Discovering human will in the digital age : Beyond facades

The word 'Digital' has redefined many social activities and systems. Digital media, digital marketing, digital business, digital economy, digital government, digital experience, digital security, digital transformation, digital enterprise ... this list goes on. Digital has become a polynomial in every sense. It is conjoining otherwise divergent and dichotomous forms of institutions, social activities and human interactions. Why is Digital so pervasive and overarching entity ? What makes digital a superstructure and meta-narrative with such hegemonic influence and reach?

Before understanding the nuances of digital communication, we need to know that it is not the entirety of human modes of communication. We humans, can communicate with each other and with the larger entities in the natural world.

Physical world of ours is made meaningful through the social interaction and communication between human beings and the nature. Every human to human interaction develops through the confluence of conscious intentions and unconscious instincts. History, culture, memory, instincts and all sort of complex emotions run through human to human interactions. In the case of human interactions with nature, this is more versatile and meaningful. We may consider this as a natural logic. Natural logic inspires human creativity and imagination by manifolds. Nature communicates its hidden and explicit instincts to human beings whereas human beings express their intentions and imaginations back to the nature. There is a rhythm and radiance in natural expressions. Nature inspires creativity and imagination beyond confinements.


On the other hand, digital communication is centered on human to machine and machine to machine communication. Increasingly, we are entering a digital world where machine to machine communication is anticipated to dominate the human to machine communications. An autonomous wold of machine made semantics and semiotics is in the making. The advantage of machine to machine communication and sensor networks is that there it increases automation in the lower modes of production and improves productivity.

Machine to machine communication is a means to run an efficient information processing and energy processing engine on the ground to ensure that the products and services are consumed and produced more efficiently. Natural language processing and cognitive computing is the other frontier in digital communication. The benefit of creating a natural language interface is that human to machine communication becomes more seamless and controllable.

Is this an end to human intervention in the scheme of affairs? No, absolutely not.

At the outset, all this sounds exotic and magical to think about a more efficient, effective and seamless digital communication network of pervasive computing abilities. On a further note, we can see that the digital channels and touch points cannot generate their own original instincts or free will. Their basic instincts will be essentially driven by the power structure that governs them.

The interactions, networks and interfaces that we denote as digital exist as a facade to a larger mode of production and consumption in the economic sense. There is a physical mode of political and market economy behind every digital experience and engagement. We speak about virtual reality and augmented reality emerging as new frontiers in digital media and digital communication. We are seeing the end user interface of these digital experiences. The digital channels and touch points exist as a means to integrate the consumers to a global market economy through virtual and abstract means.

The other side of this intellectual facade is the compendium of forces that govern the laws of digital communication. It is made up of mortals like us. Nothing virtual or digital about it.  Thus humanity need to discover that their fragmented digital experiences are not an end in itself. We human beings still build and rebuild the relationships and rationality in human and natural modes of communication. Digital experiences are just a subset of our larger terrain of experiences and emotional journey.

Digitization of experience: Have machines become more humane than humanity?

Digitization of experience: Origins in the power of media, information and data hiding 

As we know, mind tries to rationalize every experience and generate a united sense out of it. Everyman's mind exist in conjunction with its own past and a greater memory which may be called racial / collective. Hence we can say that our mind and body is conscious as long as they are able to unify experiences in a moment with its own vast set of memories. This act of unification of experiences happen in every piece of experience in every singular entity in space time. 

Digital devices and social interactions are worth investigation in relation with this. Digitization or digital technologies employ efficient and state of the art encoding of information. It can be information about a particular aspect of space, time, symbols, ideology and so on. Information from a continuous signal or experience is first quantized / discretized and then encoded as per our convenient processing rate as a preliminary state to digitization. This post does not aspire to go into the internals of the signal processing here.

Digital Ocra by Daniel Dionne on CreativeCommons

Instead, in this article we are interested to see how the digitized information influences the people who consume it.  When we engage with a digital data, we tend to think that data is the same as our continuous signal. It is the first and foremost significant difference. Digital data is not the same as the analogue / continuous signal. Hence it is highly customized / encoded and as a result highly ideological and influential. There is a relative limit to understanding condensed information. This cognitive capacity will be relative to each person and different cultures. When this limit is reached people tend to become subordinate to digital experiences and become just subservient consumers. From there onwards the discretion on taste / distaste, good/bad/ugly are lost. This can be termed as a decoding threshold. 

In addition to the data, the machine interfaces and interactions of digital world are highly customized for capturing human attention. This has a huge impact on the human cognition in the digital experience. Thus digital data and interfaces are highly customized and condensed to gain maximum attention span and focus from the consumers. And it will have repercussions on all the phases of digital experience. Thus data, velocity of data ( Like Twitter) , variety of data ( Like FaceBook ), value of data ( Like Newspaper) and veracity of data ( Government and popular media ) determines the decoding of digital experience.  If we visualize all these entities of data abstraction, data hiding and polymorphism on data it will render a complex information architecture. 

