The Webs That Bind Us

the beginning of my paper for Industry Operations_term3

I will soon be editing this as I have gained more perspective over the last 5 months.


We believed it was flat, then we believed it was round.
Some have always perceived it seamless, spacious, transparent, multi-dimensional, part of a greater whole,....ALIVE.
How will our world be globally perceived next?

As the human species senses it’s narrowing chances for survival on the crust of this round, revolving, 70% water-covered living rock rolling 67,000 mph elliptically through eternal night what genius will arise and shine in the minds then deeds of our most ‘creatively endowed’ members? And how will the critical mass of us respond to the resulting changes?

I was born into a paradigm in its final episodes of B&W TV, Ozzy and Harriet (not Osborne), and the North American Material Dream. (Material girl, Madonna was born that same year.)

Interestingly, NASA was created that year. Perhaps, in part, explaining my connection to, and fascination with light and space, inner and outer, and further out there. Sputnik (fellow traveller) 1, the first ‘artificial’* satellite officially launched, was quickly followed by NASA’s Explorer 1 on Jan. 31, 1958. And thus the stage was set. The ‘Space Race’, instant global surveillance, communication, and new dimensions of exploration began.

Are you old enough to remember how perfect and vulnerable those first Apollo ‘ships’ seemed? In the din of domestic discord those virginal phallic rockets loomed 'larger-than-life' as that mythological God of Archery’s arrow striking chords of light, truth, poetry and promise in my impressionable young mind. What a brilliant time it was: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Beatles, civil unrest, men on the moon...it was a light in the darkness kind-of-time .... and in San Francisco funded largely by the US Military, defining new advances in technology that still spin ideas and innovations that dominate our global attentions today.

Very nearly half a century later, enrolled in a New Media Design and Web Development program at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, I am challenged to consider this past, the present and the future of technology’s place in design, communication, commerce, and a multitude of other functions, and it’s impact on my own life, at least.
On all of life, at most.

WOW. Pick any related subject. It’s big. Hard to ‘wrap ones head around’ a moment in time, and its true multi-layered meaning. Feels like trying to flatten the layers of a deeply resonant poem. To define an element of mystery just beyond what is presently recognized. And then take it that one step further into the light revealing for the first time something fresh, and all at once eternal. How do I gather my thoughts, intuitions, instincts and growing knowledge? And then synthesize it into 12 vital pages worth the read? I prostrate myself before Gingko Biloba, cleanse my glasses, best I can, and begin.

* ‘artificial’; man-made, in contrast to natural, as is the moon.

Spring 2007
defragmenting then reconfiguring the world; for me, for Ed, for all.

I wipe the lens of my glasses thinking about something one of my twenty-something classmates called me the other day in class. He called me a ‘Hippie’. Not hippie, as in ‘having ample hips’. I clearly don’t. He meant, I believe, ‘a non-conformist person during the mid 1960’s (to mid 70’s) period of history‘. I think of relaxed pot smoking, ‘mind-expanding’ drugs and casual sex, lava lamps, florescent posters, endless summer fun, beads, beards and flower children when I think of a Hippie. None of these characteristics apply to the me I know so well.

Though feeling of kindred spirit with all who challenge any authority claiming any kind of control over any one, while defying to conform to something one is not and exploring all that one is, or might be, I am truly a child of the late 50’s, the eldest from a lower-middle class, second generation Ukrainian-Canadian family, just outside of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Still moderately paced, a little naive seeming by choice, still ignorant of so much, though not blissfully, and filled with high idealism and hope for an abundant, just, even tender and uncomplicated life. I feel more paradox that ease, and honestly, I am often overwhelmed with the pace and the demands of the under-lying strain, or ruthlessness, of an unfathomably diverse species globally under every kind of siege.

So ‘Why am I studying “New Media”?’
Why am I drawn to a place; where the average nervous system is a few decades fresher than my own?;
where all things digital are intrinsic? or are embedded? where change moves at the ‘speed of technology‘.

…‘You don’t take nothing with you but your soul ~THINK~’

When I was in my late 20s, early 30s I left Vancouver to plant trees in The Interior of British Columbia for a short time.
I was near Wells and the Bowron Lakes chain. Apparently the clear cut scar I was helping to reforest was, perhaps still is, large enough to be seen with the ‘naked eye’ from space. The mountains there crackled with energy, though somewhat distorted with it’s deforested, slash and burn, war-zone-like areas. It was there, in grizzly country, while walking alone along a gravel logging road that I witnessed an Elk bound across the road and back into the forest. Three powerful high-speed down-hill bounds spanning an impressive distance and gone. I had never before experienced any one creature with that much life-force. (Thankfully, a grizzly wasn't in pursuit, just behind. My courage has clear limits, fierce carnivores...way over my top!)
Elk is an American Native symbol of coming together with the opposite sex to procreate, though I didn’t think of it then, shortly afterward I met the man I would conceive my daughter, Senica, with. Years later I realized these and other connections. The company I had worked for was called Seneca. ...hmm.

It was in those few weeks that I learned more invaluable lessons about how resilient, how immense natures’ force is. The planet is a living being so much greater that the sum total of the ignorant, still quite primitive human population that dominates the life on it’s surface. From around the time of the earliest more complex written formal languages like Egypt’s hieroglyphics, probably derived from, or preceded by, more obscure forms, to the Greeks’ creation of the alphabet when the greatest part of the conquering mass mind began to step away, at first a little, then great distances from it’s profound intertwined relationship to 'Mother Earth' and think for itself, or as the more masterful and inquiring led us intentionally, or not, to.

And even more powerfully intrinsic: how the forms themselves incline us to think; the meter, the tone, the texture. Wow, like the forest that shares one root system under our feet, our minds are being interwoven, irrevocably. The power of the WORD. The power of a language.

It’s not a great leap to recognize our present time World Wide Web* as a manifestation of all of the evolution of our collective mind to date, or a directory of where to find it, for the first time connecting the population of the globe, from every age group and possible orientation, instantly. The profound and the crass, sex, war, commerce, knowledge, ignorance, lies, opinion, gossip, reason, art, music, passion, fashion, love…all there, 24/7…..Will we handle this medium with deeply deliberated intent in alignment with our most profound selves?
Will the ‘web masters’ be awed by the allures of easy power, greed, and celebrity enslaved to perpetuating this at mind numbing speeds, the next big yawn_TV in nanosecond time? Or will fresh and brighter paradigms charge our predominately western minds and pages with ideas and messages that lift us all onto uncharted planes of understanding, creation, evolution?

Of coarse, the answer remains the same, probably to the close of time, in all of our human undertakings, all of this will populate the Web.

The heading above by John Lennon, or was that Yoko?, comes to mind…

Think.
What are you creating, and why?



*interesting note: there is an American Native belief that Spider Woman is the great creator of our red road (earthly) life. Will get back to you soon with more detail, more connection....and more musings on the subject.