The Media Landscape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Like how someone can scroll for hours through vapid dankness, and how that is actually normal. Boggles my mind.

Maybe the shortening of the attention is also a concentration of attention, rather than merely a shortening. Perhaps this concentrated attention allows for more robust retention, albeit within proportionately shorter parameters.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Also a generation-specific edge these post-threshold generations have, is that they are most accustomed to decentralized information. Basing their potential purchases on random peoples reviews, rather than the review of some published expert or critic. Can lend itself, to some degree, to rhizomatic activism, decentralized organization by way of pseudo-federalized group texts.

Like how in the film The Battle of Algiers, some colonial military authority was briefing troops on the strategies of the revolutionaries, and how one revolutionary would recruit two more, and each of them would get two more - in such a way that most of them only knew three people, their recruiter and their two recruitees, and could undergo torture without even having information about the cadre to disclose, etc.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Plus, the phenomenon of the global schoolyard. With the online supplanting the offline as the primary social space, you are now navigating a social body that is orders of magnitude larger than the previous, offline social body.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Being able to spend hours staring blankly at gross memes doesn't strike me as a decisive advantage exactly
Well that could be a side effect, some spandrel, some relatively negative symptom. What could be an advantage, somehow, is if the shortened attention also amounts to a concentrated attention, which can be handled perhaps in some novel and strategic way. Not sure though.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
are you right to say the offline supplants the online? I think for the post threshold generation theres no distinction made. its all one world
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
are you right to say the offline supplants the online? I think for the post threshold generation theres no distinction made. its all one world
I mean, in one straightforward sense, the post-threshold generations are more or less born into a reality where they quickly start spending more time on a screen than off a screen. We can say that people of all generations now spend more time on screens than off, but most of these generations also experienced key developmental/adolescent life without screens.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
But in another sense you're right, seeing as pre-threshold generations may subordinate the online to the offline, and the post-generational may not. So yeah, that doesn't necessarily mean the post-generational subordinate the offline to the online, just, at least, that they don't subordinate the online to the offline.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
So perhaps it is a "one world" view for the post-threshold generations, with just the radical/extreme among them who subordinate the offline to the online.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
black september hypostatized
What do you mean by black september here? Haven;t heard of it before, and having looked it up, I can't make the connection.

But another point is that this global schoolyard can serve to polarize socio-political developments of kids. The liberal would tend toward increasingly global, intercultural dialogues and mutual deterritorializations, perhaps resulting in a a sort of demographically diverse yet culturally homogeneous cosmopolitan youth, whereas the tribe-minded would double down on their culture and more staunchly and desperately shut out the others?
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Also would be interesting to statistically pin down where the threshold is, generationally. Just so we can start roughly mapping out the demographics.
 

Leo

Well-known member
Just a run of the mill burst, although almost every one is more totalizing than the previous. Otherwise all that energy gets pent up, actually really refreshing when this happens. Like a heavy hydraulic exhalation, purging the excitement and derippling the waters.

some people just have a wank.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
It has amounted to a semi-regular purgative discharge of some quota of psychic/vital energy, but with the capital left to continue.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
This cultivation of capital energy is necessary to run the kind of "psychic machines" I've been pointing at, the higher order beings, but I've only been able to contrive a sort of skeleton formula for these machines
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Well, technically they're already psychic machines, but this could better align our wills with the ontologies of our greater machinery.
 
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