Media Consciousness

“In the information age, attention is the monetary unit.”
- John Perry Barlow, One of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and former writer for the Grateful Dead.

Attention

Attention is what humans have learned to do to survive and thrive in the world. Normally, we do this instinctively, subconsciously, on auto pilot. We continually shift our focus to what “attacks” our attention: fear, fight or flight, food, and a mating opportunity. In the age of information, our senses are in overload from all the “attacks” from people who want our attention and our money. To surive and thrive in this, sometimes, virtual world, we need to become conscious of our awareness process and intentionally “pay attention.”

We can choose what, where, when, and how to pay attention!

As we continue to project and extend human cognitive processes into technology, we are challenged to reflect more on our own cognitive abilities. In order to understand Media Technology, we need to understand ourselves and our Intentionality. In order to deal with virtual reality, we need to “ground” ourselves in our reality.

So, I suggest the term “Media Consciousness” is about how we pay attention to media.  We think of consciousness as being the content of the media. It is more useful to think of consciousness as containing media. In other words, media is a function of consciousness. That’s the shift in perspective that is meaningful.

In the context of quantum physics, our perspective seems to be that The Field exists as an objective thing and is affected by consciousness as a separate thing. Would it be more useful to think consciousness creates the Field and imposes order of it with form and pattern, therefore, manifesting “the universe” we experience as reality.

Awareness

There are hierarchical levels of consciousness, therefore, of media consciousness: gross or waking awareness of physical details, subtle or dreaming/cognitive, and causal or formless/form making consciousness.

For an example of gross awareness of media, consider what we can be aware of about video or audio in our environment. We can focus on auditory frequencies and amplitude. At a more integrated cognitive perspective, we distinguish harmony or noise, dissonance and chaos or the resonance of clarity of multiple sources. In video, we may notice darkness or lightness, blurry or sharp focus, overly contrasting intensity of luminance, etc. The devil is in the detail and the professional has a much higher physical “resolution” of awareness than the casual “user” who may only be emotionally/subtly aware.

Media Convergence: The Web

Through out history, human consciousness has been both enabled and constrained by language and other media of communication in thinking, learning, and understanding the nature of ourselves and our universe.

The Internet infrastructure and it’s operating systems is a projection of our physical nervous system, our cognitive process, our collective memory, and, hopefully, our collective wisdom. The nature of the Web medium both enables and challenges us to expand our thinking into multiple dimensions.

You might also visit my professional website at branam.com for more of my history, media career, my philosophy, more articles Making Sense in the Information Age, and WebBrain, mind map of my research and experience in the Theory of Everything .

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