Will the Internet manifest itself in a less external manner, combining itself with the human race at a biological level? I’ve always wondered about the effects of all this binary data that is tearing through our bodies. Will we evolve to be able to hear this information, as we evolved to listen and interpret sound waves? What if we develop the ability to send as well as receive data? We’ll be walking operating systems, or maybe we’ll have grown out of physical activity by that point, and we will finally have a version of telepathic communication.

Maybe we’ll fast forward through Nature’s own plans and install mechanical devices that hook straight into our central nervous system. Maybe we’ll all be mind readers by the year 2020. Maybe we won’t survive to see any of this because, like the dominant species on the planets before us, the ride is over and we have to join the back of the queue again.

I digress… partly because I’m feeling lousy today, and partly because I went to a theme park the other day and wanted to sneak this into the conversation somehow.

An important thing to consider, is that the future of the Internet is in our own hands. It can be a way to help us manage our overflowing jar of identities. It can be the future city in which our virtu-self will live for eternity (or until someone pulls the plug). It can be the key to connecting the human race and sharing information in ways that we never thought were possible. It can be all of the above, or whatever we want it to be.

For a week, I see what life would be like without logging on to Facebook. I turned off all my notifications, turned away when my girlfriend was logged on watering her virtual plants and avoided all temptation. At the end of the week, I wanted to identify a difference between the useful and non-useful things that social networking provides.

Staying in touch
It turned out that there were only people that I stayed in touch with via Facebook, I didn’t have their current phone number or even email address. I don’t see this as a benefit of Facebook, but a lazy hook that they use to drag you in to their realm. There’s no reason that I shouldn’t have someone’s email address, they must have one to use the site in the first place, so the onus of this one is on me.

Direct Contact
The only new direct information that I learnt was that 4 different people like the photos that I take and I also discovered that a youtube video that I thought was a fake, turned out to be… well… a fake. I understand that you have to give to receive, and maybe with a week of zero interaction, I couldn’t expect much, but  I have to ask; is the time invested in priming these responses really worth it? In the short term, I feel like I get some kind of reward from this feedback, but it feels like a can of diet soda; a nice sweet taste, with zero calories in the long run.

Useful information
Just news that my sister has a cold, and my girlfriends brother posted an interesting dance music blog. I was kind of hoping for more, since all week I’ve been teased with my girlfriends cute little snickering as she checked her profile. I had dreams of side-splitting anecdotes and golden nuggets of enlightenment, but there didn’t seem to be any. What I discovered instead, was a desire to add a few more people to my ‘hide’ list, and that I will strive to post less throwaway comments.

The flip side
In my estimations, I must have diverted around 7 facebook hours, or if I stop lying to myself; 15 hours. So what did I do different this week, that I didn’t do for the past few months? I swam a kilometre at my local pool, went for a hygienist appointment at the dentist, took my cat to the vet to get spayed, created 6 new portraits (cat chappell, kara cabados, phineas kibbey, sue kibbey, magnus huckvale, dj bissen), and paid some attention to the neglected Guitar Hero that has been collecting ageing rocker skin cells in the corner.

I didn’t get a feeling of instant reward at first, where were the people telling me that they liked my photos, where was the feeling of satisfaction when taking my cat to a strange place to be poked and prodded? I learnt that the reward system that I’d become reliant on from Facebook was no more real than the rewards that I eventually derived from myself, but the one big difference, is that I was in control, not some external source. That I can live with.

I still agree with my previous post about life being how you choose to waste your time, so if I was to say that choosing to do things other than check my posts at hourly intervals was any better than playing an imaginary guitar based video game, I’d be a hypocrite (oh wait, I am a human… isn’t it in our nature to subscribe to Hypocrisy?). All that happened this week, is that I chose to do something different, and I enjoyed it. In that sense it was a success. If you are so inclined, I suggest that you make up your own life experiments and put them into practice.

From my reading, which comprises mostly of information from the book The Human Mind: And How to Make the Most of It by Robert Winston; I have learnt to understand the brain as this entity which develops in relation to the repetition of events and the importance that we attach to them.

So, there you have it, the simplest explanation of how our mind learns to serve and protect us. But what happens when your conscious mind thinks that it has a better way of dealing with a situation than your subconscious. Where are the powers in place which prevent your body from releasing ‘fight-or-flight’ chemicals, and how do you convince your legs to stand their ground when facing fear?

In some situations in our lives, we may need to be wary and follow our instant gut reaction without questioning it. But for someone like me, there seem so few situations that I would really need any adrenaline assisted actions, that it almost seems a useless function. However, after 30+ years of brain training; by the repetition of thought patterns and the exposure to stressful or painful situations, I still have a noticeable number of ‘buttons’ that could be pressed which my body responds to with an emotional reaction.

I am consciously aware of these emotional responses, and I acknowledge at the time that this may not be the direction that I want to go in, but simply by being conscious of something doesn’t make it easy to go against what your subconscious is trying to tell you. So how do we change that? What could we do that would give us the power to override our reactions at will? How can we be strong enough to break a cycle in a single second that has taken a lifetime to create?

If humans evolved the need for a system which allowed us to be protected from dangerous situations, and we are now living in a place where we no longer need such a system in place (unless you spend a lot of time sailing off the Somalian coast), then it may be possible to evolve into a species which can afford to take it’s time when making decisions.

But how do we do this? Wallace, Darwin… we need your help…!

I can focus all my attention on a subject, use reason and even make educated predictions about the matter at hand. But all it takes is to approach the thought from an alternative perspective, and a trapdoor is opened underneath my efforts and my logic is left grasping at thin air.

There seem to be two distinct areas of perspective, divided by a very grey area.

On one hand, you have this internal viewpoint, one that is interested in human fascinations such as ‘why’ or ‘how’, and then there is the external viewpoint which doesn’t seem to care much about the historical structure of an entity, but just continues to exist regardless.

These two perspectives seem to co-exist, and whilst having no direct effect on the other, are linked by a common entity; The Self. They share a common bond, but still have no say in the other’s belief. I may consider the very depths of space, but it doesn’t have any say in whether I am hungry or not. Conversely, as an example, although I may feel loss at the death of a loved one, the impact of my grief seems to have an inconsequential result on the relentless spiral of time.

If the ego were focused on only a single aspect of perspective, life would seem a much simpler task.