At the end of our gorging on cultural gruel, we are left with a half-wit festering vocabulary that regurgitates the dander of meaningless jingles and conversations we never participated in but merely passively observed. To that end, we are fattened pigs wallowing in the fecal matter of creators who feast on the caviar of real thought and who are well exercised in the fitness of intellectual rigor.
Communication in the Renaissance relied heavily on imagery and symbolism to guide humanity into the Enlightenment, today this is mirrored in our use of emojis and memes and has me wondering where will our young thinkers bring our species?
Movies, video games, and viral videos drive the new engine of simulacra and simulation. As we invent reality outside of reality, how are the virtual simulacra going to lend influence to the simulation and allow for a simulation that can no longer be based on real-world processes?
Religion has lost its place at the center of control as it became a symbolic representation of archaic traditions instead of being hard rules that dictated how people lived.
The digital age catapults semiotics beyond borders into a new iconography of global motifs that contextualize time and location into a flattened moment reflecting a zeitgeist that may not exist tomorrow.
Modern language is becoming generative as it’s moving further away from traditions and orthodox rules. Words intermingle with images to find fluid plasticity that evolves as global culture co-ops the viral and technology introduces communication with machines. How is the structure altered when that landscape is more often digital and how long before machines create a new kind of shorthand after learning the patterns where particular words can be paired with images and emojis?
Linguistic structures in the future will create tonal spaces similar to those found in music. The Circle of Fifths can be employed digitally in the creation of electronic generative music with pleasant sounds emerging from relative randomness. The math behind understanding the distance between keys is used in creating harmonies and melodies, a similar linguistically aware application might be able to harness a new spatial model where words from various languages are plucked out a vast memory to deliver a new language; the human universal language.
What components of language are dependent and fixed upon other elements and relationships as opposed to ephemeral fragments making new connections that create hitherto unknown patterns and consequently new insight into ourselves? Examples can be found in Hip-hop where stochastic relationships find poetic deep meaning.
What’s the process when we enter a technology that starts the altering of how we talk and communicate? Our species begins architecting the words for subjects and technologies that are evolving allowing the arch we require to bring to fruition our anticipated future. It is as though we are forced by an instinctual process to develop language to take us into tomorrow.
How do we evolve linguistically when repetition of tropes and idioms in popular media repeat ad infinitum thus limiting the evolving breadth of capacity to absorb the foreign? Are these the people who intellectually are left behind?
Our current young generation is the first to have learned more words from smart machines than other humans.
We consume the product of the digital realm to enhance the simulation of the other, of the alien. By feasting on these cultural fragments we are supporting an unknown objective to model ourselves in the composite image of the idealized person we ourselves would like to meet.
Does the world exist aside from my attributing phenomenon and meaning to me within it? Am I the product of a self that finds wandering in nature, exploring words, and cultivating a personality that moves from the coffeeshop to various places that allow John to emerge while collecting bits and pieces of various cultural elements I hold relevant?
If I were to want to fit in with social convention in order to be a more integrated person would I need to layer within myself the constructs of banality and pop culture to better define my compatibility to be boring?