A little while back I went for a drive where I was able to give myself over to the moment pretty effectively. Every light, every sound, every driver seemed more there. More a part of the whole. Every sensory input and every one of my movements a delicate piece of the great dance of life. During this time my mp3 player was on random and Radiohead’s Videotape came on. Up until that moment, it was probably my least favorite track on the amazing In Rainbows. It sounded to me too much like some sad dude leavin a somewhat lame suicide video to someone he loves. Too depressing and bleak. But I head read in a Rolling Stone article that Thom and producer Nigel Godrich considered it their favorite track on the album. This gave me pause and made me think I should probably give it another chance. A closer listen.
Now I think it may be my favorite track on the album. I get it now. There’s a part around the 1:30 minute mark where Thom’s voice starts echoing around itself and begins to sound like so many ghosts. It was then that the song hit me on another, deeper level. Not as some sad guy’s final goodbye video, but as a song awake to our entire world culture’s final goodbye, happening now. Our artifact to leave behind when we’re here no longer to tell our story.
I recently read an article in the LA Times reporting that Youtube had recently hit the 75 million video mark. And is growing by 200,000 videos a day. So much media. So many moments. So many lives. A videotape of humanity. Our desperate attempt to say to someone, anyone, this is who we are. And this is how we’re saying goodbye, not in monuments, but in media. We are our media. Someday perhaps, our media will be all thats left of us. All our hopes, all our dreams, all our triumphs, all our tragedies, all our love, entombed in red blue green. red blue green. One long day on Videotape.
“No matter what happens now. Shouldn’t be afraid. Because I know today has been the most perfect day I have ever seen.”
So the human personality construct is a pretty multi-plicitous beasts, no doubt about that. Especially in this newly fractured world of social media and friends networks and avatars, the net-connected human has many opportunities to present different faces to the world as different situations and contexts present themselves. Despite this, the fact remains that contending with the many traits and habits that people bring to a situation requires a certain level of predictability and stability, or else we are left without the all important middle ground where conversation may reliably take seed and blossom.
Consider email and the habits of interaction in that well-trod, though still very new communication space. Some people rely on the caps lock key to indicate excitement or exasperation. Others rely on the aptly-named emoticon, an attempt to parse the emotion of facial expressions with the tools of text. Some emailers have a repeating set of anecdotes they employ to illuminate a variety of situations and events. If you run with the truly geeky side of the net, you may even encounter the world of 1337sp34k (leetspeak), gamely replacing normal letters with number and symbol stand-ins.
We all learn to identify and predict these styles of email communication and respond at the very least coherently, and at our best, even reflect these styles back to the sender in our responses. So while the human’s opportunities to mix up one’s personality to the nth degree has increased, i believe our personalities in context, the personalities we present in specific situations and modes of communication, are actually becoming easier to codify and predict. Email is again a good example of why. First of all, unlike many other mediums of communication, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that one’s entire history of email communication could be stored and accessed in one archive. As the medium matures and services like gmail and hotmail have the opportunity to become a kind of “life-partner tool” establishing relationships with customers that last a lifetime, the opportunity to process the whole of one’s communication styles and habits within a certain frame becomes possible. User A starts off a conversation about Subject A with communication construct style G 95% of the time on weekdays. User B responds to Question B with Communication Construct Style G6 86% of the time after a workout.
