The Metanarrative

Adrian M. Nissen, B.A. (hons.)

This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy of Murdoch University, 2016.

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Copyright notice

I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary .

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Adrian M. Nissen

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Abstract

The original contribution of this thesis is an examination of how the of metanarrative can be used to illuminate shifts in popular thought in the

Information Age. There is disagreement over what Age signify, and whether a metanarrative can exist. The postmodern dismissal of metanarrative requires re-examination in the face of understandings that have accompanied contemporary technological advancements. Information technology will be used in this study to explain the movement in globalised towards metanarrative understandings as technology is the most broadly visible indicator of human advancement.

Branching out from a core literature of media and cultural theorists and internet researchers, I also employ analogous understandings of such a phenomenon from tangential theory including , psychology and natural science.

Observations have been made of a pattern of increased self-referral over recent decades occurring in various disciplines, indicating shifts in the contextualisation of understandings. Our paradigms are becoming more self- conscious as . As humankind’s and capacity to harness understandings of the world continue to develop, we are increasingly engaging with further levels of self-awareness that provide us with the perspective needed for epistemological shifts. This thesis explores the way in which our advancement brings us closer to a meta-textual awareness. I will argue that this constitutes a shift in our towards an initial oneness of cultural narratives. An examination of convergence paradigms in the iii

Information Age can be demonstrated to speak of an underlying metanarrative that fundamentally shapes our constructed narratives.

The constructed by our conscious theorisations are becoming seen as conceits, as the Information Age is illustrating for the public that our notions of discrete are constructed from narratives. The dream world offered by the virtual is ingraining us with the of a potential for any to emerge and shape the . I conclude from this investigation that we increasingly have a self-awareness of the narratives we inhabit as constructions, creating a popular conceptualisation of everyday interactions as narratives acted out.

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Table of contents

Copyright notice ...... i

Abstract ...... ii

Table of contents ...... iv

Acknowledgements ...... v

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 2: digitised ...... 51

Chapter 3: Dreams and levels of consciousness ...... 85

Chapter 4: The microcosm ...... 122

Chapter 5: Ideas as figurative organisms ...... 157

Chapter 6: A world of graphics ...... 186

Chapter 7: Narrative as a technology ...... 213

Chapter 8: Conclusion ...... 242

Bibliography ...... 254

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisors David Moody and Ian Cook for their guidance and discernment.

I would also like to thank my for their general support.

And of course I would like to thank Isioma for her and patience.

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Chapter 1: Introduction

Our narratives before our eyes

Well, dreams, they feel real while we're in them, right? It's only when

we wake up that we realise something was actually strange. Let me

ask you a question, you, you never really remember the beginning of a

dream, do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going

on.

The 2010 film Inception is a cultural site that serves as an illustration of current of the tenuousness of a tangibly solid reality. The above excerpt is a manifestation of an emerging notion in popular thought that the world is constructed from ideas that lie beneath what is immediately visible.

As in a dream, when we are in the midst of a framework of thinking, we do not realise it because the is hidden. We are realising now, however, that shifts in thought make us cognisant of the notion of an unconstructed world from which any narrative of reality can manifest. Popular works such as

Inception and the 2011 film Source Code ponder on the properties of a world that is created and perceived simultaneously, as if what we see is being constantly rewritten. Productions such as these reveal the emerging public awareness of how much we bring to the world in perceiving it. Accordingly, there is arising in the global consciousness an increasingly prevalent awareness of the generative and dynamic power of paradigms, in that our changing ways of seeing the world are becoming more tangible and apparent 2 to us. In the Information Age, the movements of information are explicit. This is developing through constant and profound technological advancements.

Since the widespread proliferation of mobile telephones early in the decade of the 2000s, for example, it has become common to hear it remarked that text messaging is having a deteriorating effect on the use of correct spelling and punctuation, such as in the magazine article “Is Texting Killing the

English Language?” (McWhorter 2013). Today, such are becoming platitudinous due to the constant documentation of and commentary on social trends in the Information Age. There is also emerging a new, deeper understanding that such societal impacts of technology are occurring not only on an immediately visible level, but also in a less tangible manner that reflects the intrinsic properties of the technology we are beginning to use. An example that today is met with little dispute is distinctions between notions of “professional” and “amateur” becoming undermined by the user-generated environment of “Web 2.0” (Keen 2007, 5), which I will illustrate as being intrinsically associated with a forced convergence of these concepts in culture. These examples are all aspects of a global trend in which narratives of binary opposition between concepts are being undermined by of unity implied through emerging technology, namely, transcendence, continuity, and potential. The unravelling of conceptual discreteness is leading to a new conception of paradigms as combined on a unifying substrate, an overarching of consciousness or

“story about stories” that in this thesis I will call the metanarrative. This notion's captivation of the global consciousness can be seen to be, as in the of paradigms, spreading through the ubiquity of technological 3 developments. The nature of our advancements is creating an awareness that narratives of reality and reality itself are connected at an intimate and fundamental level. As seen in the blurring of the boundaries between professional and amateur, this awareness is creating a paradigm portraying a unification that transcends narratives of discreteness. I will illustrate this through ways in which other social institutions, including concepts of geographic space, social hierarchies and individuality are being affected by the constructed nature of narratives being brought to the forefront of consciousness by the digital .

Literature review

Scope of terminology

In this section I will examine the particular ways in which terminology will be employed in this thesis. I will focus on the effects of contemporary and emergent technology, and as such will tend to predominantly favour analyses of in developed regions, i.e. those infused with the conveniences of information technology. Globalisation has been recognised as an implicitly technological process: "there is an interacting process in which economic globalisation is facilitated by technological globalisation but also enhances it"

(Fotopoulos 2001). I will accordingly use the premise that the tendency of forms of technology to expand in their geographical presence points to the relevance of their associated thought frameworks eventually extending globally. 4

Regardless, in the scope of this research, the specific regions referred to are largely incidental to the capacity of technology to shape society. In temporal terms, I will use the Information Age as a site for this study. In defining the

Information Age we must explicate what is fundamental to it, and should therefore identify a central catalyst. While Castells defined it as beginning in the late 1970s as the result of developments in information technology and cultural upheaval (The Rise of the Network Society 2010, 53). I will focus on developments occurring since the dawn of the World Wide Web in 1990 (T.

Long 2007), as this thesis focusses on contemporary change. As such I will use the term the Internet to refer to the modern, public manifestation of the

World Wide Web, as opposed to its literal meaning as a mere private connection between terminals.

Ideology is fundamentally understood as relating to “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of ” (Althusser

1971, 162). The term’s political history, such as its use in , will not be explored, as I will employ it in a general sense as denoting a picture of the world manifesting through mass consciousness, and not only specifically as representing systems of cultural hegemony. here comes into in the discussion of paradigms in that systems are fundamentally narratives that spread through repeated , and contribute to collective understandings. I will provide examples of this phenomenon later in the thesis. While it can be argued that ideology can exist implicitly and internal to an individual without explicit verbal encapsulation, it is only spread interpersonally through the use of actions, and cultural institutions

(Swidler 1986). As such, I will use ideology as a term meaning constructed 5 narratives that have the power to influence attitudes and values at the levels of both individuals and society.

Irony is consistently understood as representing a discrepancy between a surface or commonly understood meaning, and an intentional inversion of this for a different usage (Booth 1974, 101). The way I will use the term irony in this thesis is different: as a term for an individual and societal self- awareness of being situated in the idiosyncrasies of the epistemes and paradigms that one inhabits. The surface meaning here will be represented by the legitimacy in everyday life that paradigms intrinsically designate themselves as having; the inversion is the recognition of their tentative status created by their nature as theoretical. Keeping this intellectual distance from norms implies some degree of conscious intention. I essentially use irony to represent the superiority granted by distanced perspectives.

The term “” will be used to mean an awareness at the overt societal level. At the same time I will use “” to mean the hidden frameworks that inform epistemes and fundamental cultural assumptions that are not accompanied by a widespread intellectual recognition. The term will also be used in the context of Jungian psychology

(1968, 101-110) where designated.

Unless otherwise indicated, my use of the pronouns “we” and “us” will refer to the participants in the global culture of the Information Age, as opposed to the readers of this thesis. 6

Defining metanarrative

The term metanarrative emerged when it was employed by Lyotard in a description of attempts to account for the global or societal essences of paradigms in a particular intellectual area (Childers 1995, 166-167). Lyotard employed the term in the context of postmodern critique. As such, it has been associated with scepticism from its origin. of unifying forces controlling consciousness have previously achieved legitimacy, but came under different names, not depicting themselves as narratives or constructions but as indescribable . Metanarrative was not conceptualised as a synthetic construction in these frameworks. Modern thought sees itself as having moved on from transcendent, totalising narratives, largely restricting its investigation of metanarrative to critiquing it as an artefact. Any treatment of metanarrative as a legitimate phenomenon tends to characterise it as an aggregation of paradigms that exists as the product of constructions more than their catalyst. Its usage is coloured by the idiosyncrasies of the given era. The term’s definition as "a global or totalising cultural narrative which orders and explains and " (Stephens and McCallum 1998, 6) unifies geography but not time. This is problematic in that without a unification of time as well as location, overarching trends cannot be illuminated. My use of the term will relate to a “four dimensional” view of metanarrative that accounts for the progression of paradigms over time, not merely a snapshot of the zeitgeist at a given moment in history. This will separate metanarrative from the similarly used alternative term “master narrative” because master simply implies a competence in accounting for narratives, denoting a geographical expansion 7 of the concept to merely mean “bigger narrative” (Halverson, Goodall Jr. and

Corman 2011, 14).

Additionally, metanarrative has been used to describe the assertion of specific (V. Brown 1994) (Bridgman and Barry 2002). In narratology, the degree to which authorial voice can be determined to be disruptive to the illusionism of a story has been identified as contingent on the norms contextualising the reader. That is, the perceived normalcy of the narrator is contingent on what the reader considers to be the “objective” view of reality and the of nature (Fludernik 2003). In this framework of writing, the influence of metanarrative is characterised as subject to shifts in cultural context. Theorisations such as these present metanarrative as an ad hoc creation in service of existing narratives, rather than using the concept as an overarching reconciliation of the disparate. If metanarrative is to be understood as unifying, and a “coherent system of interrelated and sequentially organized stories that share a common rhetorical desire to resolve a conflict by establishing audience expectations according to the known trajectories of its literary and rhetorical form" (Halverson, Goodall Jr. and Corman 2011, 14), then it must transcend other narratives in its scope.

My framing of metanarrative in this thesis does not react only to an aggregation of cultures, because the socially constructed aspects of culture present the issue of their units of analysis being used to build analyses of metanarrative, and this presents the danger of shaping the findings of the investigation after the . What I propose is an emerging idea of metanarrative in the Information Age that is not bound to a particular snapshot of time or space, but one in which highly abstracted images of the 8 world can emerge spontaneously through the floating of information possible today. One particular culture or collection of cultures is no longer the context of changes in ideas. The new vividness of abstract virtual environments means that changes in mass views are being seen to come from a more fundamental place in the collective consciousness, one that is being illustrated through the increasingly visible history of paradigms.

The social products of different narratives can serve as catalysts to further narratives, but this makes the identification of their cause a snipe hunt.

