Media and Me --- Media and We

Now that we are coming into the age where all experience is more or less mediated, I realize that the time ahead is the secret source of me. The idea of what constitutes media is actually changing even as I write. We think we know the media, but this is an illusion and the old notions of media are being redefined. Media are still about communication, but not in the old magazine and newspaper sense... not even in the old television and cinematic sense. Media is about community and represents the fracturing of the masses, a splintering into communes of interest --- not the communes of the Bolshevists which were designed to control masses, but the emergence of communication and consensus.

All that matters is that we are here, that we are part of the whole. I am concerned that this new media has a slight tinge of conformist pressure. This is necessary as part of a transition to a major shift in culture and civilization. We are experiencing this transition in every phase of human expression... all music sounds alike, all rap is the same, all websites are copies of each other, all films are knock-offs of each other, books are siphoned through word processors with cut and paste precision, and images are all photoshopped to death. Technology escalates imitation, but the creation of new masterworks materialize through emulation. In the newness of ourselves there is an immediacy, an awareness that our most profound knowledge is gained as something is happening rather than when it is completed.

Technology has empowered us with a new sensibility enabling us to move through materiality to a spiritual presencing. We experience this as a form of electricity sustaining a network emulating consciousness. With each advance, our material equipment is less cumbersome, smaller, more immediate. Connecting and sharing burgeons as the principle of Being. In the initial stages we rely on this not for the inherent spiritual power but for reassurance, a validation that we exist and that our existence matters and is confirmed by others. But this has already changed in a few of us.

Almost imperceptibly we are evolving as a new species. This is a major happening, and the advance sentinels of this new species are scattered among us. Like any emergence of a species, these modern individuals are few, but they are the advancement of all that we are becoming. We are the new media.