Digital consciousness: Emergence of new state of mind

Consciousness is an expression of experience, an expression of your higher grasping and control over life and reality. We say that someone is unconscious in their actions or thoughts, when we cannot find a rational or unreal reference to some of their expressions or natural responses. It can be termed as a complex result derived from the history of experiences, neural behaviors of memory and deep rooted social symbols from racial memory. 

Without a real reason or material connection, new forms of consciousness or unconscious will emerge in the society or individuals. Hence the collection of imprints of digital technology and modes of commodity production are very much reasons for this new forms of consciousness. Consciousness is never complete in a single human being. It is in between people and their social reflections. I am conscious about what people think about myself equally as what I think of myself. Thus our thought processes meet inside each one of us. Will this happen in digital experience as well?

Creative Commons: Fotopedia -  Making of Harry Porter

Digital consciousness is a nice term for this age of digital devices and digitization of experiences. Before you are digitally consciousness, you are naturally digitally unconscious. You will be exhibiting certain unique unconscious responses to digital surroundings and ecosystem. Like any ecosystem, digital realm also will have layers of experiences. digital art, digital signs, digital science, digital philosophy, digital religions, digital fetishism, digital ideology, digital pathology all will be part of this way of life that reflects in this new way of thinking. How is digitization coming to our life in such a big way? It is part of our professional and personal life alike. Workplace intimacy and expertise with digital technologies follow at home. The more we use them in our economic transactions and money making moments, it becomes closer to us. This is quite natural.

Digitization introduces a lot of layers and hierarchies of experiences. We bank on technology to pierce through these layers to reach out to more people virtually. Then these layers will become natural parts of our digital persona and virtual life. These virtual networks offer huge amount of 'life casting' to attract our interests. Digitization has huge capability to create a virtual layer that imitates you and amplify your like and dislikes. This reflexive capacity of digital medium can induces a hyper level of narcissism in our ego. It can override your balanced state of mind in great scales. 

CreativeCommons: Fotopedia: MessagePad

When we deal with digital experience, their is a certain amount of abstraction and condensation in this mode as opposed to analog expediences. It is always in beta. Data is never in final form. It continuously evolves with the digital interfaces. Thus human mind fails to a certain extent to generate a final reasoning or conclusion about digital moments. When we experience anything our mind works on both reality principle and pleasure principle. Digital experiences provides a digital layer that directly interact with human to create a satisfaction in both real terms and pleasure. Thus human mind continues to explore digital experience. 

When we take mind and body together and weigh the influence of digitization, it may seem that the mind is the most affected by it. Though mind may be the larger part of this engagement, our senses and active body organs also are part of this experience. When digitization enriches mobile technology, it becomes part of every moment of our conscious life as well. 

When you become digitally conscious, you affinity to devices and miniature details of life continues to increase and your mind will struggle with meta-narratives in every kinds of experience, be it politics or poetic, be it love or distastes. We are getting more details than we can comprehend in the capacity of human cognition for a moment of experience. It also alters the scales of space and time in the digital information communication and experiences. Thus building a perspective in digital experience becomes increasingly difficult. The moment our mind realizes this, it may either go into addiction or aggression. 

If we can treat digital experience as normal as real experience, this layer of hyper reaction and ideological affinity can be controlled. As we know, a mirror is always a mirror, irrespective of how much you like your reflections !

De-Cognition: Social Media and the Information Architecture

Demystifying the Internet Pragmatism: A Cognitive Approach

Any media ecosystem evolves around the currents of communication. How different is Social Media from the mainstream media and the traditional formats of a communicative medium? The levels and depth of commoditization has liquidated the reach of communicative rationality in the media formats such as Television, Film, etc. Social Media has evolved around the concept of social networking and the inherent non-linear and decentralized nature of Internet. Social Networking as a concept has roots in Sociology and demands a wider narrative. To analyze Internet as a Public Sphere, we need to demystify various abstractions to reach the political economy of the worlds largest producer and consumer of information.

Can Social Media, with its base in Social Networking topology has always offered a potential for becoming the next generation cognitive network. It has even been visualized as the axis for a semantic web where information becomes a self organizing network. Is this technological pragmatism anywhere near real life possibilities? If not, why so? This is the vantage point of this critique. Why do we need this much of information in Social Media. What is the driving force behind the information architecture and the accumulation of information in the social media space. Big Data and the information overloading has becomes the prime movers for the Social Business. Social Business has been predicted as the game changer in the information technology landscape. Thus it is a big business now. 

