Re-immersing myself in my hunt for technological solutions to our growing social unease; the cause of my re-immersion? [Strange how this is still apt even though It's from, yup, 3 years ago!]
I guess COVID-19 is the cause of my latest attempts to kick myself up the butt. Like many, I have been feeling afraid for my life, and that of those around me (I hastily add to appear less narcissistic). Like many I have been thinking deeply about what my place is in the world, and like many, I have been in isolation, digging out old hobbies and developing new skills.
So, what drives me? What am I looking to achieve? What or who inspires me?
Well, I guess I've always felt like an outsider, for one. That has made me long for a sense of community. And that is something that the internet, gaming and IT have been held up as exemplars of.
Yet for me the those worlds are still lonely places - perhaps it's me, my self-imposed alienation, perhaps my ADHD mentality, yet I find the existing online community communications methods patchy and fleeting, without warmth and empathy. I am frightened of really expressing myself, because I don't always think in a PC way, and I want to challenge the status quo, but perhaps I'm not stable enough or positively assertive enough to withstand the backlash.
And don't get me started on OL gaming. OK, I don't actually do any, but this is mostly because I am soo put off by the paradigm that don't even feel it's worth investigating. The thing that really upsets me is either VIOLENCE or VACUOUSNESS - most games which involve group play seem to fall into these two camps - Fortnite or Animal Crossings! Is there nothing deeper out there?
As for IT in general, I feel sad for my father^'s hopes of an online utopia; it feels like technology, our constant reliance on handsets and kindles and laptops and smart fridges, is separating us more and more from the real world, from nature, and from each other.
So that's the moaning part over; what drives me is looking for a solution to these problems - trust, empathy, psychological stability, self-reflectivity, non-violent communication, alienation, separation. Can we turn the existing paradigm on it's head and create a vision for a more humane, intuitive and hopeful future?
I've just been talking about all this with a housemate: the lack of vision and narrative behind modern politics and political movements, neolithic/bronze age age monument building as team building exercise, how removing a statue doesn't create a sense of achievement, 1960s: the age of optimism including Yippie movement, what are our technocrats doing with their money? I also talked about thee Netflix doocumentary "john was trying to contact aliens", and the strange absence of signals from other planets, and how the less is out there, the more we should care for what's here. hopefully I'll expand on these theses later.
I must remind myself also to write about trying to affect subconscious bias with computer games (and the inefficiency of the Implicit Association Test) , and Annalee Newitz' article about fluffiness and Netizenship in this week's 29th August 2020 New Scientist.
*My Chinese birth-year is Tiger, so perhaps you'll get what I mean by that analogy more now ;)
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