Considering all this, and if we really are just brains in meat vats (lifestream 01.10.2011 #1), experiencing the world through our senses (plus the technological prosthesis we attach to them, i.e. networks, monitoring software, information systems, etc), how can we ever hope to share a common culture, digital or otherwise?  How can we be sure that our interpretation of anything is close enough to that which is experienced by another?  How can we be sure that there even are other people?  The unavoidable conclusion is that we cannot.  But to admit to such feels almost like fatalism, and perhaps the only recourse is to swallow the blue pill, and stubbornly carry on creating and sharing in this (hopefully) common culture.

Some videos that have informed this contemplation:

What is real?

Click here to view the embedded video.

There is no spoon.

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Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

Bell notes Andrew Ross’ observation that many ‘people work in cyberspace or work to make cyberspace possible.  It is not simply a medium for free expression and wealth accumulation; it is a labor-intensive workplace’, (Ross, 1998, quoted in Bell, 2001).  My first reaction to this was an offhand and idealistic rejection.  I considered the ease to produce and mash up media and the many thousands of sites which enable sharing of content; the supposed fact that anyone can freely become a web designer, developer or multimedia author.  But continued reading reminded me that despite the ubiquity of such enabling tools, the free time and skills required to use them come at a premium.  Freedom of expression is a luxury when your time is better spent feeding your family.  Let us not forget that the real winners of such enabling tools are those who live comfortable first world lives.  For many other users, the connection to the world wide web (if it exists at all!) is an enabler of a different kind, namely access to international labor markets.  Services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which provides crowdsourced, on demand, low paid digital workers to western businesses, are becoming increasingly popular and more visible online.  Bell goes on to quote Luke (1999) as an illustration of this point, telling us that  “thousands of poor women in Jamaica, Mauritius or the Philippines [work] in low-paid, tedious data entry or word-processing jobs for firms in London, Paris or San Diego”.  When viewed in this light, cyberspace becomes a much darker place and very different to the vision promoted by the free libre open source movement or by remix culture.  But the fact remains that cyberspace is simultaneously created by both the dark and the light forces, and perhaps in that sense it accurately mirrors our physical reality more than we realise.