Quarantined

Hey everyone. Nice site you've got here. :) and thank you to those who emailed me a reminder - my head's been flu-addled for far too long and I'm looking forward to getting back on track.

As some of you may know, swine flu found it's way to my door and I've been fighting it off for a little over a week now. Which gave me a lot of time, in between sleeping and hallucinating, to think on different issues of power and what kinds I wanted to explore in a project of my own.

Of course the thought of sickness itself crossed my mind: The way in which H1N1 changed the way people saw me, treated me. I rememeber getting sick in the past and I was always greeted with sympathy and soup - these last few days I've fared little better than a leper, met with nervous glances and cautious isolation.

It got me thinking about the way we treat those around us, and the reasons for our interactions. Do you greet a stranger the same way you greet a friend? Of course not. There is a shared history between you and your friend not present within the stranger. Experiences you can draw upon to make judgements on how to act in future situations.on the power labeling has on power struggles.

Do I greet a stranger in the same way that you would? Probably not. Because we have different experiences, and prejudices based on those experiences. (Prejudice here should not be confused with the offensive contemporary connotations. The word simply means to judge beforehand, and each of us do this everyday when encountering people and places. We take in the scene, filter it through the collection of our past experiences, and act accordingly.)

In this way, it can be said that we are shaped at least partially by our past: We are the sum of our experiences, and because of this each and every one of us must be unique, as no two people can have the same collection of experiences. (it is impossible even to have one truly 'shared' experience, as two people cannot exist in the exact same time and space as another... except, argueably, within a virtual reality via cyberspace... but this is a tangent and I'd better not stray too far from my point. :P)

We are shaped by the expectations of our futures, our plans and goals which drive us to take action in a particular direction. However, these goals and desires are products of our past - what we have observed/experienced in our lives and come to associate as good or desirable.

And the present? Nearly non-existant, the fulcrum between the spooling thread of an evergrowing personal past and the open vista of an uncertain future. It's mind-boggling, to think we forever live in the present but never experience it - the world our senses percieve is always a fraction of a second slow, so the world we see and hear and love is the past, already set and fading.

....AND, to add to that bag of worms, the world we see is an illusion, a trick of that past-produced perception. We are filters, after all, and the world that you see is much different from the one I do.

There are the minor physical differences: Vision and hearing, for example, allow us to sample a slice of the information actually out there. The visual spectrum leaves us blind to infrared and ultraviolet. Our ears are deaf to infrasonic frequencies that many other organisms use for communication. Human to human, the range of each individual spectrum is not perfectly coordinated. Some people see a little more than others. Some hear sounds others cannot.

But the abstract differences are far more influential. Concepts like Tree and House seem so rigid, (because, as we spoke of in class, our own personal interpretations of "treeness" and "houseness" seem so obvious to ourselves). But each individual has a different "treeness" composed in his or her mind, based on that which they have associated with 'tree' in their own past experience. Different leaves, smells, textures, shapes, functions. And those associations are not isolated to 'Tree-ness' - they are interconnected to other feelings, images, ideas and sensations, a web of the mind unique in each of us.

and that's for something as simple and concrete as 'tree'. What of the true abstracts, like love? hope, trust, rage, faith, remorse, religion?


As hard as we try to connect to others, we are and will always be alone in our perception.

...but that doesn't mean we can't get close. Or think, or assume, or believe, that we are truely understanding one another. The more closely shared experiences two individuals have with one another, the closer they are to thinking in the same way.

Just being in proximity to one another is one manner of shared experience, but conversations, actual interaction, is much stronger. People are attracted to people with similar likes and dislikes, and all groups are founded on the basis of at least one shared belief.


But all of this leads to troubles, big troubles. Because all of that chaos in the world would shut us down if we tried to process it all in our heads, all the time. So it's filtered, filtered and muted and simplified until it's manageable. It starts with the physical - I already mentioned that we see and hear only a small range of what's really out there. Because we have evovled to see and hear only what we need to survive. Any more would be a waste of brain power, it would slow us down, perhaps fatally so. We have adapted a balance between head and hands, truth and functionality.

