ever-flowing feedback fountains
Right now there's still a certain stillness to the web. Ripples
spread across it when you touch it, as a few copies of what you've
said echo on a few different sites or lists, but after a few moments
the ripples die down, and its surface is glassy smooth again. It
takes another human touch to spread any further ripples in echo or
response.
Soon, inevitably, that stillness will be broken. Each touch will
begin to echo autonomously & endlessly, swirling into self-maintaining
cycles. We will feel our actions on the web not as small pebbles
tossed into a still void, but as tiny alterations or additions to a
giant, spinning, independent storm.
For instance as more & more cameras fill our lives, more & more often
the images they catch will be of screens playing pictures from other
cameras. They'll form a giant worldwide fountain of images, spilling
constantly from continent to continent however we direct them. And
sometimes, more & more, an image will find itself back where it came
from and will begin to endlessly cycle, distorted & altered &
transformed more or less by the conditions in however many, however
distant places.
We will expect everything we do then to be remembered, not just as a
dead archive, but in a living cycle. Shadows of the past will always
be dancing with us.
And then, soon after that, there will be no more now & gone, no more
here & there, no more living & dead-- only now, only here, only
living.
mungojelly