Ultimately, reconciliation between narratives requires an initial catalyst that is independent. Accounting for the metanarrative through existing thought structures is circular, and circularity is not useful in explanations of a phenomenon that involves a fundamental catalyst. A totalising story must not have dependence on the idiosyncrasies of a particular culture or time period, otherwise the concept is diminished by not being omnipresent. Similarly, metanarrative cannot be a schema, a structure of assumptions, because schema imply the conscious premises that only form the first parts of the thought that comes after them, rather than dictating their subsequent revisions, a function that I will argue is performed by the metanarrative and outside the reach of consciously imposed limitations. If the metanarrative shapes the history of knowledge, then the trajectory for further human conclusions are already held within it. Contrastingly, conscious premises are only premises, always subject to further permutation. I submit that metanarrative requires a transcendence of plurality between any notional units of analysis, including locations and eras, because it represents potential that rises above the restrictiveness that they enforce. This, however, can be 9 seen as being approached by contemporary ways of thinking that are the product of techno-cultural phenomena.

Poststructuralism has led to the notion that any for a metanarrative can only ever be an assertion from established power structures, and thus ingrained with predispositions towards elite interests or understandings

(Taket and White 1993). It is held that this ultimately puts it at odds with the interests of academic investigation, namely the formulation of analogies and models that attempt to describe the essential nature of narratives. In this vein

Lyotard argued that developments in postmodern thought essentially antiquate the idea of a unified story in which all other stories take place, given the heterogeneity of models of perceiving reality and the resulting conflict between methods of description:

The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great

dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in

clouds of narrative language elements—narrative, but also denotative,

prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are

pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. (Lyotard 1984, xxiv)

This reasoning is contingent on the idea that any notion of metanarrative must be able to be theorised in constructed models that account for all the variations of its behaviour across the globe. I will argue that conscious processes of construction are becoming seen as invariably artificial, and that terms with elements of transcendence are gaining appeal as the only means of describing the nature of narrative. In an increasingly connected world, there is now a perception that the larger the narrative, the less it correlates to 10 the finite capacities of discrete units of analysis. There is now greater emphasis on the context through which narratives are possible. As such, while universalism may be a way to envisage this framework, semantic interpretations of universalism in which universals are legitimised ad hoc through language would be antithetical to it. Because description and units of analysis are inescapable necessities, however, a degree of self-aware distance is necessary. Only through the admission that all analyses are equally inadequate in encapsulating such a grand view is the picture of a greater metanarrative being stimulated within us at an intuitive level.

Although transcendence may not be able to be intellectualised, certain evocations are allowing us to sense it through a level deeper than the intellectual: inspiration.

An investigation beyond the confines of relativism is therefore required. While linguistic states that the act of description uses constructed units of analysis that comprise elements of ideology or narrative, my argument utilises the premise that metanarrative transcends the synthesised

“primordialism” that we invoke to construct heuristic ideas of the world. This reading of metanarrative has been regarded as unavoidably neoconservative due to a perceived disregard of principles of rational theorisation that were produced in the Enlightenment, the question being "how can an intrinsic ideal form be constructed from the of , that neither just imitates the historical forms of modernity nor is imposed upon them from the outside?"

(Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers 1991, 164-

165, 169). What is required, rather, is a model in which there is a separation between the notion of a paradigm that describes the world, and that of a 11 hypothetical unifying paradigm that does not describe but has some role in overseeing paradigms themselves. Existence is becoming treated as occurring in degrees of consciousness on a spectrum, with the metanarrative positioned at a fundamental level in the collective unconscious, hidden and independent from consciously constructed narratives. While we cannot describe the indescribable, as Lacan characterised the concept of the Real

(Mills 2014, 100), the recognition of broad patterns that point to a metanarrative is possible.

Here a precedent exists in the relationship between natural science and the physical universe. Natural science alludes to and provides an approximation of the force or forces governing the universe that we experience. While the laws of nature, as infinitesimally complex, escape the categorisations of conscious intellectualisation, models can be formed that predict their operation with some degree of corroboration. As Habermas has maintained, all communicable phenomena seep into everyday life (Crook 1998). It is under the same circumstances that increasingly sophisticated understandings of a metanarrative can be expressed, if incompletely, and are being increasingly accepted publically.

In summary, the definition of metanarrative that I will use will comprise four elements. The first is that it is overarching in time as well as space, extending beyond descriptions of any particular era. The second is that it is not an ideology or relative to cultural contexts; it represents a transcendence of the limitations of narratives. Thirdly, rather than having a cultural construction that begins elsewhere, the metanarrative is the independent variable. It is not part of an arbitrary sequence, but catalytic, containing the history of 12 paradigms within itself. Lastly, it circumvents ’s critiques of that are final because it is not limited by intellectualisation.

Metatextuality

The metanarrative can be figured as reaching “above” the text. Broadly, narrative is thought of in a narrow literary sense as a retrospective account of events, or a story. Novelist Jane Smiley uses it here in a linear sense:

“Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves.” (Biles

2014). Popular conceptions of the term largely do not extend its significance beyond defining it as a framing device, as portrayed here by critic and novelist Peter Ackroyd: “It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.” (2011).

Traditionally, narrative is not thought of as something predetermined or fundamental to movements in popular thought patterns. Today, the popular notion of narrative is being challenged by the of the Information Age.

It is being expanded to become more macrocosmic. Just as McLuhan theorised that a light bulb can be “about” something just like a painting can

(1994, 13), there is an emerging paradigm that narrative is becoming visible outside of what is usually deemed as narrative. This is a representation of the phenomenon of the Information Age increasingly finding new, more abstract 13 and broader definitions of once self-contained concepts, such as the word site, which has been abstracted through its description of the Internet domain to mean a notional place as much as a physical location. In noting this pattern, I will argue in this thesis that unification is a defining aspect of the paradigm into which we are entering. A singular narrative is no longer an isolated exercise, much like privacy is increasingly antiquated in the era of social media. Connectedness is not merely an attribute of the technology we use, but an element of an underlying unity between narratives that is being revealed through technology. As a result, narrative as a concept is ceasing to be containable, and can be conceptualised more broadly.

Narrative extends through society also. Richard Schechner outlined how social behaviours can be seen as agreed upon narratives acted out through society, such as the "enactment of a narrative transmitting information and values concerning sacred history and geography... social hierarchy, , and the personalities of gods, heroes, and demons" (1993, 134). This can be seen as an anticipation of the tendency in the Information Age for our conceptualisation of the real world to align with that of the virtual. This view of narrative as being everywhere has manifested further in response to means of storytelling in recent technology. Commentary on new forms of narrative has found narrative in the Information Age to be expanding in ways that see it transcend restriction to any one medium. The capacity for varied storytelling is increasing with today’s online technology. For example, Alternate Reality

Games (A.R.G.s) are a transmedia storytelling format, employing different media, including real world activities, in complex narrative continuity, using the Internet as a coordinating mechanism (J. Watson 2009). Through 14 developments such as this, the world is increasingly being treated as a space, with game play beginning to be visible in daily life. The previously argued performance aspect of narrative is being exemplified now in information technology, and the artificiality of social constructions is being engaged with more now through virtual worlds. I will explain how these developments illustrate that narrative is becoming seen as an omnipresent phenomenon continuous throughout the real world.

Therefore, in contrast to metanarrative, which I portray as the substrate itself, metatextuality could be thought of as merely the trend of narrative today reaching outside of its common conceptualisation. The concept of narrative is escaping its relegation to storytelling, and becoming relevant in broader everyday conceptions of reality. Narrative is increasingly becoming seen as the material from which realities are made.

The motivator of narratives: metanarrative or mere change?

As an arrangement of sequence, change is traditionally regarded as the force that defines narratives. In a culture that continually references constant change as an fundamental to the reality of the world, any notion of a consistent underlying metanarrative has been considered antiquated as a driving force. Our very conceptualisation of change in our theories, and the impacts that this can have, suggests the existence of change in some real capacity, even if only in the capacity of our thinking. Narratives are the product of putting ideas in sequence, from which paradigms can result.

Change, therefore, has real effects on paradigms. In antiquity, however,

Zeno purported that change was impossible, arguing that in an isolated 15 moment, a fired arrow is not moving, and that therefore its movement can’t possibly arise from a string of connected moments (Huggett 2010). Emerging technological trends are inspiring a view that revives this notion of an overarching simultaneity. I will argue for an increasing concept in the public mind that change exists in consciously constructed narratives, but ultimately subsides to an unchanging metanarrative that percolates from a collective unconscious of archetypal form. I write this knowing that such a view is fundamentally opposed to the current dominant postmodern paradigm of cultural studies theory.

Fundamental to this is the basic idea that technological change is accompanied by a related shift in knowledge that represents the fact that the event in question can happen, as it has been made apparent through the existence of new technology. Flight, for example, was revealed as possible in a “common sense” view of reality through the invention of manned aircraft, spurring a change in the perceived limits of human possibility. In this way, technological advancement itself implies that change on the superficial level of the immediately apparent means change on the level of knowledge and the collective underlying episteme. The operation of movement at the intangibly conceptual level of knowledge has been addressed boldly by

Rupert Sheldrake in his theory of morphic fields, which provocatively depicts a picture of the collective consciousness in which all change is connected: it

“includes other kinds of organising fields in addition to those of morphogenesis; the organising fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent ” (Sheldrake 1988, 112). 16

While this theory has struggled to find acceptance in scientific consensus

(Shermer 2005), failing to achieve credibility in the same way as the comparable Jungian concept of genetic memory (Almeder 1992, 28-29), it may be applied as an illustrative model of the way that paradigms’ connectedness is now being conceptualised.

Change, of course, is also contingent on time. If we accept the notion in relativity of time as an illusion created by the fabric of spacetime, then change only exists in constructed narratives. A metanarrative through which all narrative is connected would therefore mean that all change is connected.

McLuhan’s idea of production, consumption and learning being unified (1994,

350) and Baudrillard’s simulation (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

1994) correspond to this, noting information’s ability to become physical reality. The course of human knowledge is linked to the physical. Through the human capacity for production, this link is becoming more obvious over time.

The business of the physical world is increasingly being dictated by the exchange of pure information through Internet interactions. Gilbert Ryle implied the same notion in The Concept of Mind; that there are not

“mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements” that exist in separate, isolated categories. He argued that change on the “physical” level corresponds with change on a more abstract, more ideal or transcendentally purer conceptual level (1949, 215-223). The

Information Age could be said to be highlighting that smaller change represents further, broader change in a way that reflects the relationship between narrative and metanarrative. I will argue that narratives are being increasingly regarded as intrinsically an expression of a fundamental 17 substrate of metanarrative.

Sequence

To establish a discussion that reaches beyond the framework of narratives that implicitly terminate, I will eschew eschatological notions of narrative, discarding fields concerned with humankind’s ultimate . A source narrative suggests an independence from the artificial segmentation of events inherent to notions of time, unlike constructed narratives, and would not be subject to an end. Hence it is a meta-narrative. I will point to this growing picture of time as a construction that is relative to smaller narratives of perceived change, and metanarrative as transcendent of these narratives.

This has precedent in Jung’s synchronicity, which describes meaningful coincidence. Through synchronicity he framed time as only relative to shifts in psychic forces, rather than “causal” chains of events (1973, 8). This can be interpreted as an unfolding of themes as in a story, and gives us a notion of the paradigm of the simultaneous. It is representative of a unified view of time and space that reflects an abandonment of the categories that allow them to be mentally processed in microcosmic units, i.e. we realise we are only separating units of time for the sake of simplified theory. With the immediacy with which information spreads in the Information Age and the resulting ubiquity of social issues in the zeitgeist, virtual representations of themes that dictate narrative are defining cultural narratives increasingly in comparison to a detached historical perspective. In the virtual, themes are not subject to a passage of time; our everyday interactions with technology are increasing the 18 role of an eternal present in which anything can emerge and re-emerge. We are experiencing a thematic core to physical events.

