Fragment

I

To be human is to imagine and to flourish as a human is to bring your imagination to life.

To be a machine is to remember and to recall to flourish as a machine to remember more and recall quicker than any other machine.

II

Do the mediums we use to communicate more than just mediums. The mediums we use to communicate are in themselves a type of communication. The medium influences and incentivises different styles and substances. If a medium were to nudge a message into a different form hasn’t the medium changed the message. And if the control a medium has over its message is so great wouldn’t that mean that in a sense the medium it self is part of the message. This ability of a medium to be part of the message has great repercussions for not just the message but people who live witht he message.

III

Present political problems or at least their framing and debate all have one root problem. The problem is how does one adapted the politics of the television age to the internet age

The television age was an age where the whole country or mass of people were on the same wavelength. The whole discourse was control by a central entity.

Control of discourse is the most important function in politics. For whoever controls the narrative has authority and whoever has authority has power and control.

The dream throughout the twentieth century has been to expand the reach of tele-media . The final form of tele-media was the phone combined with the internet.

IV

The phone combined with the internet was supposed to herald the peak of the tele-media world. But it has betrayed expectations. Instead of acting as an unifier it has fragmented the discourse. The discourse has fragmented no one has authority over the discourse anymore.

Along with fragmentation has come over-abundance. We are seeing too much of everything. Things that used to take time are faster than ever, information more abundant than ever.

Abundance has caused minds that were not designed for it to tune out and switch off. Instead of an a single discourse, discourse has become niche and scattered . We have formed villages in the cloud. People are beginning to know others from half way around the world than their own next door neighbours.

The most cutting edge technologies have returned us to medieval times. We have moved from physical villages to virtual villages and as it goes with villages different villages don’t get along well with each other.

V

The democracy we have today is a television democracy. It is based on having the whole nation on the same type of discourse and voicing their opinions about that discourse.

The challenge facing us is what happens when fragmented discourses with differences verging on the religious clash with each other.

We stand at the dusk of the television era.

The transition from medieval to modern was tumultuous the transition from modern to medieval promises to be just as if not even more tumultuous.

If nothing else is guaranteed one thing is, and that is that the future will be nothing like the past. Truly

welcome to the brave new world