As every human action or creation, everything we are publishing on the web is an impermanent, short-lived vanity. The Internet is probably an epitome of symbols of the brevity and the futility of life, of the emptiness and the meaninglessness of our existences. Online, both devices and contents have an expiry-date. You can notice the recrudescence of softwares allowing to convert files, because the formats we are using are always improved, faster and faster. I still have a video-recorder, but I had to buy a DVDplayer when videotapes became out of date, and now, my friends lend me movies thanks to usb keys, external hard drives, and I can even watch a movie thanks to streaming and video on demand. I realised the importance of that change when I became aware that all the video location stores I knew in Paris didn't exist anymore. Obviously, the Internet emphasizes the impermanence and the quickness of changes.
Vanitas Vanitatum, Omnia Vanitas.
It also works for celebrity. The Internet, just like television, tends to create ephemeral glories. We are now in the future prophesied by Andy Warhol, where "everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes". This is just the essence of the "buzz". Anyone can make buzz, but not for long. To make buzz, you have to be original, shocking or fun, and to choose the most visited websites of the web 2.0, such as facebook, twitter, youtube or myspace. Here is a good exemple: funny wedding entrance video. This video has been watched more than 25'500'000 times on YouTube, circulating from the site to blogs, facebook accounts, and emails.
But who will remember Jill, Kevin and their guests next year? Unless they make a buzzy video for their divorce... who knows.
MM
So are the Internet and the ever shifting e-world the ultimate illustration of human frailty ?
ReplyDeleteA catalyst for man's vanity, a spur to our natural vain-glorious surges ?
Quite possibly, but doing so they also act like the developer solutions of photographic processing: consider the web sites we secretly enjoy, those we are not too proud of, or those we watch with what we think is a lucid second-degree sense of humour… (how quickly we say we are lucid when in truth we are addicted): vanity of vanity ?
Well, one could also say "o felix culpa !" for there is only but a little effort to be made between vanity revealed and vanity vanquished:
"Nothing softeneth the arrogance of our nature [better] than a mixture of some frailties" (Halifax).
I get your point though: what is all this rushing around issuing new hardware and software all about ?
Improvement ? We all know this is just "marketing team talk".
Is this not, in the end, less a question of human frailty revealed by the passing of time, than of good old human greed ?
However if this eager pursuit of the wind is the hallmark of the e-culture, then beware !
For this e-civilisation has one weakness: goldfish memory… and this is a man involved in legal processes talking:
Let us imagine you are working in some legal department: a legal archiving of emails and data is required, and they have to be readily accessible for the next 25 years …you might as well be talking about eternity in this e-civilisation. Just go and ask you usual supplier if he can guarantee that your information will be safely stored without corruption for 25 years and watch him lie to you !
You may think, "who cares about legal archiving and lost emails, we've got good lawyers"; then think about scientific data: gone with the wind too ?
It took wars and catastrophes to loose Aristotle's books and Alexandria's library, but the e-culture may be about the achieve the same results much quicker, by careless planning:
"This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang, but a whimper" (T.S. Eliot).