Читать книгу Homo Cypiens - Herlander Elias - Страница 10

As mentioned in the previous chapter, the fifteen minutes of fame advocated by Andy Warhol would be equivalent to vitality, creativity and used by all of us in the future. This future is our present, and at this moment we can already be stars just famous for appearing in front of a virtual audience, and not for the fact that we do something relevant. Formerly, important people became people known for their deeds and feats, for instance the astronauts or the Nobel prizes. Now, since there is YouTube everyone has a media channel. There are many people who in fact publish reviews on computer articles, provide make-up advices, promote DIY tools or various applications for the most varied hobbies and professions. In this context, we are probably no longer in the era of broadcast yourself, or “self-disclosure” that was so popular in the 1980s, but maybe we are in the smartcast era. And in this smartcast stage what's interesting is that Orwell's fear came true. We are allowing to third parties accessing our data, and that we ourselves film ourselves with our smartphone cameras. We forget that they are not anymore mere telephones, but rather smartphones. This means that we have within reach the perfect weapon, the ultimate instrument of the massive dynamics that allows us to set up smartcast. Whenever we make a video and we host it online in a web site or in a social network we are doing smartcast. We are the first to do self-monitoring.

On the other hand, smartcast is interesting because it enables us to communicate with the world, to be a node in the network. This is our disclosure, an intelligent distribution of content. The Chinese believe that quality comes after quantity. In this sequel, the more users teach other users, the more people will learn by placing smart content. It is also a fact that we are in an era where everything is smart: smart TVs, smartwatches, smartphones, smart cars and smart digital assistants. Anyway, everything around us is getting smart, but some pop computing that has appeared as being in fact post-computer is actually less computer than it seems at first glance. And here we refer to, for example, tablets. However, users who learn from each other rather than from experts are not the ideal solution. Moreover, what happens is that we are really alone to learn from each other which allows two readings: on the one hand it is good because the culture of the user and the amateur is enhanced, on the other hand, this learning becomes a mere and fragile culture of amateurs.

In another point of view it is equally true that little by little amateurs become experts. However, we can not fail to point out that the smartcast era can be easily misunderstood and comparared to amateurish-cast. One point that seems equally relevant is a certain “empathy projection” with which, for example, YouTubers and social media users in general accuse. Anyone who wants to be smart is projected onto the network to have more than the usual 15 minutes of Warholian fame, but anyone who browses the network looking for content, like us “users-searchers”, also manifests itself as an “empathic projector”. According to science fiction author, Philip K. Dick, more specifically in the famous novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? of 1968, one speaks at a given moment that, once at home, the person would interact with his empathy box. Such “empathy box” would be useful for the person to meditate, disconnect from the real or synchronize with the media and its dialectic of images and news. By this we mean that at the moment we are all in tune with our empathy boxes, whether these are TiVos, Nintendo game consoles, Microsoft or Sony or Apple TV. We are tuning in to empathy boxes. The same thing happens when we get on computers, tablets or smartphones and connect to the social digital world of contents presented by stars. And the most fantastic is that if before all people could have their blog, now we all have our vlogue, our YouTube channel. We are all media and all stars. Orwell's nightmare and Warhol's omen are consummated. We are all in the media, talking about media and in need of therapy.