The question is has the cost of business sacrificed the potentials for developing cognitive networks around Social Media. When it comes to the information architecture, we need to know the basics. Who is the producer of information. It is each of us. How is the Search Engine giants generating wealth of information and the uniform resource locators (URL). The URLs act as the nodes in the information graphs. It is each of us, consumers, who creates various paths around these nodes and make them alive. This is largely forgotten. Thus the real value of information is generated by the end users like us. Information machines are thriving on the cognitive networks created by our information production, consumption, circulation and re-production. Search Engines are only one side of the coin. The present generation content aggregators are also only dynamic nodes of information. 

Cognitive networks created by us becomes commodity in the split of each second. This commodity again circulates among the networks of us. In each turn and twist of this information nodes and network, it generates money, the real money ! Thus we are working for a global system of finance capital virtually not knowing the sweet sweat that we shed in front of the the dumb terminals of computers. It is indeed a great state of hibernation or a glorified state of social pathology. 

+Gokul Alex 

A Critique of Identity Politics

Exposing Identity Politics

Identity politics spells out various meanings. This convenience is used by different movements. It communicates something surreal yet ubiquitous in a society. It is used as a wrapper for many movements from its inception. Some treat it as a counter current for class politics; where as some others use it against nationalist politics. There are some others who consider it as a prelude to the class politics.  Beneath this polymorphic composition and ambiguity there lay vexed questions on the terrains of identity politics.

In the works of Michael Keith and Steven Pile [Politics and Spaces of identity], modernist identity politics have created a sort of essential-ism that rests on the exclusivity of certain norms. They allege that this sort of exclusivity and selectivity of modernist identity politics have made it very divisive. This was not congenial for working toward a multiple, pluralized yet still radical conceptualization of agency and identity.

We can see an array of works on the national identity discourses. It may tempt us to think that identity politics have superseded the national polity. Simon Bekker defines Identity politics as the search of reconciliation between nation building and demands by different citizens for recognition of communal identity. He goes on to say that identity politics has emerged as a primary challenge in many nation states. He accuses the national tendencies to achieve homogeneity as the primary reason for the unrest and ethnic conflicts. This conveniently ignores the external interventions that stir ethnic unrest.

Moreover, homogeneity is an apparent ideology resting on the ethos of cultural nationalism. In that sense, the attempt for a cultural homogeneity itself is an identity politics. Rashtriya Swyayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which preaches a ‘Hindutva India’ is one instant example for this. They are the ones who raise voice for uniform civil code and hegemony of Hinutva ideology.

Thus any attempt to unify the nation based on culture or religion or language devoid of considerations of productive forces and the social relations will become identity politics in reality. Stanford Encyclopedia highlights that identity politics strive to achieve a political freedom for a specific constituency of marginalized people. But this fails to explain the causes of marginalization. The awareness that only a particular constituency of people is marginalized is because of identity politics. It confines the perspective to specific identity ignoring the totality in exploitation.

In a market economy, if someone says that only tribes are marginalized, it is a cruelty to slum dwellers and the millions in the unorganized sector. The process of marginalization acts as a time warp for all those who labor  Only those outside the dominant mode of production will be in a perpetual state of marginalization. Detaching tribes from the dominant mode of production by way of identity politics will only worsen their plight.

The case of Narmada Bacho Andolan (NBA) is a grim example of identity politics. The apolitical struggle of environmental politics detached the struggling people from the political process and its dynamics. Their voices became unheard in the political ecosystem. What the identity politics has achieved in NBA is creating a perpetual apolitical site. This generates a question: who creates marginalization, NBA or National government?

Capitalism has evolved to become sustainable in ecology of unequal modes of production. It no longer standardizes the economy. As capitalism now thrives on the expanding market economy rather than nation states, it stimulates multiplicity of choices. It is in this focal point where the pluralism of identity politics and the market’s desire for multiple choices converge.

