Do The Strand

I love treading the shoreline between analogue and digital, that liminal space between human and machine interaction, each informing the other in beneficial positive feedback. It reflects the absolute need for us to engage with the world in as broadly-formed a manner as possible, obviating source bias and echo chamber reinforcement. We were talking earlier over lunch about actual, personal and group knowledge of historical events versus the unfounded suppositions and associations of the more conspiracy-minded of our world. How some of our number are old enough to remember events now having doubt cast upon them by the 'C-Theorists', whose views are propagated digitally and further reinforced, digitally, by reward algorithms via 'social' media, until the resultant epistemological soup resembles less the reality that pre-digitised minds can actually remember first-hand, and more the output of rogue feedback loops [see blog posts passim for more on those].

The beauty of hybrid interfacing with the world is in its inherent balance, as in nature itself. There is no one true way to come to terms with the confusion of information potage we are presented with on a constant basis; if there were, we would already inhabit The Matrix - which some of the C.T's out there actually believe to be the case - and which in more abstracted ways, many do anyway, having devolved their 'thinking' to the digital world alone. There are a plethora of tools, established and nascent, available to us with which to make sense of and give internal structure to the chaos of the world. Without the analogue realm, which after all, is from where the digital world emanated in the first place, we lose the checks and balances necessary to maintain the knowledge transmuted from the one domain to the other. Without human memory and analogue backup, there can be no completeness to knowledge.

Knowledge cannot be framed solely in the ultimately paradoxical fluidity [floating-point arithmetic and accountancy, anyone?] of the digital domain. Where once we sought to concretise our knowledge through hard-coding and imagined we were taking out the vagaries and vagueness of the analogue in the process; in so doing, the converse has happened. What was once relatively static and demonstrably provable is now whatever the data transformation algorithms that we created choose to spit back at us. Knowledge passed on in the analogue world, whilst still eminently capable of being corrupted nefariously, it is still the place where  we can ultimately confirm or deny whatever assertions the digital realm makes regarding just about anything. Neither mountain nor abyssal, the shores of human knowledge are where we are most comfortable, and ultimately are at our safest...