My Dads loves gadgets. He once was a computer wholesaler and at his house still he has a computer room filled to the very brink with wires, pc's, discs, speakers, monitors, shelves, keyboards, organs, guitars, amplifiers, wall to wall with no spot of carpet left uncovered. He is absolutley a feind for gadgets. He loves kareoke. He has managed, between different computer set-ups, laptops and actual kareoke machines, to have access to a microphone and kareoke from anywhere in the house. Anywhere. He loves to sing 'Black Magic Woman' by Santana to the kareoke machine, and play the solo on his guitar everytime I visit. Every single time. Loud.
His latest pride and joy is his GPS. He loves to talk about the GPS. The GPS is this, the GPS is that, we are taking the GPS overseas with us, we couldnt have gotten there without the GPS.
And for some reason I hate this small little black helpless machine with some unexplainable passion.
Paul Virillio mentions breifly the GPS in his interview with Louise Wilson. He mentions that the GPS is like the second watch. The first watch being mans disection of the solar and lunar day and night divided into hours minutes and almost ridiculously seconds. This disection of time, a manmade time, in my opinion is a huge factor in the role of angst and stress in our society. This need to arrive on time to the minute. At lot of jobs if you arrived 5 minutes late everyday you would be fired. This focus on time seems a little absurd.
I feel the problem with these machines, time and GPS, are that they tend to take away our own control over our our attention to the little details that you could pay attention to in your own life.
With GPS you no longer have to look around at street signs, building or trees as land marks to know where you are, to look at the sun to know that your heading east if its morning. Also you are not the only one who knows where you are. As Virillio says Its a de-realization. I think this mean that you are not aware of what is happening around you anymore.
Anyway, you get the gist, I think I could just going on.
What do you think?
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4 comments:
Global Positioning Systems are simply another insidious, surveillance technique...
You are right Michelle, to title your topic - "Do you know where you are right now?"
As the point of such systems is to allow you to forget about your position - be driven by the system - all autonomy flying out the window!
Paul Virilio has been criticized for his techno-phobic attitude to info-graphic and video-graphic systems of surveillance. His belief is that we will eventually loose the capacity to see (and ultimately think)for ourselves.
Hummmm...
Times have already changed.
I say: Remain ever vigilant.
In response to this I started thiking about allocation of periods of time to certain tasks through out the day; how I always plan my day around how long it will take me to walk to where I'm going, even including extra for possible stops incase I see something that needs a few minutes dedicated to it (stray cat petting, shop window admiring, etc.) If I am walking somewhere new, I usually look it up on whereis.com to see how long it will take me to walk there. I am going to stop walking for time and start walking for myself, this is probably going to result in me being late for most classes. Time is such an endlessly interesting topic.
Holly, I too have to allow extra time for the random cat or dog petting.
Time. Time. A horrible, horrible thing.
It does actually scare me quite a bit that our lives are governed by things that only exist because they are dictated and asserted by either the masses, or people in power - like the economy, time and where we are as you mentioned, morality... yeah. Consensus reality. What a trip.
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