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Dying Media or dying Homo Sapiens?

During the reading of the Media Archive from Adilkino there wasn’t really one paragraph that stood out. It was reading between the lines that sparked my interest into thinking.

This idea came obviously from the beginning of the text about the ‘gibberish’ left by the writers. Destroying books by giving the possibility of misreading’s. Making up your own version of what has been written. No moment of truth, but metaphorsize the text to your own liking. What happens for example with stories that are being retold. One person changes a name, or a location. A few persons later the story has found a new light.

Just like what is being said in the text itself, it’s about the noise – an authentic source of information - deconstructing the text into just the basics about what they’re trying to tell you. Text was the starting point for the idea of order, it’s when you take away that order sometimes when you see what the basics are.

When scanning the text there was a word that struck me. Death. In this particular paragraph the death of media was discussed. Mentioned was that at the moment we start to have media that involves near death experiences, hospital reality shows etc, the death of media has started. It is by seeing death on the screen that we remember that we are alive.

Doesn’t this mean we’ve entered that stage now, and have been for a while. It seems that we are being sucked into the death of media without realising it. Even though on tv it censored to a certain amount, via new media outlets like youtube we can experience, for the first time, the most realistic and visual shocks that we as humans have become addicted to. I have stopped looking at this media for a while now, by having no television channels I cut myself off from most of these images. Hearing people talking about this was like being on the outside of the world. I had no desire to see this media, but I missed the connection. Now, having back my television channels I still try to stay clear of this particular media. But i still let it in somehow. Are we so submersed into media now that we don’t even realize or care the end of media has been here for a while? Do we really need these particular images to feel alive? And is this indeed, the death of (normal) media?

This idea is very intriguing because it creates a paradox, and at the same time a visually interesting phenomena. By seeing death - on the screen - we as humans feel connected and alive. But showing this death is killing the media. The dying media idea came back to me constantly going through the text.

The media itself doesn’t care what it does with us anyway. We are raw material, for the media to test itself upon again and again. It keeps developing itself. It will never be finished because the media surrounding the media is also in development. The route that the media take during the process is not laid out. It’s formed by means of experimenting, which can never be completely the same as previous taken routes. It lacks any responsibility and especially towards its audience. But then I ask myself, what if the media trial takes it so far that irresponsibility becomes recklessness. Does this indeed mean the result of ‘death’?

Or can we see this particular phrase of ‘death’ under the fact that innovative media has become a must instead of a creative impulse. Because of the overwhelming forms of media that are effective today, it seems everyone is trying to ‘keep up’. There is this need for ‘more’ and to stay connected with each other which creates a pressure to constantly adapt to new innovations. We are not secure, we are merely trying to follow and chose the right things out of the impossible number of choices that is available today. With every new form of technology we create a new view for ourselves, which changes the previous path or definition we knew. We can never be secure this way, if our nervous system has to keep adapting. We are becoming so involved into these new formats that at one point in the text the word ‘homo electricus’ was used to describe human beings today, which in my opinion says it all.

What is being mentioned in the paragraph about the need to make technological innovations is that this is partly motivated by the threat of Data. I didn’t quite understand how this could be the case. Later this Data is being labeled the Data Dandy, as a person who wants as much data as possible, obsessed with creating the complete file no matter what – having the ability to grow beyond its own borders. I think we all know what that is in reference to. The world today is being controlled by this precise Data Dandy.

To me this has always been the biggest interest of all – the big Dataland in which it seems we are all disappearing into. I don’t understand how this is a motivation for innovative media though. Is it so that this puts pressure on people to keep up with media and the Data Dandy so as not to become isolated, cut off from connection, or afraid of being noticed – because we are the only one not within the data? If you think rationally it seems that this is a motivation to stay clear of all innovative media and technologies. And with that also the possible death of media. Maybe we are too submersed into media and controlled by the Data Dandy that we can’t think like that anymore. Which means it's more a death of the Homo Sapien.

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