The question of identity rests on the epidemiological currents initiated by modernism. The essence of modernism lies in the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize itself, not in order to subvert it, but to enrich it more firmly in its area of competence [Modernist Painting, Clement Greenberg]. Thus it inherits a tendency to criticize itself. As self-criticism is the organic element of Marxism, it is easy to draw parallel lines between Modernism and Marxism. The awareness of identity is a dialectical process between objective knowledge and subjective experience. Identity is a subjective knowledge of objective experience as well. It is rooted in both of them. Thus identity is the dialectical product of objectivity and subjectivity. Identity of identity is nothing but the labor process and life process. Hence identity is both reflexive and self critical in nature. With the progress of either objective knowledge or subjective experience identity undergoes transformation in form and content. This means that identity of a child born to a religious family undergoes change if he studies in a national institution and it changes further if goes on to work in a multi-national corporate organization.

Thus if class is the dynamic product of self in labour, identity is the transient process by which self changes. It is this volatility of identity that becomes the instrument of imperialism. It captures one by its fractured identity and tempts to organize based on it. Fractured identity and identity crisis can be rooted in both crisis in knowledge and crisis in experience. It implies a crisis in the criticism itself. It is this fractured identity or identity crisis that is being targeted by the architects of identity politics. These formations of identity groups are not self made always. Imperialism purchases the identity formations through various funding agencies. And using the power of money, imperialism exercises hegemony over the identity groups. And using this funded economy, identity groups will be integrated to the imperial market economy. Collectively, these preys can be named as social capital.

Destiny of a Decade

Stolen Spaces and Marching Ants !

Time is a tyrant! And a decade is a mere dust in the sands of history but it means much more in the life of a human being. In the mainstream media recap, we see a decade as a sequence of events and tale of newsmakers. Seldom does it lead to interpretation and introspections. In such an attempt, we can see that a decade means different for each strata of society. In the lives of upper class, technology and social media invaded personal experiences to the deepest.  Simulations stimulated their desires and plenitude of choices pampered their lives. The working class had to confront tightening labour laws and insecure way of life. Labour increasingly became a mobile commodity integrated to the supply chains and global delivery models. The poor were encircled by spiralling prices and weakening welfare state schemes. Rather than growth, poverty trickled down to the downtrodden. 

Under the pretext of globalization, world economy became an integrated financial market. World became flat in that sense. The poor were erased from the flash memories of the elite and the aspiring ones. On the other hand, because of digital divide and growing economic disparity, world became more and more opaque. Adding to the woes of the wretched, Mother Nature created havoc to the millions in the forms of thunderstorms, earth quakes, floods, Tsunami and cyclones. More than anything these calamities exposed the callousness of the governments and the micro-politic agenda of the donor agencies. India saw the massive earthquake in Gujarat (2001) which took more than 30,000 lives. 

Indian polity saw the resurgence of coalition governments in Centre adding a new dimension to federalism. The Tehelka expose took the political bureaucracy by storm. The Gujarat riot will always remain as a blot of this decade. The failure of Agra summit put Indian diplomacy in no man’s land. Indo – US nuclear deal generated much acrimony and put an end to the love –hate relationship between UPA and left. Maoists aided by the inflow of weapons from Bangladesh and Myanmar became the serious threat to Indian internal security. The political economy of Kashmir improved marginally and gave way to democratic process.  

The same decade saw the upsurge and retreat of globalization. The hype of Y2K puzzle disappeared in thin air. None bothered to count the millions lost in preparing precautionary steps. The alliance of Time Warner and America Online (2000) became the big hit of the millennium. The honeymoon of techies did not last longer. The Tech crunch (2001) and the dotcom bubble were the preludes for the recessions to come. In this sound and fury, all ignored that it was the collapse of minnows which led to the formation of monopolies in technology. 

Silicon Valley emerged as the hub of information technology. IT revolution was nothing but the use of existing computer communication platforms for financial and international trade networks. The wave of globalization of labour and capital was accelerated by internet technologies. In Doha round of negotiations of World Trade Organization (2001), it was USA, European Union and Japan which stood for agricultural subsidies retreating from their previous support for neo-liberalism. Though it exposes the hypocrisy of imperialism, more evident is their losing faith in the free market principles. The changing tides of world economy favoured the labour capitals like China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and ASEAN nations. The fundamental importance of productive forces in a political economy was amplified by this. 

