Rather misleading, as there was no ‘Digithurst and the Internet’. The online experience was simulated but never implemented for real, perhaps out of fear of that ghost in the machine. So, from the bench at the side of the pitch, this is how I saw the game unfold.
These days, time moves so fast we have lost track of it altogether. Social media has blurred the distinction between work and leisure time. Facebook is used as a business tool and for social interaction, advertising and delivering news. Tablets, smartphones and Wi-Fi in Starbucks have ended the concept of an eight-hour working day. We surrender so much of our time to networks that we are forced to use Amazon Prime to buy some of it back. Meanwhile, the volume of information we are expected to consume continues to grow. I wrote numerous articles on information overflow and the impact of virtualisation during those last two years at Digithurst, most ignored by a publishing industry which has since wandered blindly into the digital age.
The transience and brevity of social media is the Internet’s response to the growing volume of information we are expected to consume. We have the instantly disposable 140-character news story, and a compression of language so bizarre it makes you want to LOL. Text, which is too time consuming to translate into a concept, now takes second place to pictures and video; our thoughts have been replaced by moving images. Information has become addictive, a dopamine rush; the 21st century’s LSD. While we perceive it as mind expanding, taking us to a higher level of conscienceless, in reality it merely overloads our senses. Within this infosphere, increasingly removed from physical space and devoid of a coherent narrative, we are losing sight of reality and our sense of ‘self’. As with LSD, quite where the Internet trip ultimately takes us is unclear; perhaps the hedonistic immortality of Keith Richards, the enlightened worldview of Bob Dylan, or maybe the brain-fried demise of Syd Barratt.
… (Extracts from The Ghost in the Labyrinth by Peter Kruger)