McLuhan also alluded to a constructivist notion of sequence: “The moment the sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and the configuration” (1994, 13). This highlighted that the unification of time reveals what is, in substance, actually constant. We are seeing that once change is revealed as mere appearance, the timeless archetypes of existence become tangible. In writing fictional stories, sequence becomes something to be played with. Authors take control of sequence, and they must employ archetypes to do this effectively. This can be seen as analogous to the way in which becoming knowledgeable of history leads to the identification of common patterns of events that transcend eras. I will argue that the oneness with the unconscious that is required of understanding archetypes is being facilitated through the Information Age’s establishment of a continuity of information, and means a growing effectiveness in the vivid construction of our own imaginings.

The unfolding themes of everyday life

While we have always documented understandings of ourselves through telling stories, the range of expression allowed by art has meant that art analysis has long been used as the method of divining the most subtle aspects of a culture’s psyche. The fact that media production is now occurring at a scale never before seen through user generated content means that there is a seemingly unlimited scope for reading the zeitgeist.

Further, an increasing distance and self-awareness is gained from the 19

Information Age’s more comprehensively documented perspective. Every artwork can now be accompanied by its own discussion and analysis. This allows us to see the paradigms we employ and the world we have created— simultaneously to inhabiting them—as a constructed story, rather than ideas whose and units of analysis are considered an objective reality with intrinsic . As Moore’s of computer processors illustrates, change happens more quickly through exponential advancement (Moore 2006, 67).

The pace at which information is now being transmitted is allowing us to witness it happening. We are more equipped to see the totalising story of the collective consciousness’ progression. This makes us able to see narratives in events that are not nominally stories (McLuhan 1994, viii). This ability to identify narrative patterns in our overall collective trajectory allows us to approach some perception of what drives the metanarrative.

Social media have further transformed everyday acts into art. The Facebook paradigm of online profiles can be seen as representing the understanding that literary interpretations of the world constitute facades or performances.

In this framework, appearances that we see as reality are only representations of the world that have been made vivid (McLuhan 1994, 79); the metanarrative is represented not only through the world as perceived through consciousness that Lacan deemed the Imaginary, but through what they symbolise of an underlying totality, a notion also reflected in the Real

(Mellard 2006, 49). The spoken word is spontaneous and visceral as opposed to timeless and intangible. Literary representation reflects the world as apparent to conscious thinking; it is only what is present on the surface.

Verbal theorisation is articulation, but it is also inherently artificial. Because 20 its use is intended to persuade or spell out, it inherently involves a simplification of concepts. Current cultural movements contrast this, with less idiosyncratic understandings being produced by a more unified and underlying story of existence. The rich symbolism of the world of dreams serves as an insight to this plane of the collective unconscious, and reflects the increasingly filled world that the Information Age is developing through the mounting abundance of electronic data in virtual worlds. Again, this is a portrayal of existence as simultaneously occurring on two conceptual planes: one a world of conscious constructions wherein events are explained by “cause and effect” understandings, and the other an underlying plane on which events are explained not through but the manifestation of themes. As I will reiterate in a discussion of non-locality in Chapter 4, synchronicity was an instance of such an idea by Jung, representing a connection between causally unconnected but meaningfully intertwined events. If symbolism is an intrinsic element of narrative, then the metanarrative, as the story about stories, may be composed of the most potent symbolism, representing a series of occurrences infused with themes waiting to be reflected upon.

Paradigms as the history of knowledge

Kuhn defined the paradigm as "universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners” (Kuhn 1970, 48). In contrast to the term’s definition in natural science, however, the framework of theories and assumptions occurring at the cultural level of the collective consciousness is 21 the definition that I will use in this thesis. While Kuhn argued that paradigms must be examined according to the specificities of the given era’s contexts in order to interpret them, German sociologist emphasised an examination of the meta-analyses that we employ in a historical context that spans multiple eras, in order to understand continuities in systems of representation and societal psyches (Luhmann 1986, 3–7, 9). Castells later commented that this has been facilitated through the privileges of the

Information Age, which have provided us with an ability to monitor the effectiveness of the "view of the process of transformation of our world" that is applicable to time periods across history (Rise of the Network Society

2010, xix). Sheldrake has argued for further significance of what paradigms represent, being inspired by Kuhn’s to think of the paradigm as a

“mechanistic theory of life” that describes reality itself (Scharmer 1999).

Instead of employing the scientific use of the term, I will focus on the popular perception of it. I will argue that the general public is now conceptualising paradigms as stories that collectively form a greater story about the shape of the history of consciousness. A paradigm represents the history of knowledge in a given area, and presents its limits in the form of problems that are to be addressed in a paradigm. Paradigms in this way are a series of questions and answers, with each answer creating new questions. In this sense paradigms fit together in overarching sequences of inquiry. I will characterise technology as the expression of this—outlining that technology is “knowing”, in that it is a recounting of a culture’s accumulated acumen.

This largely theoretical constitution of the concept points to the progression of technology as being increasingly regarded as a “history of science”. As 22 narratives are inflected with theories, the metanarrative can be thought of as the history of theories. The story of technological is becoming visualised, through the new prominence of the virtual, as the story about change from one imagined state of affairs to another, from one understanding to another, and therefore a story about stories.

Movement between paradigms

When the ideology inherent in a paradigm is increasingly treated as real, it inevitably breaks down because of the ultimate inherent in its organisation as discrete units of analysis. The paradigm is replaced by another which is a natural successor of the previous one. This was argued in the book The Perfect Crime, where Baudrillard argues that reality ultimately dies out (1996, 45-47) and The of Evil, where he discussed the political effects of what he calls "Integral Reality", in which a is institutionalised to the point of precarious fragility (2005, 17). Each paradigm is implied by the form of the last, just as meaning is understood as intrinsic to symbols in symbolism. This can be used as the basis of a reading of metanarrative as a narrative about narratives; a series of paradigms that raise the collective consciousness to higher levels of awareness. An example of this occurring is the convergence of media; virtual worlds have become possible through the totalisation of media such as music, storytelling and visual art. The resulting vividness of virtual worlds allows to be clearly displayed and communicated through and performance, thereby expanding our capacity to experience different perspectives firsthand. 23

The episteme—behind paradigms

Kuhn’s concept of the paradigm allows for thinkers to be conscious of alternatives to the present paradigm. The episteme, meanwhile, as the apparatus that determines whether or not something is considered scientific or coherent in a given power-knowledge system (Foucault 1980, 197), is a framework of worldviews of which we are not immediately conscious, and requires perspective that revaluates what is submissible in theory. As this thesis is concerned with the limits of possibility as established by technology, it will examine paradigms at the level of depth of the episteme. I will however favour the term paradigm, treating it as comprising both an element of which we can be conscious and a less visible component that might alternatively be considered the episteme. The effect of a paradigm is analogous to the act of trying to view a colour image on a black and white television; the framework from which the innovation is being viewed is stuck within the existing constraints and prevents understanding. This analogy is itself a reflection of how technology represents paradigms: it is what most embodies cultural change. However, the characteristics of transient cultural mindscapes remain, and result in my choice of the word paradigm to describe the changes in the collective consciousness that I outline.

In his book The Silent Language, Hall says we are never aware of the rules of culture (1959, 144). This is conceptually equivalent to Foucault’s notion of episteme as a fundamental apparatus that informs the possibility of particular theory (1980, 197), and could thereby be characterised as being less than apparent to the immediate, conscious world. This reflects the more 24 unconscious forces of paradigm shifts, or to use Jung’s analogy, the areas of the electromagnetic spectrum invisible to the human eye (2014, 215). We cannot see beyond our episteme. It is a process of one medium “acting as the content of the other, obscuring the operation of both” (McLuhan 1994,

52). Emerging trends illustrate that is in the fate of each narrative to be seen eventually for what it is, as an artificial ideology.

The notion of paradigms shifting, in itself, keeps the “bigger picture” hidden from thought. When one’s mental framework is in the process of transitioning between narratives, it is not immediately possible to see the emerging implications, only the illusion of linear movement. This is noted by McLuhan:

“self-amputation forbids self-recognition” (1994, 43). The notion that there is such a thing as transition is an invention of our need to theorise discrete moments and concepts (forming narratives). In , this is the fundamental process that creates energy (see Chapter 4 for further ). It is simpler for us to conceive of events one-dimensionally, with one happening after another. This is a product of linear Newtonian time, and disagrees with the relativistic, simultaneous view of time developed by

Einstein and utilised by Jung. These ideas are now manifesting culturally in response to information technology.

Linear transitions between paradigms are becoming a less relatable notion as the Internet and virtual worlds allow us to instantly transport ourselves to other with increasingly vivid engagement of the senses. Paradigms are becoming seen more as being part of one simultaneous phenomenon, and we are seeing that paradigm shifts only exist at a superficial level of consciousness. Once we transcend the notion that our smaller narratives 25 encompass the larger story, they become available to us at all times. We travel between paradigms on a subway system, climbing to the surface and concerning ourselves only with our arrival at our latest destination. The undercurrent of the episteme is hidden from us. What we can’t see, we can be influenced by without our knowledge. Now that we are dealing with less tangible possibilities in everyday thought frameworks, however, we are becoming more aware that the collective unconscious hides a metanarrative that affects the surface world.

The elimination of distance

Rather than speaking of culture as if it were divided into states, or notions of nationality that are being forcibly connected through synthetic means, I will present it as having a fundamentally unified nature that is becoming more evident over the course of the metanarrative’s . I will use ideas such as quantum entanglement to demonstrate that there is an emerging that culture is fundamentally interconnected, with the whole contained within the part, and that macrocosmic views are increasingly applicable as technology progresses. Hierarchies dependent on the constant reinforcement of particular narratives are becoming more fragile. Bauman argues that there is what he describes as an increasing liquidity of culture that grants greater mobility, but with the qualifier that this may be restricted to developed regions (2006, 78) (2000, 1). This view requires broadening in the face of the dismantling of status barriers occurring in Web 2.0 paradigms, in which the option to continually reinvent oneself and contribute creatively is extended online. Castells has similarly claimed that those living in poverty are 26 being socially excluded to a greater extent in the Information Age because the lack of access to information technology is becoming more significant

(End of Millenium 2010, 145). This rests on the premise that socioeconomic status is a continuing barrier in being affected by the culture of the

Information Age. While immediate access to information has extended to the point of breaching some barriers of economic restriction1, it is becoming evident that technology is not limited to the devices we use, but extends to our understandings that comprise the image of our world. I will demonstrate that the culture of this understanding is being transmitted on an increasingly global scale through what is increasingly common information technology.

After employing the global village metaphor, McLuhan later started using the term global theatre, as he saw the result of the electronic age being not merely an extension of consumerism, but an arena in which performance and creativity replaced passive forms of participation; in 1992, Henry Jenkins called this “participatory culture” (1992). He portrayed the concept of the

“village”, a community in which each person has an assigned job, as eroded by the broadness of a connected world that is no longer divided into chapters

(McLuhan and Nevitt 1972, 265 and back cover), an idea reiterated in

1 Advanced computers are becoming trivially cheap and ubiquitous, with even handheld music players today connecting the user to the virtual plane on which every user has equal potential to access knowledge and services.

This is not, however, the ultimate for information technology’s global impact.

