The Glossy world around 21st century Intellectual fashion parade

Stomach full of ideas and mouthful of lies: 

They come in thick lens and frames, shabby face with hair spread all over, distant gaze at the foreign lands.
They have one thing in common: a sort of contentment, air of passivity and blooming fragrance of satisfaction of their intellectual prowess.

Do we need intellectuals to guide us in these moments of paid subservience to the orders of various kind?

Across nations, seminars, conferences we are seeing intellectuals of various kind. Some busy selling their days of diaspora, some venting their anger across.

Our society is largely unguided now. We tread in crowds and commit unforced errors and heinous crimes motivated by urges of carnal self and no remorse. At the same time, I could listen to a bunch of intellectuals who deliver wisdom from the heights.

This post is prompted by hearing a few intellectuals the other day speaking about Indian nation state, the challenges of sovereignty, the fundamentalist Gandhi, the possible resurgence of Asia in the world stage, the problems in Kashmir valley, lack of critical attitude in the society etc.

Undoubtedly, their is a market out there for these intellectuals. World all over, intellectuals bred from Asia will be sold like hot cakes in the international intelligentsia and academic space. Their genuine dissents with the native regimes will be a good brand for them to sell.

A few of these themes are relevant indeed. No disagreement whatsoever. The point is when these intellectuals occupy our public space and speak about these numerous issues, I am not sensing an iota of integrity in their words or deeds. It may be a personal prejudice of mine. But I am not able to suppress this feeling. Do

Our nation needs genuineness and integrity more than any intellectual play of words or any kind of deft maneuvering over the world of ideas. Developed nations and the wealthy nations will have the luxury to breed and feed this kind of fashioned intellectuals. We need real blood people who can think beyond their personal reflections and turmoils.

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 !

Some Pathological Trends in the Social Media

On the Ideological Apparatus behind the Social Media Measurements

Social Self? This supposed to be 'oxymoron' has been with us for quite some time now. Now we believe that the more we are social in social media, the more we become identity conscious and identity empowered. May be a small leap of faith for the humanity and a giant step for the technology. What is happening in this flurry of affairs? 

Now we have conceded that the Social Media spread across the nation states has generated a huge volume of data about the humanity. May be this is the data store about the people with the access to internet and the world market forces believe that they are going to the the drivers of growth for the decades to come. Hope their predictions and reasons stand the test of time. 

Looking at the state of Social Media, now we can see that every other social media preaches to measure our online presence and to rationalize it. In other words, formalize our social self. But a moment please, what is that we are doing? Are we becoming more social and empathetic towards each other? Are we becoming more conversant in real life. If not, we need to look beyond the social media metrics that projects our presence in scores and dashboards. 

The Social Media is making us more and more eloquent about our thoughts, our connections, the number of friends in our network, the number of different profiles we have, so on and so forth. In other words, this semiotic framework is centered around each of us. Thus each of us becomes the target for different market segments. It is a really intricate mathematics where an end node is being referred by different graphs and each graph generates a different visualization out of the same node based on its diverse semantic potentials. Hence each of us becomes the perpetual sources of information for various networks and they generate insight out of our primary, secondary, tertiary and virtually an infinite set of semantic connections. As my interest is least on this mathematical modelling let me go beyond this abstraction.

I have just stated a problem provoked by my endless nights wandering in different social media systems to create an inflated ego. Now I am working on resolving this illusion and beyond the semiotics of this media ecosystem. Rather than being inflated about the semiotics of this ecosystem  we need to make it as conversant and communicative as possible. Here comes relevant the study of communicative rationality devised by Habermas. Rationality and reason can only decipher the signs and lead us to the real world of affairs. This post by no means is a call to boycott social media instead to understand the ways not to get paranormal by its illusory apparatus.