m a n u s c r y p t s

Sometime back, I read an extremely interesting post by Chris Messina – how we’re now hit by a plethora of data and information on the real time web, which our brains are not adapted, and how, in order to process this, we’d require an augmentation of our existing abilities.

The information overload has been happening for a little while now. I’ve been on Twitter for over a couple of years now. Between reading blogs, writing them, microblogging, Facebook and all the shiny little tools that keep coming up, its a constant juggling act. I can also see a drastic change in the relationships there already, as compared to the banter of the initial days. New people, new thoughts, old people who’re changing with time, old thoughts recycled.  A simple @ tag connects lives. Meanwhile, its not just relationships and thoughts that change, but also behaviour – the need to share an experience, attention deficit, and so on. These would obviously vary with an individual’s usage of Twitter, facebook etc, but I’m sure there are more like me.

While I’ve been dimly conscious of the vastness of the Twitterverse, I had a more tangible realisation only after i came across a tool (from an article shared by Shefaly). As I sat watching the pictures streaming across the screen on Twitcaps, I felt I was somehow connected to all of them across the world sharing images – from parties to churches to landscapes to death to raunchy stuff to coffee mugs and so many many other things. There are multiple images being shared every second, and I had an acute realisation of the magnitude of change happening, in terms of connectedness and sharing. The population of the world, the population of your own city, the number of people working in your office/living in the apartment complex- as the numbers come down, the people slowly change from a blurred intangibility to a focused person. But as we get more and more networked, the number of persons who become tangible are increasing, the arguments about their relative importance to self notwithstanding. As Chris says in the article, can human beings cope after a point?

Sometime earlier this year, I remember writing a post about speciation – the evolution of the human species, and how replacement of body parts and advancement might finally end up in a being that may not match our current concept of human, or even living, like the Cybermen in Dr.Who. In that post, I had also mentioned Homo Evolutis, one of whose characteristics was networked intelligence.

As the information deluge gathers momentum, there may be those who choose not to be part of it, who are comfortable not being part of this vast stream of consciousness, while there may be others who use their abilities and the augmentation to embrace this. These are obviously two extremes, and its quite possible that humans would figure out a middle path. But I already see this divide happening – some leaving it by choice, some left out by circumstances. The learning curve is becoming so steep that after a few years, it might be difficult or even impossible to catch up. And that’s how I begin to wonder whether we’re rapidly approaching the point when the species will diverge. Maybe not in my lifetime, but within a couple of generations?

There’s another aspect of all this that I wondered about. With the increasing amount of information and the speed at which we’re forced to process it, will we have time to acquire more perspectives, or continuing that cycle, accumulate more baggage? Will that change the way we behave with people, and the way we live life? Will we become more objective? Or will we become more biased, relying on notions we don’t have time to change, and behaving accordingly?

As I write this there is a stream of thoughts running in my head – of times, friends and relationships. Poignant moment as I realise the vast yet connected nature of the universe and its inhabitants. In the miniscule amount of my lifetime that I have spent on Twitter, I realise that people and relationships have changed, perhaps irrevocably. The lifestream will be an interesting read for me later, if I do manage it. Meanwhile life flows, faster, faster, until each second and beyond is accounted for, with streamers in between, so that we might remember…just..

until next time, you’re here..now..reading post #700..thank you

In the first book of the Ramayana series, Ashok Banker uses a line, a statement made by Rishi Adhranga to Lakshmana, as the brothers are about to enter Bhayanak van, where Tataka resides – “Over time, truth becomes fact, fact is rewritten as history, history fades to legend, and eventually, legend remains as myth.” In the myth , these words are  spoken in the Treta Yuga (the Age of Reason), which follows Satya Yuga (the Age of Truth). The character also states that by the time its the Kali Yuga (the Age of Darkness, which is last and after the Dvapara Yuga), devas and asuras would be just race-memories and dismissed as fantasy by the rational and the scientific.

In science fiction, there are many stories of the ravages of time. One, where, man comes across computers and other technological specimens, but does not know how to use them, since the lack of energy had made humans de-evolve. Another, where man discovers that the canals on Mars were made by a race of humans, ten thousands of years back, in an older ‘cycle’ of evolution and de-evolution. Interesting?