Corporate capitalism exposed its wilderness and chaos with the collapse of the American Energy sector giant ‘Enron’ in 2001. Sarbanes-Oxley laws tried to take grip on US corporate governance. The roller coaster ride of free market capitalism met an unexpected twist from the high heavens itself. American Hedge fund investment groups started collapsing. Mortgage giants like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae bailed out their prestige. None could save the fate of sinking Lehman Brothers, 150 years old Investment Bank. Entire financial market in the developed economies felt the tremors. The recent market updates reveal that US economy hasn’t yet circumvented the recession despite the massive government bailout. 

This decade witnessed the madness of American imperialism as they invaded fragile nation states using their military might. The aerial attacks on the twin towers of World Trade Centre in September 11, 2001 became the launch pad of American neo-colonial interests. Greed for Oil and urge to retain the dollar hegemony led them to cook up stories against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. When American Missiles bombarded the planning ministry in Iraq (2003), world conscience was a mute spectator. On the other hand, geopolitical interests in Central Asia and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden were the reasons for the Afghan invasions (2001). 

Almost ten years on, the war on terror is on going. Taliban and Opium trade in Afghanistan is on rise again. Incapable to curb this, US-NATO army is busy murdering civilians in the Af-Pak border. Abu Gharib jail tortures exposed the savage side of American civilization. The controversial Guantanamo prison opened by USA to detain the war prisoners (2002) is on the verge of closing down. 

Organized crime and terrorism were the perennial disturbances for the entire decade. Few realised these as the fruits of social anarchy spread by the proliferation of market economy world wide. The Somali young terrorist holding the American weapon exemplifies the dialectical relation between imperialism and terrorism. US shipped more than 40 tons of weapons into the ports of Somalia. The new decade will tell us who the recipients were.  We saw terrorism getting the religious tint everywhere from Indonesia to Colombia. The state of affairs rekindles the memories of crusades in history.  

The entire Islamic nations who were against the American oil greed were tainted as terrorists. Thus political Islam was equated with terrorism. By sabotaging the democratic governments in Islamic nation states Imperialism sowed the seeds of theocracy. Yet we failed to realize that terrorism was best exploited by Imperialism to fragment the opposing nation states. Baltic nations and South East Asia stands as the victim to these experiments. But world polity relishes in the convenience of forgetting. 

The world continues to be hot and simmering for the Palestinians with Israel breaching all the limits of atrocity. Palestine lost their iconic leader Yasser Arafat in the middle of this decade. All throughout this decade this West Asian strip of land was stripped of all the human rights. Goldstone commission appointed by UN (2009) was a mild solace to their concerns. 

The decade saw the transformation of culture industry from a mass media to hegemony over human capital. The decade began with the arrival of Survivor – the Reality show, first of its kind. It was an instant hit in USA. With ‘Idea Star Singer’ making waves all over Kerala just all in this decade we can sense the spread of a global mass culture. Social media became the second nature of netizens. Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and Orkut satisfied the tribal instinct of millions of people. Yet there are concerns of privacy and information security in these social networks. Identity of individual was lost somewhere in the networks. Wikipedia became the ultimate source of anything and everything on universe. The potentials of these sources take us also to the concerns on the authenticity and ideological intentions. The potentials of music were best explored by Apple Inc with their ‘iPod’.  

One cannot ignore the winning strides of science in this decade. And we salute in the memory of seven space scientists who shed their life with the burning Colombia Space shuttle (2003). The Genome project (completed first stage in 2003) and the Chandrayan moon mission (began in 2008) were crowing achievements of the decade. SARS and bird flu consumed many lives world wide. It revealed the vulnerability of the healthcare systems world wide. Climate change concerns became a political issue in no time. Development politics and environmental politics locked horns in various international forums.  Much hyped Copenhagen summit (2009) failed to deliver any progressive results though it created a coalition of developing nations. 

In this decade, imperial states, non-state actors, NGOs and the donor agencies were the key players in the world polity. Identity politics and micropolitics were their weapons for fragmentation of democracies world wide. They scan even the smallest space of every individual. On one side, they weakened the democracies by instigating ideologies of decentralization of power through micropolitics. On the other end, they created political anarchy by funding identity politics and exporting political terrorism. At the end of this drama, as a saviour of democracy, US imperialism marches to foreign soils to liberate the people and deliver them to the world market. Confrontation between democratic nation states and market forces happened to be the major current of this eventful decade. A society wandering in stolen spaces; it is the gift of this decade.

Gokul B.Alex