present, really connected, really there, she’d forget about her phone.
Because you didn't really "do" anything, didn't "go" anywhere. All that time and information gathering or whatever just falls into a void.
Which is why I've occasionally found myself blogging, sometimes almost word for word, the same blog entry on one of my nonsense blogs like Hardly Baked that I did four or five years earlier, because it was similarly impulse-blogged in response to some video I'd stumbled on at YouTube. I stumble on it again and the same mental responses, amusement/bemusement are triggered. Thanks to the amnesiac effect of internet life I've completely forgotten that I blogged it before.
Perhaps that's why I'm getting a horrid feeling of deja vu - creeping suspicion that I have typed in thoughts similar to these at Dissensus before, on some earlier thread…
I get this feeling too, but I don’t wonder if they were my thoughts, more if they were someone else’s.
‘Here and now’ would have been a great thread, even better than this one.