Interaction12 Ruminations
Interactions are relationships.Inherently every action has
an opposite reaction although
in a network it may not appear
to be fundamentally equal as
parts are distributed and transmuted
across the topography of life,
comprising people, emotion, behavior,
and motivations hidden from self.
This person you are causes motion,
and an effect ripples through that
entity I have to call “the system”,
triggering a series (still ever a series)
of bits to change state, retrieve data,
alter properties, store a record,
and otherwise modify the _quo_.
Inputs become outputs, and new
or known is made manifest
in place or elsewhere, perhaps
transmogrified and always processed.
The phenomenon of technology
is never fixed in time,
is never singular in its actors,
for by definition it is goal-oriented,
offering skill that links one to
desire expressed via the action –
and but yet, today, tech percolates
into the quotidian – the art and joy
of our lives as family, friends,
lovers seeking eternal affirmation.
So the art of being, the good of
knowing, the thrill of connection
and the choose-your-own-adventure
of poesie needs to confront the
formal linearity of machines that
we aim to remake in the finest
image of ourselves: fulfilled.
(Thanks esp to anthropologist Genevieve Bell and philosophically-informed Jeremy Yuille for triggering this particular train of thought….)