27

Friedman’s flat world concept (2007, 400). The element of self-aware performance, as opposed to unconscious acceptance of epistemes, is implicit in what I will argue is a transition to the perception of the world as a stage constituting a constructed work. James Gleick observes this when he says that “every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself” (2011, location 234). With this new social and conceptual mobility, technologically advanced societies are seeing their inhabitants become shape-shifters. Irony and shape shifting are aspects of the mischief maker or trickster archetype: amorphous and playful, the trickster sees the world as full of potential, like a child. It is synonymous with the neologism trolling, which involves bringing about changes in mass perception online through the use of disingenuous speech or mischief (Oxford Dictionaries 2015). If the Information Age has a genre, it is becoming seen as a or a cartoon in which the ability to change forms at any time is inherent to concepts. The seriousness of consequences are retained from the real world, but connectivity means the boundaries between discrete concepts are being obsolesced.

Technological determinism

The term technology is commonly applied to physical devices, and rarely to the theoretical tools that are abstracts of them. In an age wherein information and technology are becoming synonyms, however, it is more useful to visualise Foucault’s concepts “technologies of self” and “technologies of power”, which extend the word to theoretical or virtual meanings (1988, 16-

49). Technology is becoming increasingly understood in the collective 28 consciousness as based in skill and knowledge, leading to a reinforcement of the understanding of technology as a kind of intellectual understanding itself, as it was by Plato and Aristotle. Technological determinism implies a notion of technology that inherently portrays it as the use of theorisation, stating that because technology creates a framework, it will shape the society that harbours it psychologically. Croteau and Hoynes define technological determinism as an approach that identifies technology, or technological advances, as the central causal element in processes of

(Croteau and Hoynes 2003, 305-307). The fundamental notion that technology changes the nature of society is further exemplified by McLuhan in his analyses of the impact of various media on the development of civilisations (1994, 14). The printed word weakened class restrictions on access to knowledge in France (Eisenstein 1980, 135-136) just as the freedom to communicate and produce content on the Internet is now challenging notions of authority and professionalism.

I will argue that technology is becoming widely sensed as not merely the most impactful influence on change, but actually inherent to change as an abstract concept. I will further argue that narratives are increasingly becoming our technology, with their sophistication implicitly leading towards a unity between human narrative and metanarrative. Information is the product of distinguishing one concept from another, as without this our conscious lives are nebulous. An example of this exists in machine code, the foundational language on which computers function. The stark opposites of one and zero are used to denote whether a particular electrical circuit is on or off, and form the simple language on which complex systems can be built. As 29 such, when we encode or express information, a process of binary opposition is always used. Words and concepts are defined by what they are not. In this way, information technology in particular is at its essence change and knowing. It is the zenith and accumulation of human sophistication, and a direct reflection of the human ability to treat the world as a malleable substance. It is the extent to which we can consciously shape the world.

McLuhan stated that “we have confused “ with a single technology” (1994, 15), conveying that we have conceptually isolated some imagined “pure” form of reasoning from any manifestations of our own understanding. I will illustrate that there is in the Information Age a growing awareness in common understanding that the way in which we ration or parse concepts in paradigms only corresponds with our inventions, and that the forms of rationality that we engage with are direct reflections of the latest technology that has become widespread. The cause of the actions of individuals that create widespread cultural behaviours has been described as a repertoire of skills or strategies (Swidler 1986) that can be considered technology in its nonphysical form. Indeed the word technology derives from the Greek word téchnē, which means “art, skill or craft” (Merriam-Webster

2010). Technology is defined by advancement and change, which is in turn intrinsic to the adoption of new paradigms, as paradigms represent changes in consciousness. This is illustrated by the conceptualisation of technology as art, inasmuch as it is the manifestation of cultural trends. Elements of culture are only afforded an existence through the technological paradigm in which they exist. For example, the aesthetic of visually streamlining and curving corporate logos, cars and computers is inherently a product of machinery that 30 can afford to cater to this stylised form. Decades ago, personal computers were once boxlike with a harsh, angular aesthetic, whereas today they feature stylised curves (Lohr 1996). A precise curve is inherently less rigid and simplistic than a straight line, and interpreted mathematically, a more sophisticated equation. The latest cultural trends are always a reflection of the latest technology. Technology reflects what we desire from the world, and what we read into it. This becomes increasingly true over time, as our capacity to produce exactly what we want has advanced considerably, while simultaneously being limited to what we understand. Technology is increasingly so closely associated with change that the concepts are being increasingly treated as synonymous.

Technology’s emergence from the unconscious

There is an increasing perception that changes in society do not take place post hoc, but pre-exist as potential, just as technology does. The Internet’s dreamlike capacity to allow constructs to emerge from is ingraining the notion of simultaneous potential, rather than linear happenstance. This means in turn that we can question what it means to suggest that technology changes society. There is currently occurring a shift in perception that sees change as not happening through mere incidental effects, but alternatively that the knowledge that technology represents is inherent in the unconscious of each individual, as D.N.A. in a cell. The 2006 book Technicity addresses this revelation of a relationship between technology and consciousness, saying of invented technology "the question arises as to whether it is possible to think something that is nothing less than the basic condition of thought 31 itself" (Bradley and Armand 2006, location 97). Paradigm shifts do not occur until there is a conscious internalisation; the framework makes a journey between being unconscious assumption to a conscious theory, only to be replaced by further assumptions. Trends in emerging technology are leading to an overarching continuity being noticeable in contextualising paradigm shifts. In the same vein, Neil Postman depicts technology as determining how we perceive and organise the world and the course of history itself. He says

the printing press, the computer, and television are not therefore

simply machines which convey information. They are metaphors

through which we conceptualize reality in one way or another. They

will classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it,

argue a case for what it is like. Through these media metaphors, we

do not see the world as it is. We see it as our coding systems are.

Such is the power of the form of information. (Postman 1979, 39)

Postman describes technology as a signifier of how we see the world. I will argue that this connection between technology and paradigms implies the new perception of a spectrum between a pre-existence of technology in the unconscious, and its manifestation in the physical, visible world. This increasingly represents globalised culture today in that we constantly use technology that makes the virtual real, examples of which are provided throughout Chapter 2. The role of metanarrative here is a catalytic one, in that paradigms and the physical world emerge from an unconscious plane.

Such a level of unified consciousness has been compared to the unified field by particle physicist John Hagelin (“Is Consciousness the Unified Field? A

Field Theorist's Perspective” 1989). This concept is mirrored in investigations 32 into quantum entanglement, which describes a ubiquitous “knowledge” of the universe between disparate parts of itself, and represents the totalising whole being present within each part. Manifestations of technology—such as tangible machinery—as well as its associated cultural change, are being seen more as produced by an underlying blueprint that I will develop a picture of. Paradigms are by definition collective and reflective. As such, they represent a population’s prevalent psychology (McLuhan 1994, 71), within which the unfolding of themes can be seen as constituting an overarching story.

Representation as overarching narrative

The narratives that are constructed through the virtual, and what greater narrative they may represent, have drawn academic attention in the

Information Age. While Baudrillard argued that signs are situated in a web of meaning, he portrayed the idiosyncrasies of these webs as localised instead of positioning them on a macrocosmic scale. He put forth the post- structuralist perspective that any argument that attempted to articulate an all- encompassing view of reality was still going to be ideologised in a way that is intrinsic to the specific process of communication itself and the idiosyncratic forms of opposition between concepts. To those such as Emile Beneviste who argued in Problèmes de linguistique générale that meaning operates independently at a metaphysical level, he responded that the sign cannot

“jump outside of its shadow”; arguing that meaning is rooted in opposition

(Genosko 2002, 39). Derrida drew equivalent interpretations in finding unchanging underlying structures illogical (Lawler 2014). Postmodernism is 33 characterised by a paradigm that meaning is dependent on structures at the capricious level of the linguistic. I will build a case for the growing cultural recognition of an archetypal web of meaning that precedes constructed narratives, and from which they derive their initial forms before becoming more sophisticated. Hegel’s absolute is applicable in conceptualising this, specifically existence , as there is no token-type distinction, that is, the concept and all of its instances are seen as one and the same (Schaffer 2016). I will argue that, as instances of consciousness represented by individuals are now being conceptualised collectively, they are taking on omnipresent properties that represent the spectrum of understandings. Smaller narratives that emerge are no longer isolated, reflecting coherence not only in terms of themselves, or shaped merely around the ways that individuals view themselves, but can be used to divine an overarching movement of ideas. The Information Age is inspiring new imagery of unity that is bringing the collective consciousness, starting on a felt, intuitive level, to new understandings.

Free will is a problematic area here that stems from this because of the paradox intrinsic to it: how can intelligence be reconciled with cause and effect? A metanarrative occurring independently of human constructions suggests a diminished notion of . This thesis will not speculate as to its implications for the concepts of free will and fatalism. It will merely propose an ongoing reconceptualisation of constructed narratives as part of a greater narrative in which they are unified, with consciousness on an individual scale seen as an expression of the collective unconscious. There remains question of the extent to which theoretical constructions can diverge 34 from the notion of overarching themes: is this divergence superficial and illusory? The relationship of these questions to free will may be grounds for further investigation.

The level from which archetypes emerge

The idea of a fundamental story of existence occurring at a hidden level has been explored through the concept of archetypes, which appears in the fields of behavioural theory, Jungian psychology, Platonic philosophy, comparative and narrative theory. The common meaning between these is a recurring generic trope from which varying instances of an idea tend to derive, with Jung presenting archetypes as types of living ideas residing in the unconscious and influencing the more superficial conscious world (1968,

4). I will build on this by arguing for a conception of archetypes as more like structures that are only nominally distinct from a continuous pre-existing field.

My argument for a general diminishment of discreteness necessitates that archetypes cannot be discussed in isolation from what unifies them.

There is a growing sense of a unified conscious plane in that we are increasingly seeing that ideas can take on lives of their own. Internet , roughly adapted by internet culture from Richard Dawkins’ memes concept, rapidly spread ideas that convey a very specific notion or sentiment (Oxford

Dictionaries 2016), and display “viral” behaviour in the Information Age. This is showcased in Inception, in which ideas are presented as the most resilient organisms. McLuhan argued that our understandings or “sense ratios” change in relation to an unspoken equilibrium (1994, 45-46). In the

Information Age, the impact of ideas in relation to our everyday, material 35 reality is tangible and visible. There is greater recognition that ideas that inspire are those that fit into an archetypal mould, reflecting a unifying framework of the unconscious. Because the Internet makes ideas viral, there is increasing recognition that successful ideas conform to an archetypal framework, implying that narratives have some consistent substrate. It is being illustrated plainly through social media that the individual authors his or her ego in relation to the ideas that have become prominent in the context in which they live (Turkle 2011, xi-xii). Our ego engenders a reverence of the values implicit in new technology, like successful , because they are manifestations of a narrative that coincides with an overarching view of the history of consciousness. The more archetypal an ideology is, the more potential influence it has. When an idea is buried deep enough in unconscious archetypes, we inevitably live it out in our relationship to the world. Increased sophistication in predicting the general shape of the metanarrative allows the more conscious creation of viral ideas. I will outline this ability in Chapter 7. This is making the technology of metanarrative an extension of ourselves. The notion of a greater context to our current paradigms is experiencing resurgence through the ubiquity of our digital reality.