The filtering doesn't stop there. Because even in that limited range of senses, the enormity of what we hear and see and smell and touch is still very distracting, especially if we have to take the time to reason over each and every person or object in view.

So we simplify. That isn't a collection of timber carved and lacquered and fitted together with four legs and a back upholstered in leather and stitched twice around the seams with some sort of thread and a small stain on the upper left corner. It's a chair. Of course all of the detail is there, but our mind quickly notices it's 'chairness' and shoves it into the proper category in our heads, allowing us to more efficiently associate that particular chair with our predisposed knowledge, beliefs and feelings about chairs.




The problem arises when our minds use this same process on people. It takes a categorical Attribute, such as race, or creed, or gender, or height, or whatever group you belong in (say a particular class, or organization, or fraternity/sorority) and it applies the collected emotions and feelings toward that category (based on personal experiences - experiences, which in this case can include the discourse or beliefs of others that have been communicated to them) onto the individual person.


All of last week I was shunned. Not because my friends feared me, but because they feared the category of 'swine flu' that I had been cataloged into. The rest of who I am was momentarily blotted out beneath the shadow of that label.

This is the cause of every argument, every war, every bout of racism or sexism or any such "-ism" you can imagine. This is the fount of Power relations everywhere.

For there to be a power relationship, there must be at least two groups, and an inequality of some sort between them. Typically, majority rules. Majority governs normalcy and sanity: If everyone in a small group (except you) began to see pink elephants in the sky, you would be the outsider of the group, the weirdo. Still, you'd be confident that they are the abnormal ones, and you are Right in your way of thinking. However, if everyone in the country (except you) held firm to these beliefs, would they still be abnormal? If everyone in the world save you could see the pink elephants, where does that leave you?

The world is not absolute, and different ways of thinking exist in variable sizes and forms across the globe. When two different groups - or even two different individuals from these groups - meet, there will always be an argument over who is right and who is wrong. A boiling sea of thought and perception, stretched right across the globe.

*******


Soooo! That was a really long and roundabout way of introducing a keen interest in perception and it's influence in Power Struggles, which I plan to use in my project.



I’m still up in the air on what I am actually going to produce. I had a pretty firm idea, one based on a creative writing concept I've been meaning to pen down for years now. However, it comes dangerously close to breaching Quinton's claim on Power and technology. Perhaps we could work together on the concept and each develop branching ideas (differing perspectives) on the Tech. Revolution?

The story deals with Man, Nature, and Machine, and questions the line drawn between them.
Nature produces Man, which becomes aware and works toward isolating himself from Nature, using/becoming Machine.
Man produces Machine, which becomes aware and works toward isolating herself by using/becoming Nature.


The story is set in the future, but not as far as you might think. maybe within a century.
The environment is ruined, and as it stands the Earth is too harsh to live on its surface any longer. People have moved underground, large cavernous cities protected from the heat and radiation.

The surface of the Earth is not in ruins, but instead a gleaming silver garden, An eden, an untouchable paradice.

Robotic plantlife had been invented and invested in decades prior - something artificial to replace what they destroyed, a means of converting light into power, as well as filtering the atmosphere. Each leaf is a solar cell, collecting the light and siphoning it down the rootwires into the city below, a lifeline to the subterraneous peoples.

However, the plantlife has been changing, adapting, learning. It was produced to repair and manage itself, and without man's hand to prune it back it grew free, wild, untamed. And very recently, it seems the artificial flora have become self-aware, a childlike intelligence that went unnoticed until it began to communicate.

...it's a long and complex idea, but I plan on having issues of power be dominant in the story. There are transhumanists (those with advanced prosthetics and/or augmented faculties) and purists (people who have refused or later rejected the changes out of fear) living underground, and their reactions to the living, singing forests above their heads is something I can't wait to explore.