I have been struggling mightily to understand why we live in a world dominated by "sameness". Indeed I have spent the past 5 years creating and editing a 550 page book to help me better understand this phenomenon. My progress is slow. However... Today I would like to prompt you to contemplate the notion that "sameness" is the indirect result of our inability to differentiate between our virtual and tangible worlds [see photo].
Confusion prevails today, in part, because we have been super slow to switch our "state of mindfulness" from the tangible to the virtual. One sign of this is that images of hardship, brutality, pain, rage, etc are effortlessly flashed around the Internet. And this provides a convenient disconnect between "what is happening" and "what we perceive is happening".
Clearly any image of a destitute child in a refugee camp is a sad reminder of the hardship faced by people around the world; however, this simple image does not become a call to action unless, or until, it is embedded into a virtual network. Once it is embedded into our virtual world we have difficulty delineating between the plight of a child "over there" with what is happening "over here". The tangible distance between the child and the viewer of his or her image has collapsed. This happens because a virtual network can not bring into sharp focus the time, distance, importance, or social context of an image.The viewer does not know if this image is merely part of a photo shoot for a social movement that is seeking to raise funds for its war on this or that. Thus it is the clever use of images on virtual networks that gives me this sense that I live in world of never-ending "sameness".
Richard.
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