Psychoid archetype

Referencing the idea of continuity between the apparently disparate, Jung proposed that archetypal ideas exist both in the human psyche and in what might otherwise be considered the external world. He called this aspect of the archetype the psychoid archetype, through which reality melds with the 36 unconscious. Jung suggested that these archetypal structures governed the behaviour of in addition to the psyche:

Just as the 'psychic infra-red,' the biological instinctual psyche,

gradually passes over into the physiology of the organism and thus

merges with its chemical and physical conditions, so the 'psychic ultra-

violet,' the archetype, describes a field which exhibits none of the

peculiarities of the physiological and yet, in the last analysis, can no

longer be regarded as psychic, although it manifests itself psychically

(2014, 215)

Subsequently, physicist Wolfgang Pauli and astronomer Johannes Kepler both theorised that the archetype provides a link between physical events and the mind of the individual who conceptualises them (Stevens 2006, 87-

88). These models can be used to illuminate the impact that elements of the collective unconscious are having on the perceived world of the collective consciousness in the Information Age. Foucault’s episteme is useful in defining this process, as the episteme, as the basis for intellectual thought, forms the original legitimisation of any idea as an intellectual one.

Archetypes, as the prototypes of ideas, imply that all intellectual ideas emerge from the primordial pool of the unconscious, what Jung called the unus mundus or “one world” (Aziz 1990, 57-58), and that the episteme merely solidifies it. Using ideas in new physics, I will argue that matter is also becoming seen as governed by archetypal forms that can be conceptualised as semiotic material becoming solid. 37

Words shaping our reality

Kant found that all experience is organised according to categories called schema through which we experience our thoughts (Brodsky 2010). This should be compared with notions that Jung and others developed. Archetypal structures, I will argue, are becoming vindicated through information technology, as the visible aspects of everyday life are being increasingly experienced as impacted by hidden or virtual forms. Discussions of the way in which narrative shapes our reality today cannot occur without also addressing the concept of hyperreality. Baudrillard theorised that human culture is moving towards an overlay of solid symbols in which apparently figurative acts can take on properties of the real (1994, 22-23, 124). This view is comparable to principles in symbolic . I will outline how this role is also played by symbolism, commenting on the role intangible themes play in forming the world around us in the Information Age. Baudrillard called the idea of hyperreality the “scaled down refraction” of ideas of the real in which

“all meaning and charm, all depth and energy of representation have vanished in a hallucinatory resemblance” (1994, 23). This distinction, although argued as an incremental one, might be thought of as equivalent to oil on top of a body of water; a superficial addition that doesn’t permeate what is naturally there. I will engage with this argument through addressing the state of the distinction between the idea of the real world and that of a symbolic reality.

The role of conceptual relativity in meaning, however, cannot be outright denied. The underlying unity that contemporary technological paradigms 38 suggest must be distinguished from the relativity of the conscious world.

Baudrillard argued that signs only make sense within their respective contexts, and that they always say something about their users (The System of Objects 2005, 218-219). This is analogous to McLuhan's sentiment that any meaning in the “content” of a medium is merely normalisation by the larger society, which is itself comprised of idiosyncrasies (1994, 7-8). This relativistic view is supported by phenomena such as the ability of our brains to make sense of the world from the relativism that exists between ideas, a principle reflected in new technology such as Starkey Labs’ Cetera algorithm for hearing aids, which determines the relative distance between, and three- dimensional positioning of, objects. Analogously, this is comparable to waves of energy serving as substrates to particles of matter, which is what binds two notional “states” of a particular particle. Einstein found that matter arises from this dualistic tension, which serves as an appropriate metaphor for emerging perceptions of narrative as arising from an underlying unity. As with centrifugal force, as long as our narratives of self act as the catalytic source, the bodies of matter that are our ideas circulate around it, remaining in our ideology. Daniel Dennet draws this parallel in the essay “The Self as a

Center of Narrative Gravity”, in which he discusses how the idea of the self constitutes a gravitational body that can shape the way we view our reality

(1992, 4). I will reappropriate this principle to illustrate a perceived transcendence of self through the trends that have been prevalent through the Information Age. This principle suggests that the abstract concept of absolute binary, which I will demonstrate as only a product of human ideology, forms the foundation of the environment we create for ourselves, 39 through our very ideas of ourselves. Relativity implies discreteness between units, which itself breaks down at a sufficiently minute scale of physical activity and a certain depth of consciousness. I will repudiate as circular the premise of underlying self-referential binary, and illustrate how a unifying substrate is becoming obviated in the Information Age.

Underneath consciousness

Baudrillard implied that the world is devoid of discernible meaning without the process of consciousness actively infusing the world with it (1994, 81). This necessitates the premise that consciousness is a separable overlay that is distinct from any naturally existing meaning. The elements of a contrasting view, namely that of our perceived connection with a unifying substrate, are taking root today. As I will outline, contemporary technology demonstrates possibilities that exist outside the frameworks that binary opposition artificially introduces. While intellectualised constructions and their basis in parsed units of analysis can be ascribed to the relativism that arises from discreteness, we are now experiencing in the Information Age that discreteness is only an assertion that uses to simplify. Contemporary technology is highlighting that words are not irreducible; they speak of underlying archetypes that, in the Information Age, are being demonstrated as shaping narratives. This notion that the universe that we experience can be framed as the dynamics of a greater unifying consciousness was catalysed largely by

German philosophers of the 19th century such as Hegel and Schelling. In theorising a greater consciousness, their notions of "ideal" phenomena have proven highly potent to the point of being largely considered implicit to it, and 40

I locate myself in this as opposed to the relativistic aspects of the poststructuralist trends of the last several decades. Today, this view is exemplified by Hagelin’s philosophical elaborations on particle physics theory. Hagelin purports that not only do observations of energy waves

“create” particles, as is currently accepted (Weizmann Institute Of Science

1998), but that this implies that our socially constructed world collectively reflects a unified consciousness of conceptual potential. This represents that intellectual distinctions between concepts, a conscious process, legitimises solid or tangible reality. This also includes the implication that narratives of separate instances of consciousness are fundamentally unified at a quantum level, making all notionally discrete ideas in our world the manifestation of a grander story. In this way, the scope of relativistic contexts is expanded to a greater unifying context of narratives. The technological trends of the

Information Age can be shown to collectively point towards this.

Dissertation structure

I have structured this dissertation in a manner that parallels the paradigmatic shift in culture towards greater self-awareness through epistemological perspective. In representing my argument from different angles, I will employ an approach that uses “vignettes” in order to reflect the microcosmic nature of narratives in relation to the metanarrative. Comparable to the way in which flows of information in social media can be interpreted more usefully through a greater cultural context, this will be used to build an overarching narrative. 41

Virtualisation

Using contemporary Internet trends such as social networks as a launching point, I will begin by outlining the virtualisation of functional aspects of day to day life that have until the Information Age been physical and tangible. By reconceptualising the substance of globalised culture into digitised information, we are adopting the pure dualism of theory into our understandings. Binary opposition is its foundation, just as the foundation of computer language is ones and zeroes (Gleick 2011, location 158). The increased vividness that the virtual grants the imaginary is conditioning us to regard and respond to the real world as fundamentally conceptual.

Theorists such as Baudrillard have purported that digitisation signifies that reality is arbitrarily constructed with the result of no visible reference point

(Simulacra and Simulation 1994). In contrast, I will use the reconceptualisation of reality as information as a platform from which to challenge postmodern models of meaning as endlessly deferred. I will illustrate that a continuity of information is left behind after concepts are taken back to an unconstructed state. I will use this premise later in the thesis to argue that underlying structures emerge with the wide exposure of such a state.

Levels of consciousness

I will then explore the notion that we are increasingly seeing our media as equivalent to a conduit for dreams that give us views of our collective unconscious. I will explain how the ironic perspective we gain from a 42 paradigm shift aligns with waking up from a dream, and how increased understanding of the context of paradigms is arising from engagement with our unconscious. McLuhan argued that each new medium turns the previous medium into content. Layers of irony can be seen as degradations (1994, vii).

An example of this is YouTube videos within YouTube videos (Keen 2007, 5), a Droste effect evoking the distanced perspective of Mise en abyme. This paradox of infinite regression perpetually defers the frame or context to the point of rendering it invisible. By conceptualising consciousness as occurring in degrees of wakefulness, we are gaining an understanding that what appears to be solid and real is what has achieved a fundamental resonance with the collective consciousness. Further, we are living our lives according to the premise that such seemingly solid forms conform to abstract archetypes from a virtual substrate that transcends the physical.

Archetypal criticism primarily speaks about archetypes in terms of the literature that uses them instead of the origins they may have in the psyche

(Mingdong 2003). Jung’s ideas of archetypes as emerging from a deeper collective consciousness have not been applied to the trajectory of information technology; archetypes have not been used to explain technological convergence. Using the concept of a unified unconscious to illuminate information technology can inform discussion of the way that conscious thinking is influenced and the way that reality is being re- envisaged as a spectrum of solidity.

Positivism being the prevalent scientific paradigm means that the idea of an objective reality also dominates public consciousness. The notion that reality is merely an intermittently solidified reflection of an unconscious dream is 43 something the Information Age uniquely predispositions us to appreciate. In the online age, in which the landscape can shift at any time depending on the ideas circulating, the public imagination is becoming more captured by the idea of the world being formed by intangible thought projections. Constructs can go from being hidden to visibly manifest in an instant, changing the way we see paradigms. This notion of a less visible plane influencing the shape of things on the surface of consciousness challenges the perception of permanence in the real world.

Self‐similarity and the microcosm

It is a necessary premise of everyday life that concepts, individuals and objects are separate. Theories of social organisation, for example, correspondingly reflect the notion that individuals intrinsically identify themselves according to distinct traits. People are spoken about as if the division of consciousness between them is an unchangeable reality. However information technology is now conditioning public thinking to align with the idea that we are only bound to the paradigm of discreteness to the extent that our understanding allows. Technological convergence is a trend that illustrates this.

Providing examples of the increasing omnipresence of information, I will illustrate the increasing self-similarity of recurring forms of ideas, and the underlying unity that this represents. The Information Age is leading to the understanding that information is, by its abstract nature, ubiquitous, and areas of the human experience that are thought of as discrete and existing in 44 isolation are in fact microcosmic of a unified spectrum of meaning that is reflected in each constructed phenomenon. While increasing distance from our own ideologies is providing us with new perspective, the premise of disparity between concepts, on which distance depends, is being fundamentally challenged in a way that signifies the perception of time and space in the collective narrative to only an artificial différance (Lawler 2014) that we have learned to live by in order to make sense of the conscious world.

The increasing tenuousness of the idea of the solidly “physical” ultimately corresponds with an underlying unity. Recent discoveries and theorisations in particle physics have found that there is a continuity between the physical world and abstract forms, a continuity that we have learned to ignore through our mental constructions. This aligns with ongoing cultural shifts. Classical physics has come to be considered a divorce from a pure potential of forms that underlies quantum physics. In the same way, there is a growing awareness of the way we construct mental narratives that separate us from the idea of a unifying potential from which our perceived reality emerges through culture. I will use these discoveries in new physics that exist at the cutting edge of ontological understanding to illuminate contemporary cultural shifts that parallel these notions.

Ideas as living

My contention that society’s psyche is built up of a greater unified consciousness is illustrated by the metaphor of ideas as living things.

Expanding on Dawkins’ “memes” and Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field, I will 45 explore the ways in which ideas are analogous to organisms by comparing their nature and behaviour. This will provide an illustration of our methods of parsing the world into units of analysis that cloud the innate unity of an underlying awareness, of which individual instances of consciousness can be found to be merely different expressions.

The concept of ideas being literally living things has a hegemonised and de- emphasised status. The original concept of memes is held as academically incongruent by cultural theorists (Lachapelle, Faucher and Poirier 2005) and the notion of spirits is now treated as archaic. However, we can examine the power of the idea of living ideas as having influence over the public psyche.

