The toxicity of data
Too much input causes sickness. It turns out Future Shock is real[1]. I was unwell yesterday. Some sort of 24 hour bug that left me listless and yet unable to sleep. (The app I have which monitors my sleep quality tells me I managed 9% sleep quality on Saturday night. This is roughly equivalent to someone at a rave having a bit of a sit down in the chill-out room, or a long distance lorry driver on the M6 resting his eyes.). I have a notion this sickness was caused by a surfeit of social media; and so here I am writing about it on LiveJournal.
Of course Dear Old Live Journal is now the oak panelled leather armchair of social media; there are words here rather than animated gifs with brightly coloured animated text. Thoughts, dreams, and pauses for breath.
It even has paragraphs.
The speed at which one has to assimilate information is not so fast. There is no instant messenger, no refresh buttons. You can look back a week, a month, years into the past.
The signal to noise ratio, particularly since the what kind of quiz am I contingent moved to facebook, is a lot higher.
At the weekend I looked at Whisper; twitter for teens. A vast space where people shout into the void surrounded by coloured icons. It was ... Awful.
So many damaged, lonely, desperate people backed up with an AI that selected images to sit behind whatever people had to say. The AI was broken, or the pattern matching algorithm has been designed by someone who did not understand semantics.
"Like watching people on ketamine trying to spell car crash," I suggested. The search engine returned a photo of some GG list celebrity in her underwear.
I turned away from it. The whimpers of 17 y/o M looking for fun were too much. Imagine twitter where every tweet is presented to you. There is no filtering, no friends list, you can sort by proximity and popularity. But ten minutes was enough for the memetic code to make the leap into meatspace.
Every time I closed my eyes I could see the data stream, I could hear the machine grinding down the virtual souls of the tens of thousands of people plugged and tugged into it. Selfies and photographs of genitals, shouts for attention, cries for help. Thousands every minute. Me. Me. Me!
I purged it. Painkillers and sparkling water, a vicious work out (contra-indicated when you are unwell, but I have a grading next week and it was good practice,) and a bath hot enough to steam it out of me.
When I left the bath, the grey water flickered with data, icons of dope plants, girls with duckface, men pretending to be lesbians in order to get naked pictures (presumably from other men pretending to be lesbians.)
Twenty four hours jacked up on Whisper: A drug stronger than any amphetamine or cocaine derivative. Crystal Ethernet / Freebase data. The sort of thing that Jeff Noon writes about, but here and now in the real world.
That shit is dangerous!
***
This story is not entirely a work of fiction. I really have been unwell, and Whisper is every bit as awful as I described.
However I slept - at 99% - for almost nine hours last night and I feel a hell of a lot better for it.
[1] This is not a 2000AD reference
Of course Dear Old Live Journal is now the oak panelled leather armchair of social media; there are words here rather than animated gifs with brightly coloured animated text. Thoughts, dreams, and pauses for breath.
It even has paragraphs.
The speed at which one has to assimilate information is not so fast. There is no instant messenger, no refresh buttons. You can look back a week, a month, years into the past.
The signal to noise ratio, particularly since the what kind of quiz am I contingent moved to facebook, is a lot higher.
At the weekend I looked at Whisper; twitter for teens. A vast space where people shout into the void surrounded by coloured icons. It was ... Awful.
So many damaged, lonely, desperate people backed up with an AI that selected images to sit behind whatever people had to say. The AI was broken, or the pattern matching algorithm has been designed by someone who did not understand semantics.
"Like watching people on ketamine trying to spell car crash," I suggested. The search engine returned a photo of some GG list celebrity in her underwear.
I turned away from it. The whimpers of 17 y/o M looking for fun were too much. Imagine twitter where every tweet is presented to you. There is no filtering, no friends list, you can sort by proximity and popularity. But ten minutes was enough for the memetic code to make the leap into meatspace.
Every time I closed my eyes I could see the data stream, I could hear the machine grinding down the virtual souls of the tens of thousands of people plugged and tugged into it. Selfies and photographs of genitals, shouts for attention, cries for help. Thousands every minute. Me. Me. Me!
I purged it. Painkillers and sparkling water, a vicious work out (contra-indicated when you are unwell, but I have a grading next week and it was good practice,) and a bath hot enough to steam it out of me.
When I left the bath, the grey water flickered with data, icons of dope plants, girls with duckface, men pretending to be lesbians in order to get naked pictures (presumably from other men pretending to be lesbians.)
Twenty four hours jacked up on Whisper: A drug stronger than any amphetamine or cocaine derivative. Crystal Ethernet / Freebase data. The sort of thing that Jeff Noon writes about, but here and now in the real world.
That shit is dangerous!
***
This story is not entirely a work of fiction. I really have been unwell, and Whisper is every bit as awful as I described.
However I slept - at 99% - for almost nine hours last night and I feel a hell of a lot better for it.
[1] This is not a 2000AD reference