So the other day, I was thinking about facts, truth, history and stories. It further led me to thinking about these blogs of mine, the lifestreams on Facebook and Twitter and on the blog. The digital snapshots of our lives, the way we are storing our life almost by the second, for many reasons. Our experiences, our thoughts, our desires, our emotions, our fears, our happiness and sorrow, and so many more things. To share, to look back….. to create an image of ourselves for whoever sees it?

In Cochin, at home, there are these old albums with black & white and sepia photographs. The ones with which we, as children, had fun trying to identify Mom and Dad in their childhood photographs. There are other characters in them – grandparents, uncles, aunts and other relatives, friends of theirs. While many of them are easily identified by the earlier generation, some remain unknown, or rather, ones who aren’t remembered. Either ways, other than direct interactions, these photos are perhaps the only remains of people who lived a few decades back. Ever wonder who they really were, as persons, what were their thoughts, what did they think of their life, and others’, did they question their existence, or were they busy running a life, as we are? Did they think that someone, somewhere in the future would look at their photographs and peer into their lives beyond the confines of the frame? Would they have smiled a bit more if they knew, or would they try to look more serious? Maybe they wouldn’t have cared enough to strike a special look or pose?

With the advent of the web, there are now more means than ever to store ‘life’. Sound, pictures, videos, enough material to make sure that a life is much more documented than the two dimensional photographs. Though my lifestreaming purpose is limited to my life, when I read posts about what happens to a person’s blog/Facebook account etc after his/her death, I can’t help but wonder about the future of digital lifestreams.

With relationships getting redefined on a  regular basis, will there be anyone later who cares enough to go through another person’s life. After all, with the explosion of user generated content, an individual’s lifestream is just a statistic. (yes, even otherwise, it might just be that, but these are perhaps our efforts to move from being an irrelevant statistic  to a relevant individual). Yes, perhaps truth won’t become facts and so on, though the objectivity of truth itself can be questioned. But meanwhile, I am reminded of the science fiction tales. Maybe no one will be able to access all this content. Or it could be a deviant of this scenario. I have quite a lot of music cassettes. While I can still easily find devices to play it, a few years later, that might not be the case – either that, or the tapes would be in no state to be played. There are many tracks in these which I can’t find online. In the near future, they will be lost to the past. So in essence, technology might advance so much that those data items which have not been updated might be inaccessible anyway.

A life. A lifetime of experiences, which defined not just what happened to a single person, but also to those around. Multiple lives. A web of existence. Humanity. Statistics and non-stories. All of which would be rendered inaccessible or meaningless in the future, but without which the future would not exist. An endless stream, which may have the larger picture of its origins, but has only hazy notions of the details. Makes me wonder. About the construct of our lives.

until next time, streaming out loud…

There’s an old man whom I meet almost everyday now – he’s a parking attendant. He has a speech impediment that renders most of what he’s saying incoherent. He claims to know quite a few languages and from what I make out of his Malayalam, it is quite passable. I did try to make conversation with him a few times, but felt uncomfortable every time I asked him to repeat something. Sometimes I see him talking to himself. Maybe he is relaxed when he doesn’t have to explain, or maybe he doesn’t want a response when someone cannot understand him.

A few experiences made me compare his condition to my communication on Twitter. I have always fancied Twitter for the lifestream capability. That’s one of the reasons (the fear of losing the lifestream) that I’ve even started hosting my tweets in my own space. But, while I can do that on the blog, the conversations and some interesting people I come across make an effective bonus that keeps me hanging in there.

However, last week, something made me question my Twitter existence. On two consecutive days, I was ‘forced’ (yes, I do take responsibility for forcing myself too) to explain tweets which were my reactions to a couple of stuff that were being talked about on Twitter. The reactions were not pro or against anyone, and did not even touch upon the central issues, they were just interesting to me from a thoroughly different perspective. No, I am not going to detail them here, but suffice to say that while I was explaining, I felt like the old man, who found it so difficult to communicate something that perhaps (and most likely) in his head, doesn’t suffer from any lack of clarity at all. It frustrated me that, even keeping aside barriers like language and speech impediments, it has become impossible for us (I blame myself too, and am generalizing, so those above all this, please ignore) these days to take a statement or idea and not immediately judge it and catalog it safely into some stereotype we have made in our head (in both cases, I was considered either pro something or against something, when I didn’t have an opinion at all, because the issues themselves were of relatively lesser importance to me)