As long as ideas are elevated to the same status as living things, they can act as shamanistic entities, cultivating and commanding worldviews. Ideas can occupy the same space in a person’s mind as any other internalised psychic figure. A paradigm can indoctrinate values, priorities and realities as much as a parental figure. The power of ideas to cultivate worldviews unnoticed is now being exposed through the Internet. We can watch as the course of a viral idea’s grip on public thought is explicated. Through this increased understanding, the power is being made clearer. This creates a need to revisit theories that have been relegated to antiquity. I will outline how, simultaneously, this diminishes the power of individual ideas, as something bigger is made apparent.

A world of graphics

Current literature on visual culture could be enhanced with investigations that re-evaluate the extent to which the Information Age illuminates the nature of 46 reality as visual. Chapter 6 will explore the visual’s power. A concept manifesting in contemporary society is that reality can shift as quickly as the visual. The power of imagery is not restricted to the ocular, but representative of all reality perceived at a surface level of consciousness. My argument in this chapter will be that technology now highlights that the world is constantly re-envisaged through the imagination. The Internet exposes us to the idea that an environment can be built from graphics; not only a visual environment, but a mental one of ideologies and understandings of the world.

In examining the world as a worldview in relation to information technology, the salience of the visual can be further appreciated.

The Information Age reveals that ideological narratives create the world by observing and encapsulating it. Today, however, narratives are becoming more graphic through our increased ability to manipulate imagery through technology. As we look at the world differently, the constructed world changes, and we are now seeing it as a graphic fiction whose narratives we are capable of authoring. Inversely, fantasy is becoming tangible to the same extent that reality is being revealed as artificial. I will illustrate how this ability to paint new pictures of the world is a direct expression of paradigms creating the world we live in, and that this is being reflected in emerging technology.

The developing fundamental awareness of understanding itself as a “picture” is leading to an increased subtlety in our ability to craft new narratives that deliberately shape consciousness.

Narrative as a technology

The thesis will end with an exploration of narrative being used as a 47 technology in emerging paradigms. Our present ability to construct powerful ideas from nothing are developing in sophistication so that we can do this at will, and maintain a measure of control over the narratives that we consciously employ. The increased perceived interchangeability of the paradigm with the reality is leading to our ability to reshape the world through the exploitation of conscious thought. We are developing greater awareness over abstract structures that underlie the constructed world, giving us further power over the surface of consciousness. This reflects principles that have previously been limited to pre-Enlightenment societies or designated as spiritualist thought.

Symbolic magic is not submissible academically, however its principles are becoming increasingly relevant with emerging technology. The ability to reshape consciousness on a mass scale is becoming perceivable to the public. The term metanarrative can be usefully repurposed to denote an awareness of awareness itself: consciousness at the point of convergence.

Paradigms have not traditionally been conceptualised as tools with which consciousness can be altered, but this follows from advancements in technology creating shifts in awareness of contexts.

Thesis proposition

The technology of the Information Age is moving us towards internalising the notion that a metanarrative constitutes a greater context in which paradigms operate, and that the discreteness we see as existing between concepts only masks this underlying continuity. Because paradigms are narratives, the theoretical understandings that we have constructed for a given era in effect 48 create the world we live in. Consciousness in the form of the most tangible thought—the level at which ideology is accepted as real and constructions as solid—regards categorisations of information as real, without any ironic distance from these notions. Thus our attempts to categorise perceptions of the world means that information determines our reality in a very direct sense. The changing collective conceptualisation of the world from the graspable to the digital or intangible serves to make this notion real for us, thus bringing the paradigm into effect.

This paradigm shift of the Information Age is exposing the lack of a practical distinction between the real and virtual. The technological advancement of human culture is portraying the tradition of categorising ideas as fundamentally fallacious. I anticipate a corresponding global shift towards emphasis on the non-corporeal. Hence with the emerging view that the theoretical and practical are indistinct, we are entering into a culture in which reality is seen as formed by the sum of all consciousness. Through this I will aim to illustrate that global cultural trends are facing in the direction of the catalysts of paradigms being considered as parts of a greater metanarrative at the core of conscious experience, rather than as independent constructions.

The investigations of the topics in this thesis will combine to make a contribution to understandings of shifts in popular thought in the Information

Age. It will achieve this through elucidating a new conception of metanarrative that reaches past postmodern frameworks, as is being necessitated by information technology trends. The topics I will group my arguments under will represent the different aspects of the journey of popular 49 understanding towards this new paradigm. The quantity of information on the

Internet makes explicit the frameworks with which we think, giving us critical distance from our paradigms. The addition of context in this way allows further levels of self-awareness that provide us with the perspective needed for epistemological shifts. An underlying unity is presenting itself to what I have called the collective consciousness through our current of concepts existing as a continuum of information. The metanarrative that emerges is a collectivising reconceptualisation of lesser narratives, which acts as their catalyst.

Popularly accepted concepts in the Information Age are losing their semantic rigidity. I will outline how reality being newly pictured as information makes it far less defined than the eras preceding virtualisation. In current software, new worlds can emerge spontaneously. This journey towards a more dreamlike world that portrays all things as possible could be said to represent a more malleable plane of consciousness. The notion of a point at which possibilities converge engenders us with awareness that a full variety of phenomena is contained in any one part of existence. The cultivation of very particular ideas that build narratives and worldviews is more transparent to us under this framework, with the processes of paradigm building now constantly documented and immediately visible. Knowing this, the manipulation of paradigms through the visual elements of perceived reality becomes more self-conscious and deliberate; worldviews can be catalysed through exploiting the nature of symbols. The more subtle extension of this is that the tools of changing reality do not have to start as visual; they can begin on the less fully formed, more theoretical level as words. At this point, 50 paradigms themselves become tools that can create mass shifts in consciousness. With these developments, narratives that were previously institutionalised are vulnerable to disillusionment. Important axioms of society are being increasingly made malleable, diminished to raw material with which we can toy. 51

Chapter 2: Reality digitised

With his book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte used the image that the atoms in analogue media such as books would be replaced by bits, units of electronic information (1995, back cover). This transition to a less tangible world is arising from the obsolete material means of social processes becoming broken down into conceptual elements. Separately from the concept of deconstruction, however, which implies established of units of analysis retaining the salience of their influence, we can use the word unconstruction to envisage concepts as already being fundamentally unified in pure potential. The terms solve and coagula, drawn from Aristotle, refer to this concept that established idea structures have to be taken apart before they can be put together as an invented form (Zell-Ravenheart 2004, 245)

(Simonds 1997). By seeing through to the fabric that makes up our ideas, we are being conditioned to learn that our narratives are our own constructions from this fabric. In this chapter I will establish the way in which information technology is conditioning us with the notion that our narratives are constructions. Following this, in Chapter 3 I will argue that Derridaean notions of endless deference and mere “ of presence” are yielding, through technological advancement, to a growing awareness of an underlying archetypal framework.

The virtual nature of information has meant that the Information Age has yielded a growth in the role of intangible constructions in the zeitgeist and their ubiquity in our lives. Many economic and sociological phenomena have been reconceptualised in being migrated to online infrastructures, from 52 financial transactions to meeting new acquaintances. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Castells used the term informationalism to describe this organisational paradigm of the Information Age as a fundamental concern with the acquisition of information as if it were a resource (2004, 198). The functional basis of our world as a society, an economy and a geopolitical construction is increasingly digital. In this chapter I will discuss this increasing legitimacy of the virtual and how it is producing a conception of the world as a changeable, transient construction. I will argue that the process of virtualisation through technology is leading us to inhabit a world in which concepts previously institutionalised as bound to the physical are being reconceptualised as abstracted versions of themselves. This is creating a greater awareness of the idea that thought is fundamental to the graspable and that the latter can be manipulated through the former. I will point to examples of the world becoming analogous to software: floating and able to be changed at will, as if it constitutes a narrative that can be rewritten. There is a change occurring in that the need for specific physical manifestations of concepts is being de-emphasised in favour of concepts being free to migrate and transform. As I will illustrate, this constitutes a fundamental abstraction of our world into a theoretical construction with a unifying concept of narrative.

This effectual conversion of our lives into software, in combination with the involvement of the Internet, facilitates the increasing regard of global culture as a web of connected narratives. In this way the new conception of everyday life as virtual is more and more conditioning us to accept that the virtual is what governs our experience. In accordance with Baudrillard’s hyperreality (1994, 124), the representative symbols we use can be shown 53 as becoming conceptually reified to the point that suggests a trend in which the conscious world is becoming realised as alterable through narrative. I will argue that views of the material are, in this new episteme, aligning with the intangible plane of ideas on which we have traditionally conceptualised only virtual worlds. In establishing the virtualisation of the world that is in progress,

I will highlight the way in which our culture is gaining the potential to harness the “unconstructed” from which any construction can be built.

There are two strands of thought occurring here that require differentiation.

Firstly, the fact that technology is evolving into that reality is a manifestation of underlying narrative. Secondly, the fact that we are becoming conscious of this to the point of a widespread level of awareness.

Technology is increasingly reflecting the understanding that speech acts have a functional equivalence to the plane of reality that we regard as solid.

Increasingly, as a result, we are realising that concepts cannot manifest in consciousness without our developing theorisations of them. Kuhn argued this when he equated justification to discovery; i.e. by conceptualising new understandings, we create them (Kuhn 1970, 8). Applying this notional paradigm to its own construction, this means that the conceptualisation of a paradigm equates to its consolidation. When a phenomenon is made sufficiently obvious through prevailing technological trends, there is a mass awareness of it in the form of a new shift in consciousness. The momentum of the ecological movement, for example, is seen as having been partially triggered by the reception of photographs of Earth taken from the moon

(Schroeder 2009). These images, which conveyed the fragility of the planet, brought to full consciousness the view that humankind had taken the Earth’s 54 resources for granted as infinite. A distanced perspective of a worldview consolidates a transition in the public consciousness; seeing the way we see the world creates a shift.

In practice, the virtual is becoming sufficiently reminiscent of, or sufficiently interchangeable with, reality to be a functional substitute for it in an increasing number of areas. For practical purposes, what we consider to be reality is becoming transient and malleable. Computers no longer represent an esoteric field—and the Internet can no longer be relegated to any one category of function—because of the Internet’s combination of various media.

The landscape of the virtual represents potential that is restricted only by the authorship of its own inherent machine code. We are starting to regard virtual institutions such as banking as in effect equivalent to the solid objects, such as cash, we used to deal with in their place. In the public mind, the distinction in function between the intangible and the tangible is being bridged by the virtual. Social networking sites are a ubiquitous example of the new paradigm in which the virtual becomes real and substantial. Entire relationships can be determined through computers. Video and sound captured by webcams is taken apart, rendered into code, and reassembled remotely in a location that does not require any proximity to the source. It represents a new understanding that many aspects of our lives can transcend their traditional restriction to physical manifestations. The constructed narrative inherent in the coding protocols on the Internet is a global method we use to author our own way of organising the information that paints pictures of our world. One person can now instantly combine elements of their knowledge with that of another through the vivid simplification in the visual world of the Internet. 55

Disparate information can now be immediately placed side by side, facilitating perception of its continuity. On this abstract theoretical level, the concept of distance is becoming less tangibly relevant. The ubiquity of

Internet integration across the globe, as inherent to the premise of the

Internet as connectedness, is corresponding with the gradual global digitisation of everyday life. If we visualise this in terms of Saussure’s langue and parole, langue refers to the abstract principles of language (C. Taylor

1995, 95-97) that suggest the continuity that can be visualised as forming the universal aspect of metanarrative. At this point, we can perceive a potential for our world to be rewritten on a conceptual or symbolic level.

