#umwelts

[trixclibrarian]

I guess… I get so bored/frustrated with the “intelligent alien life out there question” bc we can’t even see or attend the well distributed intelligence emerging via life all around us

the answer seems too obvious to me

the whole universe is distributed intelligence emerging across infinitely diverse umwelts

so yes it’s out there but given our stubbornly ltd perception & intelligence we struggle to comprehend it

[danicolubriale-blog]

How we know what is real.

Seriously, how do we know what is real?

Media is such a big part in both our short and long term memory today, that I find it difficult to understand how we managed without media communication platforms before! The truth is, we have always been technical beings even in the caveman days. I really like the comment from Bernard Steigler suggesting that memory in human beings was “technical from the start.” Using tools for any facet of our life is something that separates the human race to other species. We crave for this type of interaction and it seems that media interaction is part of our core and embedded into us.

The reality check comes down to a German word called “umwelts” meaning environment or surrounding world. It’s the idea that we all live in the same world but have different experiences. Each individual has different perceptual relations and affordances for their actions, resulting in stereotyping of people becoming redundant. We cannot simply call a group of students, students, because each student to their own is experiencing something different with their studies and life that occurs outside uni.

There are no simple experiences and it is only by human contact via mediated tools that can allow for negations or thoughts about certain situations. This in turn, helps society to understand individual reality.

This means reality is part of an individual experience, something that can be shared by others but is unique to one person. People are part of ecologies (shifting sets of relationships). These changing relationships result from people questioning their actions and discovering the origins of their actions in order to understand what is real. To do this we need to link our attention to our emotions in order to remember past similar feelings.

It’s interesting to think that memory and attention are linked with emotion. By remembering similar feelings of a past experience can in turn, result in subconscious habits which result from that initial feeling. This brings about particular body movements that occurred when this emotion last occurred. For example, each morning when I wake up and hear my alarm clock, I associate the radio station with annoyance and in turn smack down on the sleep button. This is a habitual move that has evolved from my memory.

Memory is somehow virtual and real but not in the actual. We are able to link up experiences from our past and present in a dynamic relationship between remembering and forgetting.

An experience is the reality but is a conflict between archives and memory. For example, using a contact book in your phone, results in a lack of memory for remembering phone numbers. The archive, the contact book, becomes the faster mode of contact, eliminating the memory.

In today’ society, we need to extend our memory which is done through media technologies– called mnemotechnics.  Fundamentally, media intervenes with the individual, social and global memory, which in turn shifts and changes the meaning of reality.

That's all for now folks!

Sources used:

Stiegler, B. 2011, Anamnesis and Hyomnesis, http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis

Wikipedia, Umwelt, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt