digital consciousness

I've recently come across an interesting piece of text by Headmine, I have shared below. It highlights an interesting problem that digital social media creates: The conscious perception of any given moment seems to have shifted, to have been delayed until the moment it is shared.

"There’s a new sense of Now emerging from the web and it’s starting to become more present than the here and now in front of us. The events in our lives only seem to come into full existence as we post them online. A moment that can’t be digitized and shared in one form or another is in danger of never happening.

Our parents took photos to try to hold on to the past. We take photos to create the present.

We point our mobile devices at the things and events in our lives not to remember them but to make them real. This concert, this forest, this meal with friends hasn’t really happened until it’s made its way online. The cutting edge of experience is shifting away from our senses, moving outside of our consciousness, and getting entangled in our electronic media.

Now has become the moment when the fragments of our ‘real’ lives are released into the cloud. Now is now the ephemeral membrane between us and the network.

'Google organized our memory. Real-time search organizes our consciousness.' - Edo Segal"

Perhaps we could say that sharing enhances conscious perception.

“It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.” -A Clockwork Orange