Time is precious, of course. But our perception of it directly affects the quality of our use. If we are rushed we do not engage fully in life, and if we are bored we do not value life enough to get really creative and fresh. I am an artist and a lover, so, for me innovation is key. In both life areas I want to present both what is pleasing, and what's never really been seen, just so. Innovation clings to tradition until the moment it casts itself in flight toward the promise of glory. Stagnation clings to habit fearfully, until the moment it is overpowered by the realization that something fresh and not one's own has replaced the central interest. Time moves more quickly or slowly to one's mind depending on so many factors, yet, we all want time to slow when we are pleased and to rush when we are not. How does the world wide web, which intensifies so many areas of our minds, while paralysing so many spheres of behavior, how does the world wide web become the most useful tool for all in terms of maximizing benefit while minimizing cost? I speak of the benefit of the luxurious sensation of having all the time illy n the world, and the accompanying sense of primordial security, while I speak also of the cost which can be understood as a terrible feeling of doubt, ineffectiveness, insurmountable distance, hardcore loneliness and self-identified strangeness? If the web has great powers of both alienation and assimilation, it should be shot thru and peppered with wildly beautiful chaos, nurturing strands of adventure, which ride atop an ocean of unbreakable glass, like the screen, and which represents stability.
Controlled and useful chaos must depart from the tradition it defines itself in contrast to. Daring first, to dare, it must not view itself as anomalous. Like a child who just gets the hang of it, or an adult who has at long last succeeded, the sense of the new which accompanies the harmonious unity with safely controlled chaos both happens naturally, and can just as gracefully be hard-won.
The internet is a rare opportunity to condense, maximize, benefit from and refine such areas. By being contained to the screen, but also by virtue of its great reach across many dividing fences, by being at once anonymous and perfectly named (for what better name is there than that which you give yourself, and by the same token, since there are only names, are not all names reduced to the same level of intimacy, which is that of pure faith, since you are not communing with somebody immediately, physically present) by being a place where you can gather the items of your totem at your leisure and with little fear of substitution, and by being a place where you can choose to shed such items at will, the internet is a wonderful, varied, hyper immediate and available thing.
First, let's look at getting cut off. Like an awards speech or something... I find myself constantly wondering in the back of my mind if I am getting through, if there is somebody who is being reached by my activity. By the same token, this activity, often virtual, which means in name but not in fact, this activity can often seem hollow or lifeless. The same monstrously powerful and undeniable surging of our collective brains oozing connectivity and amplitude, resonating and synching, that same energy has a kind of "off-switch" which has nothing to do with factual power.
I mean real time. The sense of contiguous reality, can be accepted or rejected, spontaneously during any moment of computer use. If there is a sudden menace and our fragile eco system of mind, fingers, keyboard and screen is suddenly jeapordized ("Hey, I got to go do dishes," is one example). Or if a connection you have made, or an artwork you have been fascinated by keeps you up until the moment you must leave for work. These splices of real time are becoming integrated into our human experience and are therefor held to human accountability.
We struggle with this. From the indexing and consequences of cyber-crime, to the silly beautiful minutes of the day when someone dear hits "Like" on our post, we people are engaged in the organization of existence by way of mediaitc extension everyday. Creating a set of rules to live by, for parents who want their children to not always be available as an electronic series of code signals representing who they are, or for a former misfit who has finally found the perfect circumstances in which to thrive, these new rules are being made spur of the moment, and ONLINE, as well as offline.
The internet is a mystery of presence. An unfolding like no other. Yet is filled with poverty as well. In the world of ideas, mimicry is a kind of poverty, and the creative underachievers can sometimes feel a sting of despair at having their perfectly formulated dream represented to them from an alien source.
Like Love being that unheard of and longed for confluence of what one wants and what is available and freely given, when the INternet does that, one often feels cheated. This acute awareness of real life and I mean a life which contains that which cannot be ignored, the real being defined as what is left over after you remove all other things, this sharp reality can become the cliff face upon which the waves of our conceit hurl themselves at each day.
Preoccupation with morality finds a dizzy sense of possibility here. The web can make so many murky things clear. But by the same token the daily ethics of life create the vehicle which shares in the transport of both dream and memory.
Computers are a mystic record of what we have been, and an enormous portal to who we will become. The ideas which ripple beneath the surface of its pooled resource, the millions of sets of eyes from every corner of the planet, are truly infinite, yet painstakingly present in the sense of limit, and the mortal's sense of doom.
Online we make our own chapter breaks, and life and death comingle. Entire personas are created, recreated, spliced, mixed, added to, evolved and lobotomized or dismissed. Whether we habitually set our modes of operation to flux with the many or the few matters less than we think of the time we spend doing it. The word here may not be time MANAGEMENT, so much as time APPRECIATION and INFLUENCE.
The liquid page is always, already a little bit beyond our control. As in poetic composition it is less a matter of directing force with authority (since power schemes organically shift, sway, reverse and speed up independent of our sustained vector) and much more a matter of cajoling, seducing, helping and awaiting for authoritative force(s) to converge.
Like the waves of the ocean, the waves of humanity swirl and glide in beautiful and luminous patterns upon the surface, with roiling, untold deeps below... SURF ON! Cheers,
Stanley Gemmell
Time is money. Always need to manage our time in proper manner.
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