Digital, Bios and Dios
This decade of ours, in addition to
all the peculiarities will be remembered for a general halting phase
that has come to all spheres of Life. It is not mere pessimism borne out of
lack of understanding but of a more sobering and calming thought that we have
been in a kind of transition cusp in human culture. Technology, like theology
in Middle Ages has matured to the extent of having a layered and meshed
connectivity with other areas of human concern. Its proponents are becoming
more and more serious (in poetry Mathew Arnold calls this as high seriousness
where a text graduates from rhyme to poetry ) compared to its earlier version
of a adolescent charming and getting charmed by nice gizmos he had just
recently mastered. Milan Kundera calls this a juvenile technocracy and
highlights this by an imagery where a boy is riding a bike and shouting and
perhaps with a complaint that nobody is taking him seriously.
The horoscope of technology, after a
certain interaction with human beings is read with the sense of more irony
imprinted on it. In last ten years, breaking all barriers and engulfing us in a
whirlwind, the digital revolution is behaving more like a river approaching
ocean than a young and promising rivulet breaking the canyon. The cultural
canyon through which every new idea needs to chart its path, digital age is
encountering the first taste of serious cultural and ethical challenges.
Navigation in such seas is not possible only with GPS of calibrated resolution
but devices that had been humanity’s favorite for such uncharted situation
where calibration calibrates over an Unknown that it never knows: Spirituality. The young and rosy youth of the
early 1990’s is nearing forty and the terra firma is not only changed
but in cases terra incognita. The
Ulysses of Nineties who had come back home after a glorious voyage finds
Penelope, not surrounded by suitors but by a shroud of unfamiliarity and
Telemachus interested in other pursuits. The more our generation’s Ulysses
tries to re-invent the
Technology never creates Culture.
Culture undoes what Technology has delivered and does what it has promised. A
culture created by technology alone is a laboratory curiosity, it’s wings of wax will melt like Dedealus
as soon as the flesh and blood warm sun shines on it. So has vanished the glory
of
Biotechnology is not about technology
but the revenge of Nature in one sense and harmonization process in another
sense. This is the final interface
between man and the binary bits – the interface that is a highly-complex
bi-directional converter interchanging atoms and bits. But what is the
organization of this converter itself? Does it share something common about the
objects it processes or fundamentally different? Our age as per the opening argument is in a halting
state in response to this question and technology of the future in a generic
sense showing a trend of becoming more of a culture-processing tool than a tool
manipulating bits or atoms. So we are poised to provide a new definition of
culture itself like the makers of Matrix Reloaded, in pursuing their
methodology is urged to re-invent cinematography and hence perception of visual
arts. In days to come, this trend of technology becoming more of a culture
processor will be stronger and its direction clearer. We will wait.
So we had been. So will our future
generation. It is not a question of getting a solution for all time because
neither the universe so narrow nor men are so less ingenious. Past the relics
of digital age whose high days are over as a Cultural Force to reckon with,
there will be of course local thrust but for all practical purposes, it is no
longer a living tradition in the domain of culture. It is a mere utility and
handing the batton to the next age, it has retired. So you will find in the
eyes of forty-plus of today. In the meantime, everything else will continue,
Internet will be more manicured, business will be doing what it does exactly –
doing business with the most profitable of time, politicians will be busier for
next election than next aeon, Science will be merging deeper and deeper into a
labyrinth it has constructed itself and Arts, after a long time will gift us
with uncertainties that will re-invent Uncertainty itself.
The greatest encapsulation of Uncertainty has been
attempted in the word –God. We are faintly aware that it is this on whose existence
we exist but about does it exist? The question echoes from all directions and
as I watch here, in the heartland of