Mediation by Digital Means

Short post today. Something has been rattling around my brain for some time. And that is the fact that so much of my life revolves around looking at and interacting with a computer or television screen. Sending a non-biological, non-living object my thoughts and emotions. It is a practice that mediates my relationships to people, to news and information, and most of my "career." It does seem odd that I did not do this even ten, twenty years ago. It seems a very ordinary thing now. And yet it hasn't always been this way.

I think my thoughts then convey them into a screen by writing. Or I react to something I see on a screen by emoting, back to the "thing" that is projected on the screen.

Perfectly normal, right?

This is not a profound realization except when you begin to think that what is happening here lets us brush up against our own understanding of self-consciousness; it also presents the idea in plain terms that much of we see and think of and react to is projected to us, and the world ends up seeming like a giant hologram. When I first read a version of this theory years ago by the late gay paranormal writer Michael Talbot, I immediately, viscerally, felt the the truth of what was being said: that "we" ourselves exist in multiple dimensions, that what we "see" and "experience" is only a minute part of what is "real," even in the world we are living in. Most people reconfigure this truth in many ways; ancient philosophies teach us that the material world is illusion, Buddhism teaches that nothingness is the actually realness, the New Agers teach us that energy supersedes form. (They really do.)

So do I live through a computer? And what are we becoming by doing this?