Digital Overload by Keoni Cabral on CreativeCommons

However, key factor is not in the differences between analogue and digital medium, rather the fact that people are not able to distinguish it while they experience them. People tend to spend hours in front of computers and video games confined in a single room. The same people may feel highly irritated on spending half an hour in the same room without a digital device or interaction even if there are some familiar people around. Has machines become more intimate to humans than their own genetic mates? Has machines acquired so much humanity than human beings themselves? This is a very unique situation where we are robbed of every sense and sensibility to distinguish real from illusionary. 

We term machines as dumb terminals. It is no more true. Nowadays, in communicative interactions, machines and digital devices are able to retain the human attention than a familiar human face. Thus human cognition and re-cognition is now highly controlled by the digital environment. But all is not lost for human sense and sensibility. The roots of the problem lies very much within us. We incite the addiction to digital devices and interaction in our social processes and education system itself. If we can devise a logical time slot for digital devices it is not going to take you away from your social life and social senses. Our human mind is still equipped with enough potential to rationalize digital experience as long as we prepare it upfront. Our brains no bounds when it comes to the complexity of neural nets and synaptic processing. We can still be humans!

Media as the Finace Instrument of Intellctual Massacre: Solar debacle

Solar Debacle, Endosulfan, Mullapperiyar, and T.P.Chandrasekharan Murder

Media as Finance Instrument of Intellectual Massacre 

 One:  MEDIA AND SOLAR DEBACLE: 

Media industry in kerala is on a struggle for existential space as the breathless competition for obtaining market space has been escalated. After the commencement of twenty four hour news channels, sense organs  of Kerala have been overfed with what they call information ;  the trouble of stomaching   the nonstop news adulterated with fiction ,  manufactured  from the raw material of socio political happenings  mocks the laws  of  necessity that justify communication .. We have discussed the way media and their financing masters hijacked the theme of colonization and privatization from the focal space in the solar energy debacle, how they deliberately suppressed the fatal betrayal in  the contract signed by the Indian government and W.T.O  stabilizing U.S. hegemony  in the breath and  breadth of Indian energy economy.  The material damage forced upon the energy economy   sealed under the skull was covered with the fables of lust, sex, fraud and all such ugly feeds of social contagion; the propaganda brimming with lecherous obscenity was nothing but a product of manipulative skill, the objective being distraction from the material reality:- subversion  of Indian energy economy scripted in the W.T.O. agreement , a shameless submission toward financial servility. The media institution that begs a living, inciting sensationalism to the most disgusting level reminds us through day and night that we are a people enjoying cerebral dis utility, living in the absence of reality

                  The wall street model siege, organized by the left was a parliamentary power gimmick under the cover of anti corruption morality faith, but it carried a hidden agenda that that the leader strata of the performance  never could comprehend. The Oo chandy –thiruvanchaka- high command nexus hatched  a silent contract for a solar project with a non U.S. company for ten thousand to lakh crores, while a complaint has been filed by the U.S., with the World Trade Organization that the India government did not issue orders for the U.S. solar MNCs in the agreed percentage as signed in the WTO contract. The agitation for Oo Chandy’s resignation in fact was an agitation in the interest of the U.S. companies, to get their share as per the agreement. Certain US. Goons with in the CPM manipulated the leftist man power in favour of  U.S. Companies ,the beneficiaries of the W.T.O .contract. The left of course got its political mileage out of the agitation, but it was the immediate , explicit objective played in public.  The ultimate objective of the agitation was or is the interest of the U.S. companies , cancellation of Oo Chandy – non U.S.  company agreement on the anvil. It is achieved. The commission for this great service to the U.S. companies most probably shall be posted in the account of the U.S.  lady working with the USAID financed institution in Ireland

                       The CPM leadership worried over the media manipulation in the T.P. murder case  went to the extent of nursing a superstition that the media has developed a sense of political justice and feeling of social morality,in the context of the  solar debacle; the media supported the CPM position not because of any such moral or ideological commitment; but leashed a roaring aggression against the Oo. Chandy government's shady deal in the solar, because it went against the interest of the U.S.,admitted in the W.T.O.treaty.The CPM position against Oo.Chandy deal ,dictated by the congress high command ,is an event of parliamentary political tradition, but the media took a u-turn against Oo.chandy because he  failed to honor the agreement made in favour of The U.S. interest. For the C.P.M. it was a marvelous opportunity to disgrace their traditional political rival;but for the media managers it was an occasion to prove their loyalty to their foreign paymasters, as in the context of T.P.murder . At least two new generation news channels in Malayalam,  would have received received finance from the foreign sources for disgracing the criminals in the Kerala government;they opened a vociferous battle against the ministerial criminals not because they despised crime or criminals but because they received substantial finance  from the most murderous criminal, the U.S. colonial source.

S.Sudhish