There where we find darkness and light at once,
we also find the inexplicable.
Samuel Beckett .
Returning from a trip to Barcelona on a high-speed train, the five-year-old child in the seat in front of me asked her mother (about 90 minutes after setting off and about halfway through the journey) if we had arrived in Valencia yet. The mother said no. It was night time, and as the car was lit from within, nothing could be seen outside. Not satisfied with this answer, the girl asked her mother again: “So then, we’re still in Barcelona?”
At that very moment (thanks to the girl’s questions, or rather to my later reflection on it) I understood totally that the girl had really believed that Barcelona was a slice of time-space that travelled with her inside the train. She thought it would only leave her side (as a sort of mobile connective space between two distant realities) when she got off the train at her destination. The air of Barcelona (or perhaps we should say Barcelona-ether) would be converted into a substantial concept—in physical terms—that would pervade the interior of the train car until the moment that one abandoned it.
Such is not the case in physics, which offers its own explanations based on concrete mathematical formulas. But for converts to the digital culture, these questions are settled with these sorts of explanation-reflections. Something, then, has been displaced.
Thus, the question of phenomenon (that which is contributed by a digital life), might be resolved—insofar as those fundamental philosophical concepts which concern us—by observing the relationship between exterior space-time and the interior of an object which travels at great speed from one point to another, like some kind of space tele-transporter that travels through space at such velocity that, in reality, it is facing only time and is thus connecting two topographical spaces as if by a vacuum tunnel.
This, of course, only makes sense in the context of a culture carved out of mental mechanisms such as those which overlap the representation, the multi-constructional narrative that follows channel-surfing and hypermedia navigation and, in general, the connective mechanisms of the mind distributed from current digital individuals.
lovely cute story. never become an adult, at least in terms of perception. become as much adult as you need in terms of analysis but keep having such a fresh breezy mind to perceive the world in an instinctive and innocent way.
ResponderEliminar