By first providing an account of the recent history of hardware’s transformation into software, I will outline information technology’s abstracting influence. I will use this fundamental trend to explain the significance of other areas of technological development, such as the increasing relevance of programming code to the general public, the virtualisation of , a reframing of geopolitical boundaries as imaginary and the significance of the cloud as a space-unifying function. While outlining these technological developments, I will argue for their significance in shaping society and a corresponding new view of the material that reality consists of. This abstraction of concepts from their physical forms will allow this thesis to argue for a repositioning of the point at which we see narratives as being catalysed.

56

Hardware becoming software

History indicates that technology develops further intangibility over time.

While in the past, technology was most visibly manual, with direct, hands-on physical manipulation, we are today seeing a merging of software and hardware. This includes cloud computing, the remote processing of data that bypasses the need for computational power in the immediate area; consumer

3D printing, the production of objects from digital data; and the convergence of multiple devices into smart devices, which sees formerly separate tools newly represented as applications (“apps”) on the same screen. A digitisation of tools is occurring that Henry Jenkins has recognised as meaning the fluid movement of content between media (Convergence Culture, Where Old and

New Media Collide 2006, 15).

This trend of abstraction through technology implies by extension a view of technological devices as—while capable of having an impact on the visible world—constituting ultimately intangible tools. Technology is increasingly a narrative; we are beginning to use it to shape the world through virtual means as much as physical means. The connectedness of the Information Age furthermore means that technology is manifesting broadly, making its collective data increasingly representative of the collective consciousness. At the same time a more intimate role of technology is being afforded in that neurologically and psychologically, it is more of a direct reflection of the mental state of the user. Moods are now being registered and integrated as data in social media posts, allowing their quantification and potential exploitation in computer code. Emerging technology is increasingly 57 integrating internal, psychic processes into its applications that are reflections of both the state of the individual consciousness and the collective consciousness. Technology is increasingly becoming synonymous with paradigms on both a microcosmic and macrocosmic scale.

The virtual in practice

The increasing ubiquity of the virtual in the Information Age is undermining the notion that only the physical is real. An example is Aki Ross, a photorealistic computer generated character devised by the film studio

Square Pictures in 2000, and intended as the world’s first “artificial actress” before the commercial failure of its first film. Subsequently, the character appeared in the results of the one-hundred “sexiest women” in a poll held by the magazine Maxim (Aldred 2011), becoming the first fictional character to appear on the list. Whether or not this was intended with some degree of facetiousness, cultural phenomena such as this indicate that the virtual’s increasing apparent realism is in some areas overpowering solid forms as sovereign in “real life” (often now distinguished as “rl”). This paradigm was implicitly anticipated when Gregory outlined in The Psychology of Seeing that ocular information is repeatedly re-translated through electrical impulses in being conveyed to the brain (1978). The applicable theme of this finding is that that we see is a form of virtual representation (re- presentation). While seen objects can be corroborated through other senses and measurements, the visual remains as essentially thought. There is a new acceptance of the visual world as reducible to a tentative mental picture. This is occurring through constant image manipulation as with PhotoShop and 58

Augmented Reality (A.R.), the superimposition of live footage with images that derive from the subject of the camera.

Technology’s synthesis of different realities in virtual worlds means that whatever essential distinction there may be between the real and the virtual, it is becoming less relevant due to the lack of difference between them on an apparent level. Paradigms of the public consciousness are predicated on the apparent; because they can only be said to exist if they are widely visible, their traits are defined by what is commonly perceived as obvious. Advancing technology means that increasingly, the collective consciousness treats virtual worlds as real, and there is a developing notion that the operation of the world is dependent on the virtual. Online encounters with artificial intelligence are becoming indistinguishable from those with humans (2014).

Even computers themselves are becoming theoretical, with virtual machines capable of existing as emulated computer architectures on more advanced ones (W. Kim 2009). Monetary value itself is also being virtualised, with the currency of virtual worlds being a source of profit, as has occurred through

Chinese prisoners being forced to play online to accumulate in-game items for the real profit of their guards (Savov 2011). The extension of these trends implies the concept of the virtual, as a concept traditionally distinct from practice, becoming practical, leading to new societies, tools and institutions being able to emerge almost as easily as thought. In this framework, being constantly plugged in to the virtual is normalised, with the digital world as the primary means of going about one’s affairs. As a result, more of the global population has a link to the intangible, from which any form or structure conceivable can potentially be constructed. 59

The above examples illustrate that the virtual grants a versatility through which institutions fundamental to worldviews can fluidly grow and shrink in significance. As paradigms depend on particular sets of dynamics between societal institutions, the fluctuation of institutions through the virtual means that our narratives are being exposed as more nominal than rigid. The

Writer’s Guild of America have noted that social media have allowed their members to become part of the public consciousness as opposed to being isolated in their relevance, and early research on social media has speculated on its capacity for mobilising social action in ways that bypass established institutions (Obar, Zube and Lampe 2012). Technology is creating the worldview that the world is a blank slate onto which any form can be projected; any given paradigm is seen as tentative, making reality notional as more of a temporary and knowing conceit. There is a growing realisation that mass changes in consciousness are brought into effect through the influence of those with the technology necessary to author images of the world. The nature of such technology is explored in the penultimate chapter.

Abstraction into code

For ideas to be manipulated freely, we must inhabit the abstract world of ideas. It has been argued by Goertzel that the intrinsic unity of the Internet is facilitating a return of a virtual kind of collective unconscious that modern alienation has diminished (Goertzel 2011, 312). Many of the tools for the practical processes in our lives are being converted into binary data, and in this way they are more obviously and systematically subjected to a foundation of narratives in the design of their underlying code. As a result, 60 many of our daily activities have transcended their previous status of tangibility. This intangibility means a connectedness that merges our stories and unifies us with a larger connected narrative. Web sites and other virtual worlds now visibly represent our link to an intangible plane of a purely information based reality. This can be argued to represent a new convergence of the consciousness of individuals on a plane of abstract data.

The Internet hosts a full range of thoughts, unifying divergent viewpoints.

Abstraction through the archetypal symbols of machine code means that ideologies are visibly positioned on a continuous spectrum that is unified as a representation of the collective consciousness. This evokes in the public mind a collective unconscious from which any instance of form can potentially emerge.

The increasing power of speech acts

There is now more capacity for the intangible to replace the solid through the use of symbols, such as programming code, because our ability to synthesise notional realities is being refined. We increasingly have the capacity to emulate the real through the virtual for any imaginable purpose.

Increases in processing power enable the use of more variables in constructing virtual arenas, and result in a higher degree of sophistication in emulating environments and the behaviour of objects within the environments. Speech acts are able to reach a greater number of minds through an increased online population, reach them more instantaneously due to improved connection speeds and more convenient methods of accessing data, involve them more directly through participation in social 61 media, and stay updated according to constant new data due to the new capacity to take information live. These elements of dynamism are direct consequences of evolving technology and continue to develop further. They represent a new form of sophistication in illustrating our thoughts. As such, practically any everyday need can be “communicated” in virtual form. This channel of communication, characterised by McLuhan as a “central nervous system” (1994, 4) has the ability to contain anything within it; but first the reality that it aims to imitate must be broken down into basic pieces, namely variables in programming code. This deconstruction of our world intrinsically creates the potential for it to be reconstructed differently. The general public is in this way increasingly coming to terms with the notion that new narratives generate different forms.

Graphics in the virtual

It is no coincidence that, parallel to the tangible becoming intangible, fiction is becoming more graphic and vivid. Advancements in technology are facilitating the unveiling of generative continuity between the abstract nature of text and the comparative vividness of imagery. The adage “a picture says a thousand words” speaks of the superior capacity of an image to depict and propagate a worldview through its higher level of immersion. On a strictly literal level, words are comparatively silent in their ability to paint and persuade one of an idea. However, a spectrum is being revealed that undermines the concept of them as discrete from one another. Words and images, like other aspects of culture in the Information Age, are developing what can be categorised as a self-referential meta-awareness. The 62 composition of words is being seen as inherently graphic with increasing reappropriation of graphetics in corporate logos, as if lettering is itself becoming self-aware as visual imagery instead of pure text. Notions of continuity through a spectrum of the intangible were being established when icons such as the “M” of McDonald’s Golden Arches in the 1960s were diminishing the distinction between glyph and image, concurrently with computers beginning to be connected in networks. By extension, images are now being reconceptualised as being built from arrangements of information, analogous to words, through increased engagement of images through the

Internet. Sophisticated image editing software has normalised the idea that realistic images can emerge spontaneously from the manipulation of electronic information (see Chapter 7 for further discussion on this continuity). Because what we see is increasingly computer generated, it is being increasingly seen as being authored, storytelling made visible. We have increased capacity to make thoughts manifest visually. Computer user interfaces were once text, and are now graphic. Video displays have attained the illusion of having entered the third dimension through stereoscopic technology and certain e-books are starting to incorporate video and sound

(Kudler 2014). What was formerly the work of our imaginations is becoming tangible. What these trends represent is the reduced absolutism and more relativistic conception of solid forms. The tenuousness of forms is being more overtly evidenced in global culture as the sophistication of the virtual advances. 63

Facebook and the self

Due to its monopolisation of social networking and resulting ubiquity,

Facebook has become a genericised trademark—a brand name that has become synonymous with the type of product—representing the idea of social networking; it has itself become a societal paradigm. Facebook represents a new ubiquity in our ability to float ourselves so that we become incorporeal. Facebook profiles that become our personae are generating impacts increasingly outside of the website itself, as seen with their recent use to "profile" job candidates (Brown and Vaughn 2011). While its usage on the scale of the individual may be to gratify the ego, the broader implication is that the idea of the self is progressively compromised through its detachment from the body, becoming a like a universal substance rather than an object.

The self is being positioned in emerging paradigms as existing on a continuum. With online social profiles, there is now a notion of putting the self in the cloud, where symbols are freely manipulable. The quantification of self through profiles genericises its constituent attributes, which anyone can then adopt. An individual’s uniqueness is dilated to a unified spectrum of continuity alongside an increasing number of other personalities online. The concept of catfishing, which involves the impersonation of another identity through online interactions, has demonstrated the malleability of the self when it transcends the physical and manifests on the level of the virtual plane.

Online, the image of one’s self in the virtual world does not have to correspond to its more primordial physical . 64

Moreover, there is a division through negation in the construction of the self, in which the ego is fundamental, and this separation is reinforced in conceptions of discrete physical bodies. Trends in the Information Age, however, are defined more by unification through the virtual plane. In this way technology is vindicating Dennet’s description of the nature of the self as a "purely abstract object” and “a theorist's fiction." (1992, 1). He illustrates this by arguing that the words of a computer that could autonomously write stories of fictional characters would be "interpretable, by us, as accreting biography—telling the narrative of a self." (1992, 4). Online, the dividing influence of the ego, in its role of designating one “self” to each body, is undermined. Taking this further, the ego’s traditional role as defining not only the view of the self but the relationships between concepts in perceived reality means that this has broader implications in the undermining of concepts as discrete from one another. Entering a world of pure information introduces elements of continuity and indeterminacy.

Distance, performance, irony

The abstraction of the concept of the self is having an effect that is causing us to see ourselves like the trickster archetype of Jungian theory. Social networking is making us more conscious as performers, encouraging us to have a distance from ourselves. Like Loki from Norse mythology, we are gaining through technology the ability to shape-shift, and play with the substance of our personae. It is as if we are all using our newly acquired and obviated self-awareness to constantly play tricks on each other. The current paradigm is that the world as a series of societal processes is becoming a 65 performance from which we have an ironic distance. This is reflected in contemporary comedy, which is increasingly ironic, bringing with it a new paradigm of distance, more self-conscious performance and irreverence

(McDonald 2010, 15-19). An example is the ninety-seventh episode of the

South Park television series, in which Earth is revealed as a reality T.V. series that faces cancellation due to the rationale that T.V. shows become contrived when they exceed one-hundred episodes. This pattern of progression was inadvertently observed by Marx, who said that history occurs twice: first as tragedy, then as farce (1999). Paralleling this is his earlier description of constant revolution and disturbance of social conditions:

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned” (1848).

