LTS #00 – Lowtech Doomscroll Society
Lowtech Doomscroll Society
I converted @tim_rodenbroeker ‘s lowtech painting machine to @p5xjs and streamed our beloved social media feed. While I was looking into the Fluxus movement Tim’s work made me think about the experiences we have online.
We are constantly overloaded with digital media. Our brains can only take a limited amount of data at a time, I feel this (right side) is what we do to our brains when we are doomscrolling.
Chaotic bits of information making no sense and scrambling our brains along with it. We’re constantly changing what we see and understand. We don’t have a clear head on where we’re headed. No wonder we’re filled with despair and hopelessness.
We are still experiencing Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway. The tension between the celebration of technology and impact on culture is exponentially rising.
While we worry about digital chasm where access and literacy are primary barriers. We should also worry about the genesis of a new societal underclass characterized not by a lack of technology, but by its compulsive consumption and digital addiction. The low quality of digital engagement can be viewed as a symptom of deeper digital dependencies. Our cognitive abilities have been effectively blurred disabling us to process information critically and coherently.
Doomscrolling is just a start of digital dependencies and compulsions ensnaring the psyche of the meta-modern human. This goes beyond individual well-being, and hints at a broader socio-economic segregation: a fragmentation of the middle-class by the commodification of real versus virtual experiences.
