by our roving reporter, Shaun Lawton (written in his own words)
I feel we must be living up to our necks in an unprecedented era of misguided disinformation and disgusted suspension of disbelief. It's not the time to duly note and disclose the nitpicker's reign, but rather, to acknowledge quite the opposite. We've slid into an oil slick of proponents and supporters of disparate ideologies which, were they each to be examined under the proverbial microscope, would not so much fly apart at the seams, but reveal there are no seams in smoke and mirrors as much as distracting and dazzling displays of pure illusion.
There yet remain a plethora of natural phenomena that our modern minds have long been conditioned against even noticing anymore, much less deciphering. And we can owe it to a peculiar and relatively recent development among human affairs the world over known as the internet. What got its innocuous start as a U.S. Department of Defense project in the late sixties intended to link a small number of military and university research computers into a secure, limited area network ended up becoming the one true proverbial "Genie in the bottle," or if one prefers, a veritable Pandora's Box whose lid got blasted right off its hinges.
It's because of the fact our military geniuses resorted to packet switching (breaking data into smaller, independent packets intended as backup to reroute information if parts of their network were damaged) so communication could be ensured during a crisis. In a nutshell, this became the prototype which, after adopting common transmission control protocols, that system evolved into today's world wide web.
Please feel free to take a moment and let that information sink in to your own biological neural network that processes, transmits and stores electrochemical information. Consider our situation from an objective position, if you can. Think along the lines that indicate how the global internet connects each of us disparate individual human beings together, in a way. Now consider how our own brains operate with their independent neural networks, and how they somehow manage to reach out to one another (across time and space whether within distant or intimate proximity of each other).
It's enough to beg several questions competing for our attention. First, I'd like to take this moment to ask you all to consider the irony of a worldwide network that routes, processes and stores digital information across interconnected systems, yet for reasons that may perhaps remain unfathomable to us, nevertheless appears to have failed to unify humankind towards alleviating our problems of poverty, disease and war, and in some most extreme cases (such as might be represented by our own nation here in the United States of America, currently) seems to have possibly even backfired, or achieved quite the opposite effect, resulting in a divisiveness that greedy politicians have taken advantage of the opportunity to seize the moment by the throat for their own political and personal gain, and that of their limited group of peers, rather than for all mankind. Some things seem to never change.
Now, I ask you all to simply do the one thing that our global internet, despite all of its sophistication and tangled up, re-routed and crisscrossed networks could never in a million years do. I want you to consciously take in one big long slow deep breath, hold it for a second or two, and let it out in a steady exhalation for as long as you are able to. Remember that with each breath you take, oxygen enters the blood to nourish the body, and carbon dioxide is reclaimed and carried out of your system to be expelled as a waste product, a cycle that has maintained our lives since the day we each were born.
I have made my point, for packed into this one thousand and one word article, every necessary bit of information required for each of us to put 2 + 2 together to equal 4 remains implicit. Yet I don't mind reiterating it to spell it out for you nevertheless. We make assumptions about not only the clothes we wear, or the room we happen to be in, and the buildings we travel between during the daily course of our lives, but we have a tendency to project these conjectures and expectations onto our neighborhood block, our city, county and state, and so on and so forth; but we don't stop there, we make these postulations and hypotheses about our own nation and every country on Earth, without ever really bothering to fact check anything. And if it comes time for us to do so, well we can easily log onto the great world wide web, and be led directly to self-affirming sites that stroke our egos and reassure us that what we were positing can be readily corroborated by like minded individuals out there, after all.
It's not so much a dilemma as it remains a tricky situation. When we begin to crouch down to examine the scintillating minutiae at the heart of it all, silently racing along information channels at microscopic levels shuttling to and from explosive information centers processing everything from daily stock exchanges to communal societal events ongoing periodically for anyone to participate in, we begin to notice that there yet remains a superabundance of high yield potential energy stored across our global networks that may yet kick into hyperkinetic overdrive at the drop of a hat, or clink of a dime. For when disinformation gets accidentally misguided, it may backfire on its proponents.
Entropy may continue while our momentum pushes our lives forward, yet both mind and machine trace and reflect hidden harmonies in sync with one another. Think about how networks of thought and ongoing circuits of data constantly converge into larger patterns that we can individually comprehend. One glance at our situation contains enough information to remind us that even against the apparent chaos of our online views of the world, the greater order of things in this life periodically regains equilibrium over time and settles into focus, while the trees continue to shine and the Sun grows older.
Oscillating Oculus
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