http://www.spark-online.com
Epistemological Musings In Cyberspace: Image and Consciousness
by robert delamar
Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, Japan
Hachiko Square
Standing on the busiest corner in the world, as perhaps 50,000 people loiter, pass over head, hustle by, or simply stand in awe, overwhelmed by the human energy, the rumble of elevated trains, the screech of car tires, the sounds of cellular phones ringing, and the latest Japanese Pop Band crooning on the massive video screens above, I feel a nagging doubt as to the meaning of life. What am I to make of the neon, and the shop displays, the noise and the confusion? Is this human experience, this detached and confused reaction to the constructed scene playing out before me reality? Projected onto the screens above I see a commercial advertising the natural wild of Canada. A tourism piece. I watch the mountains of my home province dissipate into another commercial, this one for televisions. My home another commodity, a space for sale between bands.
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
My Apartment -- My Computer
I just got back from Shibuya. I was observing life there from my living room, watching my former city go by on the screen before me, courtesy of a Webcam in one of the shops adjacent to the train station. I miss the Key Coffee Shop below the Japan Rail tracks, just off Hachiko Square where I used to sit and watch the urns of Turkish coffee brew and listen to cool jazz piping through the five-table café. What was once home is now a fading memory, disoriented images refracted in solitude. Is this life I live now more real than that which I experienced before? Is this life only supported by the memorial images that pass through my mind, arbitrary recollections of a former consciousness?
*spark-online, The Internet, Planet Earth
Your Home/Work/School -- Your Computer
What is this place you and I share right now? These symbols on a page buttressed by a colourful montage of light and image? This is communication, yet it’s anonymous. Why do we sit here conversing like this? I want to know you, yet I am having trouble understanding who I am. I’ve yet to get beyond myself, though self doesn’t exist in this world.Epistemological Musings In Cyberspace
Recently we’ve been debating the nature of Electronic Consciousness on these pages, and on our discussion board. A *spark-online writer, noted playwright Alan Sondheim, took issue with my contention that image is superseding text as the most important means of human communication in our present age. Sondheim deconstructed the notion of image, pointing out that even the concept of image is in doubt. Text, he notes, is image in that it’s symbolic, in the same way that other symbols, such as a Cross, or a Menorah represent meaning. Yet, at the same time, text can play an important role in photographs or paintings, objects upon which we generally impart the term "image." One need only look at the paintings and drawings of Canadian Artist Graham Gilmore to recognize the significance text can have within the broader functionality of an image.
Recognizing that text can be image, or image can be made up of text, is helpful in order to resolve the debate. The heart of the issue, of course, is that whatever the means of communication it is the intent of the communicator -- the message that one tries to impart to another -- that is important. Not necessarily the form.
What is interesting about the form of communication a given human community may use at any period in history is the significance it holds for those who observe that community. The form of communication tells us about the members of a community in a given period of time. The preponderance of image since the advent of the television symbolizes and helps us to understand the society that has emerged from the technological and economic expansion of the post-war period. One central theme of understanding which I’ve observed is the growth of image as a universal means of communication in an interconnected world.
Language requires rules and consensus about the shape or form of rules. In order to communicate using language, human beings agree about the shape of the symbols which make up the textual form of a language, as well as to the sounds which when placed in a particular order convey meaning. Of course, though the oral/aural aspect of language may be instinctual, it is also a learned or taught behaviour, passed on by each generation which speaks a particular dialect in a given human community. The symbolic form of the language is exclusively learned, as anyone with a useless Arts degree can attest. The rules that make up the heart of a language are of course, exclusive, and discriminate by their very exclusivity. Thus, language is always a means of drawing a distinction; it is used to create boundaries to understanding, as well as to relay understanding within a particular epistemological community.
Image is universal. Though it may require a common understanding as to notions of colour or shape, in this sense it is more “democratic” than language. Though one may not understand the historical, epistemological or metaphysical meaning of a picture in an art gallery, or a sculpture on display in a park (not to mention the intentions, or meaning being placed upon the image by its creator) it is universally understood as an image, a representation of a thing, and can be reflected upon by a person possessing language, in any dialect. Image, therefore, imparts a common understanding to disparate understandings. It is a universal medium in an age of global interconnectivity and cross-cultural exchange. Thus, image is at the heart of the idea of Electronic Consciousness, which is a broad historical signifier that attempts to explain the radical growth of worldwide means of communication, piggy-backed on attempts to trade, fight and generally interact on a global, rather than local, basis.
It is simplistic to say that communication has caused globalization, or that global communication is a reaction to global political and economic interconnectedness. In the same way it is simplistic to say text is losing ground to image, or text is having a renaissance at the expense of image. Historical causation is a complex cauldron of individual experience multiplied by the present population of the planet at any given time. Further, it involves individuals involved in a startling array of relationships over both small and large areas of geography. All of this takes place within the confines of a finite place, our stunning sphere of existence hanging in the nothingness of space and time.
Electronic consciousness, then, is the simple reaction of an individual human, remembering the sounds and images of another land in the tranquility of his own, recording them for the sake of doing so, knowing that humanness is a historical function of existence.
Copyright © 2000 Robert Delamar All Rights Reserved
Robert Delamar returned to Canada in the Spring of 1999, after living and working in Tokyo, Japan. He thinks Canadian sashimi is tasteless, and misses Sakura, Kaiten Sushi Shops and the high-heeled shoes of Shibuya. Of course, he can get all of these things in the multi-cultural paradise that is Vancouver, but somehow they seem less real than they do in Japan.