Читать книгу Homo Cypiens - Herlander Elias - Страница 22

The contemporary world is face to face with its own debt of events, newness and celebrity production. This economy of the immediate leaves no room for human relations to consolidate. At the same time it is also not possible to keep up with everything that is new. There is no time available to understand everything and to familiarize ourselves with what is happening today. There are many personalities, facts, statements stabilized in the collective mind and individual mind. The problem with this economy is that it no longer devotes itself to the production of goods, but rather to the investment in ideas, images, services and accesses. The products are no longer important because the immediate economy aims to solve everything based on what happens precisely "immediately". The immediacy of this world is a problem because it does not allow us to stop a bit to think about what is happening. Suddenly, thought, stopping and immanence became a problem in a world of accelerated solutions. Whatever one needs from time tends to become problematic as there is no enough time available to develop theories, criticism, comparison or analysis. The immediate is imposed as a new tyranny in which what becomes profitable is the acceleration in the name of productivity, also accelerated.

The immediate means there is still no mediation and if there is no mediation, then all poles are left without a healthy relationship. As the rule requires that the immediate formula must be applied as the last formula, what happens is that everything that is not immediate seems foreign to us as if it were the time in which there was time, opposite to current times — we do not have enough time to perform all actions and learn everything new — people are ruled by the "immediate". Consequently, mediation is crucial. So, it is necessary to study, analyze, investigate, think, see beyond the obvious, understand beyond the visible, and think in the medium and long term. However, these actions are doomed at the start because the immediate is imposed as a system. It is not something that affects only one individual, but several individuals. In this way, the immediate as a system has turned out to be a systemic solution as well as a system of problems, precisely because there is no time to confirm all the news and the most recent facts, industrial and commercial productions, and so on, we do not keep in our memory "who actually did what". Even when we are helped by the Net and other sources of information, it became almost impossible to confirm everything that is announced and launched in the market and to the public opinion. This means that the Net itself became not an instrument of confirmation of what occurs daily, but instead it turned to be the first cause of difficulty we have in confirming whatever. It is extremely difficult to confirm the truth of events and facts that appear on digital media, web pages, social networks, YouTube and Twitter. There is simply too much media discourse and little time to think about what is happening around us.

At this point, the central question lies in speed. The economy of the immediate replaces the economy of mediation. Once the necessary time has elapsed for reflection, what remains is an unanalyzed speed, a production of unstable reality, a world in which everything is produced quickly because it "has to be" produced rapidly, a world where "not thinking" seems to be rewarding. In this new world the individual is a target. All the political, commercial, industrial and economic messages are intended to confuse the individual even more, who, in effect, loses contact with "the real" reality, because he is barred from access to the true reality. The common individual only knows the broadcasted reality. All that appears in the media are no more than stabilized statements and/or produced facts. And in the face of this the correct attitude is to invest in the time and availability needed to reflect on the contemporary world. Whenever the individual analyzes and theorizes he has a counter-natural behavior towards the system that involves him. The media envelope that surrounds us does not want us to think, it does not intend us to know the truth about the past, and it is not its purpose to have an educated and demanding audience. To know more means to "see" better, to develop a deep conscious of the facts. We, individuals, are not supposed to be able to have a clear insight. It is supposed we follow the tyranny of the immediate economy. According to this new tyrannical system, the issues of the world must be solved "immediately", right "now".

How can we question the new normality of "being and non-thinking"? It leaves us with two possible attitudes: either we stop and think of everything around us, leaving this equation better prepared, or we give in to the economy of the immediate and we become a strange species that consumes and does not think, that reads, but does not know, that speaks, but does not communicate. We become strangers in our own territory. What is happening now is that the presentness surrounding us aims to transform us into tourists in our own environment. We became foreigners because we failed to understand the codes that were the usual ones between individual-system-reality. In the new schematic, the individual finds himself more perversely alienated, for he seems to continue to be well informed, and the system is more "intelligent" because it is used only for the immediate (in the individual-system relationship). Interestingly, in the system-individual relationship, all the information about our online, media, professional and social life is stored and digested by the new digital media. As today's machines know a great deal about us, we are almost foreign to ourselves, for machines know and anticipate results that stun us. What is left is the ability to digest the information and know how to be digested as information. An economy of the immediate is advantageous and we need it, but we must prevent losing our identity to the detriment of it. It is useful for us to challenge a system that has stopped challenging us and only works by distracting us.