Sometimes, I see the old man in conversation with others, and he seems to be enjoying it. Maybe his companions know him enough to figure out what he’s trying to say, or maybe they’re just nice people who would like to see him happy and make him feel that there are people who understand him, in spite of his disability. If it’s the latter, I hope he never finds out.

until next time, communication channel surfing

A while ago, I’d written about my fascination for lifestreaming, and the role it could play in storing our memories and giving it context. In fact memories and the possibility of losing them have always been food for thought for me.  One memory from a long time back, when I was an avid reader of Doctor Who books,  is of one of the Doctor’s villain sets – Cybermen – a fictional race of cyborgs. From Wikipedia

Cybermen were originally a wholly organic species of humanoids originating on Earth’s twin planet Mondas that began to implant more and more artificial parts into their bodies as a means of self-preservation. This led to the race becoming coldly logical and calculating, with emotions usually only shown when naked aggression was called for.

The connection. I saw an article recently on what has been called Homo Evolutis (original video here). Human beings have been the dominant species on the planet for a short while now, and as the author explains, there’s no guarantee that the current situation is a stable one. And in this context is seen the beginnings of speciation, in broad terms the evolution of our own species.

The author talks about three different tracks of speciation -prosthetics (from limbs to hearing aids and beyond), stem cell and tissue engineering (where we are reaching a stage when a single cell can be rebooted back to its original factory settings and can rebuild any part of our body,  and lastly, a track to improve the brain. The author says that the last track will be the slowest to evolve, but the one with the maximum impact.

And these tracks would create a new race or races- in fact a prosthetic body part, a plastic surgery etc are all the common manifestations of this process. As technology becomes more advanced, it will become affordable to a lot more people. From a physical perspective, who wouldn’t like body parts whose wear and tear can be controlled, an end to pain and suffering. And it doesn’t stop there, because we’d like to have the best physical abilities that any species has in terms of moving, seeing, hearing, strength etc. From the mind’s perspective, an organ that could upgrade itself to store more, to experience more, to work faster, to be more accurate. And it doesn’t stop there – reading others’ minds, telepathy…

We will see the beginning of all this in our lifetime. The progress might be slow, so slow that perhaps later generations wouldn’t realise how we’d lived without most of the artificial things that they would be taking for granted. How would this affect the experiences of life that we go through now – joy, sorrow, pain, ecstasy, spirituality?  How long before what we call human would give way to a being that would probably exist forever, possibly without living? Will they even realise it when it happens?

until next time, a man made man….

I always wonder what the ‘hard disk’ capacity of the human brain is… maybe we’ve or will figure out ways to quantify it, but unlike the mechanical one, or even ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, it will be a long while before we can get to choose what the brain keeps and what it send to the recycle bin. Maybe, by that time, they will also figure out how to ‘upgrade’ the human brain’s capacity.

In terms of memories, we’ve been doing it forever, from clay tablets to computers, the aim has always been to store information, though processing and artifical intelligence did get into the picture later. But having notepad and word documents with dates and activities seems a strange way of documenting life.

Which, i am guessing, is the reasons I stick to Twitter, but am always on the lookout for lifestreaming tools, like the one I have installed here. Its quite twitter heavy but also pulls information from my blogs, and a few other online accounts. I am also hoping to add Facebook status messages to it soon, since that’s also a good chronicler of happenings. This one does that too, but I’m yet to find a way to integrate it here.

In case you’re wondering why this fascination for lifestreaming, think about how you feel when you see an old photograph, hear an old song, meet an old friend.. there are so many associations it throws up.. I bet you can recollect most of these associations now – the dress you were wearing in the photo, where you got it from, where its journey with you ended, why were you looking happy or sad; where you heard that song first, the mood change it causes in you and why, what was generally happening in your life then; under what circumstances you became friends, the fun you used to have together, shared incidents and so on…. Well, I, for one, am not sure, how far back I will be able to remember, what I’ll be able to remember, and for how long… and these things are important to me because together they are what is known as my life.. and it’d be sad if I couldn’t remember the details of my own life, through my own mind or its accessories… thats the reason behind this fascination for lifestreams… maybe its to do with being a sucker for nostalgia..maybe its the way I am built…

I think it would be quite soothing at a later date, to sit back and read up the stuff that brought me to where I’d be then.. to better understand who I was, and perhaps figure out why I did what I did, why things happened to me, and so on..in essence, hunting for a pattern in the chronicle of a human life…

until next time, the sum of our lives….