As PSA frequently notes, OTL involves a blending of core elements, created and packaged much like a recipe for a tasty dish. Combine the elements just so, and it “works”.
The collection in the subject line above are all “ingredients” in a dish of understanding media, the MOs of perception, and how that is expressed in social media constructs where we “take on” a flexible and DIY identity.
Understanding Media, as McLuhan would have us do, depends on understanding the perceptive mechanics of humans. As we use extensions, we extend our worlds of perception…and we do that according to some “standardized” human operating systems.
David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, explored the means of human perception and concluded that our belief in a unified singular self is an error. He said it was an illusion that our minds/bodies create to help us function in the world, but that we shouldn’t confuse with reality. We should instead see ourselves as working with means that create a world that we inhabit as “real” but is “something else or something more.” (paraphrasing )
Hume thought that perhaps the idea of “solid” separate human entities that we could delineate was a mistake, and that perhaps reality was instead a process, such as indicated by the Buddhist saying: “Nothing Exists, all things are becoming“. Today we might say no single entity is essential in realizing a distributed network….it’s the aggregation that creates meaning.
Or we might be tempted to throw in some maxims from Quantum mechanics, which also explore whether we can “know” something out of it’s embedded context. (paraphrasing).
Hume’s approach contains elements of Buddhism, and scholars suspect he was influenced by Buddhist ideas brought back from Tibet by a Jesuit priest in the early 1700’s. Buddhism famously points to our identity with the separate and “solid” self as being a central error. Esoteric understanding of Christianity can be seen as expressing the same awareness.
This below from the Atlantic magazine by Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology, and philosophy at Cal Berkeley. direct link here.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/How-an-18th.pdf”]Aldus Huxley, the English visionary who wrote Brave New World, came to the US and lived in southern California, and experimented with psilocybin and other mind expanding substances. From those activities, and through his elite intellectual capabilities, came the book “The Doors of Perception” that explored and explained how we create the world through our mind and senses, and how under certain circumstances we can glimpse how we are doing that, in real-time.
Alan Watts, an English philosopher who was also a student of religions both east and west, having been at one time an Episcopal priest. He immigrated to the US, and wrote many books popularizing and explaining eastern spiritual ideas, in terms westerners could understand. He himself also used psychedelics and immersed himself in Zen Buddhism, among other things.
One of his books published in 1966, was “The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are,” and made several points along the lines of Huxley, Hume and even McLuhan, interpreting eastern ideas in western terms about the illusion of the self and the problems that illusion creates for us.
Today we have extensions of our senses that create alternate perceptive worlds that we call VR. From “Second Life” to “Oculus Rift”, to games where we take on characters, roles, avatars, and narratives, …we have been doing, and will be doing, activities that focus our awareness on the means of perception, just as McLuhan, Hume, Huxley, Watts and many others have prepared us to explore.
Oculus Rift is said to achieve a level of “realism” that fools our brain into thinking we are actually inhabiting the VR world projected on the goggles with screens in front of our eyes. There’s also the phenomena of “Uncanny Valley” where our perception starts to interpret VR as real, but “revolts” against it making us “sick” because the simulation is so close, but not actually, the environment the brain is fully committed to in our daily lives.
Today youth seems to particularly enjoy role play, as evidenced by such things as Cosplay, and created identities and avatars online, which may easily create duplicities and conflicts between the expressed selves, and the “real self”. At some point, all this play with identity becomes matter of fact, and just the way life is, and will spill over into our common sense of perception, and change our assumed reality where selves exist in “solid form”…and what will replace this convention?
Needless to say, there’s a lot of room here for learning about learning, and understanding media, and incorporating all the elements including identity games, and the other implications of the above, into DLE, and OTL. Can we match the possibilities that exist with appropriate innovations and elaborations of “the right stuff” and “the right tools”?