final project – digital poetics

In the current moment of the internet, there is one feeling that reigns supreme over all: that we are all spending too much time on it. People have begun to talk about social media in the way that they talk about smoking cigarettes, only without the complaints about it’s monetary cost, as the costs of the internet are not as perceivable to the naked eye. This sense of “too much internet” is manifested most clearly in what is often called “information overload.” The term, first coined in 1964 by Bertram Gross in The Managing of Organizations, then later popularized by 1970 by Alvin Toffler, a futurist, in Future Shock, was, and still is, credited as a direct result of our media-saturated lives. Even in 1964, when the media in question was “books, reports, … and newspapers” (p.857, Gross), there was still such a feeling as having too much media. If back then, as Gross points out, “when [one wants] to learn something about the state of knowledge concerning a specific problem, it is as though they were looking for a needle in a field of haystacks” (p.858). These days it feels more like searching thirty acres of fields, all with their own farmers and sets of rules, and each of which uses a different kind of hay. The promise of sites like google.com—and Google’s supremacy over search is undoubtedly a factor as well—seems initially to provide solutions to this problem, as we are no longer the ones searching for the needle, instead we have invented algorithms to do that for us; but then of course all google is nowadays—extending the metaphor to its furthest extent—is a person with a megaphone standing in the haystack pasture every ten feet shouting at you that they have the needle you are looking for and it is only by a quick eye and wit that one may catch the fine print laid at their feet that says “sponsored,” and know that they must ignore. Commercial interest has taken over google, and this has created an absolute nightmare for those of us who just want to find that damn needle and get on with our lives. But the commercialization of the internet’s spaces, and its effect on our sense of being overloaded with information, does not stop at just search engines. As many of us who have spent more than ten minutes on the internet will know, the true culprit of this overload is social media. Facebook, Instagram, and now TikTok rule the roost when it comes to how information is spread on the internet, and the most egregious offenses to our senses of peace and simplicity of information are found there within. There seem to have been four main reactions to this influx of new ideas: barriers and a hyper-taxonomy, an inconsolable search for “freedom,” a gluttonous embrace of excess, and a compliance, giving up on what used to be and embracing the reality of mind-numbing mind-fucking overstimulating information overload.

The following works will attempt to demonstrate that sense of information overload, while also exploring each individual idea, by use of juxtaposition and collage. The elements of my work may be similar to movements like that of the situationists and their juxtaposition, or Duchamp in his work The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even—though I will not deny Duchamp and the Dada movement as a great personal inspiration. The root of my juxtaposition, however, lies not of in a believed necessity to turn to the past and take elements from there, as “[i]t is not just returning to the past which is reactionary; even “modern” cultural objectives are ultimately reactionary since they depend in reality on ideological formulations of a past society that has prolonged its death agony to the present,” says Debord in Methods of Détournement (Debord, 1956). My juxtaposition lies in the feeling that I get scrolling through social media and the impression that is left on my mind of the millions of different images that my photographic memory consumes throughout the span of perhaps a week. My juxtaposition began by first collecting images and bits of text from various places across the internet, as well as taking some of my own photos for use in textures and elements within the piece. I then placed the elements together in the digital program Pixelmator, assembling them all into a cohesive image that attempts to communicate each character.

I explore in this method each of the “characters” that I have established. I have found as well that each character deals with elements that have been previously touched on by artists throughout the past 80 years. *Barriers* deals with ideas perhaps similar to Jameson’s analysis Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989), in that each and every aspect of society has an associated grouping, and each and every whim is attempted to be catered to—to a hyper-capitalistic extent. In the modern internet age, one finds themselves forced into boxes and picking between traits of themselves to put up on their social media accounts, all for the sake of the hashtag. One’s own identity becomes a trivial matter, for discussion to the end of what to put in one’s “bio;” and all the while people take this incredibly seriously, the algorithm eats it all up and uses its vast webs to sell you just the right product. “Freedom” deals with ideas similar to The Matrix, or even is able to strike accord with Buddhist texts The Monkey King and Jatakas, as they were both heavily focused on “discernment of the true reality,” as was their didactic purpose. With the advent—and I mean it negatively—of sites like 4chan and 8chan, the internet has opened a veritable Pandora’s Box of conspiracy theories, all stemming from an underlying need to “seek the truth” and “discern the real from the fake.” From this we can see, linguistically, terms such as “fake news” and “post-truth” making their way into our lexicon (Oxford, 2016, ). Within excess, I cover similar ideas to Don DeLillo’s White Noise, or indeed David Cronenberg’s 1983 Videodrome. In both, the modern capitalist precedent of choice and multitudinous abundance of product has created a world in which only the most extreme can be acceptable as innovation or art; the rest is just blasé. in excess, I seek to display this abundant gluttony. Lastly, in compliance, there is comparison to be drawn between it and Naked Lunch, another of Cronenberg’s works, in which Bill Lee (Billy (William (S. Borroughs))) is slowly pulled in to a world of drugs, giving up on the “real world” and embracing the fantasy that then becomes his only acceptable reality. Compliance illustrates the doom-scrollers. Those who have, in the face of the onslaught of media and information, chosen to give up and just let the algorithm do what it wants with their mind. Ultimately, this is the aim of each of the pieces. Each piece is a “character;” each piece is a reaction that certain people have had to the information-overload era.

Bibliography:

Cheng’en, Wu. Monkey King. 1592.

Cronenberg, David. Naked Lunch. 1991.

Cronenberg, David. Videodrome. Toronto, 1983.

Debord, Guy-Ernest. “Methords of Détournement.” Les Lèvres Nues, no.8, 1956.

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. 1985.

Gross, Bertram. “The Information Overload.” The Management of Organizations, pp.857-858, Vol.2, The Free Press of Greece, Collier Macmillian Limited, London, 1964. Internet Archive, Accessed: 6/12/24.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 1989.

Jatakas. Buddhist Didactic Texts, 300-400 BCE.

Oxford. “Word of the year 2016.” Oxford Languages, 2016.

Siblings, Wachowski. The Matrix. Warner Bros., 1999.

Stanfield, Matty. “The Medium is the Message: ‘Videodrome’.” We Are Cult, wearecult.rocks, 2020, Accessed: 6/12/24.

Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. Random House Inc., New York, 1970.

Woodward, Alex. “‘Fake News’: A guide to Trump’s favorite phrase — and the dangers it obscures.” The Independant, 2/10/2020, independant.co.uk, accessed: 9/12/24.