Correspondingly, it has been commented that the similarly long running television series The Simpsons was once essentially based in real human , but is becoming more cartoonlike in later episodes, that is, increasingly absurd and irreverent (Suellentrop 2003). The distancing from the concrete in this example reflects the strangeness of the continued abstraction that is occurring. Schechner’s dark play, the act of experimenting with meaning in ways that have no ostensible merit (1993, 36-40), is prevailing as a paradigm. The digitisation of our daily activities is causing the dangers of reality to be juxtaposed with the absent consequences of virtual environments, removing consequences from some areas of real life and instating them into some aspects of virtual worlds. The internal worlds of computer games have traditionally been free of real consequences, however since games have integrated online socialisation, they have been linked to them. The United States’ National Security Agency has acted on suspicions 66 that terrorists have made use of the relatively recent feature in computer games to communicate through player characters’ dialogue online to organise terrorist activities (Irwin and Slay 2010), confronting us with evidence that the seriousness of fiction is becoming elevated to that of the real world. Alternate Reality Games are a further manifestation of this uncanny paradox. A.R.G.s are also synonymous with the concept of the “viral marketing campaign”, a manufactured immersion of collective consciousness in a product. Such a campaign was carried out prior to the release of the

2004 computer game Halo 2: a website would specify public payphone locations and times, and those who answered their ringing would hear a multi-part radio drama containing the answers to questions that would unlock further previews of the game online (Terdiman 2004). The increasing reach of the Internet is in proportion to its ability to create narratives that breach media boundaries. In this way, everyday life is being re-conceptualised as a theatre (Schechner 1993, 26-27). Society is recognised as a medium and employed as one by this technology. This ubiquitous irony is characterised by an increasing undermining of promises of authenticity (Wallace 1993). I would argue that the endless disillusionment that occurs through this universal irony is, as a subsequence, breeding a longing to return to simpler archetypal forms. Our own capricious narratives are becoming frighteningly potent, while an underlying cohesion is offered by the more seminal nature of archetypes. This is the structure emerging as a result of concepts being taken apart and reassembled. 67

Outside of older narratives

Film as a medium has properties that position it as disconnected from the

Information Age. A theatrical film is pre-recorded, offline, and does not update dynamically. The online environment around it changes constantly, but the film remains merely an archive. As a result, mentions of Internet culture institutions feel out of place. As comedy writer Ian Maddison has pointed out (2011), mentions of websites such as Facebook or YouTube in popular films are often framed as if they are amusing to the viewer in the same way as a topical reference, as if their mere mention evokes self- congratulation on the part of the viewer for being spoken to directly; as framed in the 2011 comedy film What’s Your Number?, wherein a joke is simply that a Facebook user requests that the protagonist “like” a page. The novelty comes from the contrast between Internet phenomena, which unify information, and film, a medium that attempts to communicate through linear and self-contained forms. Online institutions are more than topical, they are live; they are not only recent news, but update continuously enough to have become sources of news. This illustrates the incompatibility of the new connected paradigm with offline, archival media such as film. Saying the word “Facebook” connects a film to the Information Age. Since everything on

Facebook takes on a kind of live dynamism, works that traditionally lack this element are undermined and distracted from, hence its furtive usage in such media. This treatment of Internet culture as out of place in film illustrates the profundity of the Information Age’s tendency to blend media together in ways of which self-contained media are not capable. Implicit in the film medium is a 68 narrative that portrays the world as linear and experienced passively. The narrative of social media, in contrast, is that narratives are participatory, cross pollinating and constantly changing.

The omnipotent authority of ideas

The potential of virtualisation can be illustrated through the omnipotence intrinsic to the abstract nature of ideas. In 2010, a C.E.O. from a security firm tried to apprehend the Internet vigilante team Anonymous (J. Taylor 2011).

The C.E.O. Aaron Barr believed Anonymous was an organised, small group of people; he wasn’t aware that their edge as a movement comes from their intangibility as a concept. Barr was a person trying to battle an idea. The paradigm of local organisation is transcended here: "the of dominant organisations detaches itself from the social constraints of cultural identities and local societies through the powerful medium of information technologies"

(M. Castells 1991, 6).

As the futility of Barr’s project makes clear, there has been a shift in that the government infrastructure of a state has diminished authority to indoctrinate or exercise exclusive control over narrative, because this has been contingent on authorities monopolising access to sensitive information. With the advent of institutions such as online information feeds and Wikileaks, we are seeing the capacity of information technology to disrupt the official flows of information. Contemporary paradigms are revealing a destruction of the dichotomy in power and authority between the government and the people.

This is creating new worlds of potential shifts in the power to narrate the 69 public consciousness. Power over information represents a new widespread political influence.

The merging of place

The Information Age brings an element of omnipresence to information.

Advancing technology means that we possess a greater ability to bridge gaps of distance. Communication is unifying previously disparate locations. With an unprecedented number of electronic options available, information from any source is essentially everywhere. Cloud computing means location is irrelevant to obtaining information even highly idiosyncratic to a location. Images, sounds and data can be summoned instantaneously across vast distances, deemphasising our geography based map of the world

(Virilio 2002, 13). We are internalising, as in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics (Maor 2009) (see section “Non-locality” in Chapter 4), that our idea that anything has a specific “location” is an ideology that we artificially impose, coming into existence through mutual consensus. Web sites are perceived as tangible because the idea is seen as more important than the thing. Baudrillard commented on the sign filled world of Las Vegas:

"Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map." (Selected Writings 1988, 166). We are increasingly embracing the idea that we traverse a conceptual plane to travel, as opposed to a physical one. The notion of hyperreality (Baudrillard 1994, 23) is occurring on a more psychologically fundamental level than that of mere 70 signs, becoming subsumed into mundane notions of everyday reality.

Technological advancements have allowed widening engagement with this notion on an unconscious level, impacting the collective consciousness.

Thus, technology is making more apparent the understanding that ideological narratives create new temporary realities whose lifespan is subject to the duration of wide agreement on the paradigms that construct these worlds.

Deep unification

Implicit in the digitisation of civilisation is a movement towards unification between ideas at the deepest level of consciousness that is manifesting as a more contingent, indeterminate re-conceptualisation of social patterns. Lévi-

Strauss argued through structural anthropology that the discreteness between theses and antitheses are incorporated into the foundations of authoritative institutions that are themselves deeply ingrained in culture, describing a “"super-technique" of social and political activity, which makes life possible and determines the forms it takes" (2008, 357). The inherent fragility of binary opposition manifests in the triad, in that thought structures based on this discreteness are poised to be undermined in discourse. An example of this is the undermining of the specious categorisations of through the ways in which sub-cultural variation is becoming more facilitated by online communities, as has occurred in straight edge forums allowing like-minded young people to interact free from parental restrictions on movement (Williams and Copes 2005). The restrictions placed on subjectivity by established cultural institutions now have a looser grasp on social processes. Perceptions of society in this way are drifting away from the 71 prescriptions of consciously intended structures. We are moving beyond the superficial to a more unified view of interaction.

Aspects of the virtual world such as online communities have shown us how easy it is becoming to bring new narratives into existence. The apparent stability of our traditional categories is faltering through the imaginary worlds we are capable of creating, ultimately building our potential to create realities built out of new concepts. We are realising that consciousness, as existing at the socially divided level of the apparently “real” world, is indistinct from the unconstructed idea space of the virtual. The Information Age portrays our world as built from narratives that only have nonspecific elements in common. Inception explores this in its depiction of “limbo”, a plane of “pure unconstructed subconscious”. The virtual mirrors such a point of origin in that it has come to represent a fundamental level at which ideas are unseparated, and the specific constructs produced by conscious thinking are as imaginary as they are real. Global culture is now inhabiting a paradigm in which we regularly deal with the existence of such a unified plane of ideas and consciousness. In the online environment, Dadaist memes and other constructs can capriciously emerge and become institutionalised, as in the case of Nicholas Cage’s face becoming an icon for insanity (Henne 2015).

This is generating the notion that concepts that we habitually hold as immutable are the manifestation of epistemic constructs that are merely idiosyncratic to particular unconscious assumptions. In this way, information technology may present a vindication of dual-aspect monism, which accounts for mind and matter as aspects of a unified underlying domain that nonetheless manifest differently on a superficial level (Atmanspacher 2012). 72

Here separation is the façade of an underlying unity. As we experience this through the Information Age, our reality is being unconstructed, because we are becoming aware of our role in creating the narratives of our world.

Cloud computing and shifting contexts

Commercial video download services emerged in the 1990s (Zambelli 2013), and have constituted the digitisation of a medium previously available only in the physical form of video tape or disk. Now, online services allow videos to be streamed online in real time. This relegates the role of the contextual frame of the content to an online server, a remote location abstracted from the attention of the user. While downloading files represents a digitisation of the content, cloud computing is a virtualisation of the medium itself. In the same manner as a paradigm shift, the framework is superseded, mastered in a way that leaves behind the chance to manipulate it. These shifts in context are reflected in our art-forms. Conceptual art emerged in the 1960s and examines the creation and reception of art, instead of just being another stylistic method (Buchloh 1990). George Brecht’s 1961 piece One and Three

Chairs, which consisted of an installation featuring a chair, a photograph of the chair, and a printed dictionary definition of the word "chair", showcased meaning, intention and reference in art (Kotz 2005). In today’s Web 2.0 era, it has been observed that commentary is the new content (Ehrlich 2011). User- generated Twitter comments (“tweets”) and YouTube commentary videos have themselves become sources of revenue and online discussion (Tam and Sherr 2015) (Grundberg 2014). The reflective positioning of oneself in a greater context of shared consciousness is replacing the banalities of the 73 specifics of narratives. Our theories develop by being continuously contextualised; we cannot change a theory without standing back from it. In this way our own epistemological assumptions are entering the reach of our perception.

Boundaries as ideation

Socio-political distinctions are being subjected to the decreased emphasis on geography occurring today. Benedict Anderson identified cultural artefacts as having begun as "discrete historical forces" but later becoming "capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations" (2006, location 165).

This trend of abstraction has surged in the Information Age, with the underlying narratives of states retaining influence, but now accompanied by an increased self-awareness in their people about their own role in writing these narratives. While the notions of separate cultures, ethnic groups or nations manifest in events in the real world, they are being re-conceptualised as simultaneously being narratives that we bring into being by speaking about them and institutionalising their ideas in our language (Roberts 2013,

65-66). The online virtual world Second Life harbours an actual Maldivian embassy (Sydney Morning Herald 2007), meaning that part of the Maldives’ soil exists in the imaginary construct rendered by Second Life’s programming code. There is a growing recognition that borders are fundamentally imaginings that facilitate bureaucracy. The spatial relativity that exists 74 between ostensive locations occurs within computerised virtual worlds, in which the imaginary concept of distance is merely a nominal allegory.

Moreover, in our experiencing this nominal of distance daily through information technology, there has developed an increasing recognition of the intrinsic property of mental construction in the abstract concepts of distance and distinct locations. What follows from this realisation is that ideas can be locations. Such a notion has already become prevalent in our language. The

Windows ‘95 operating system was marketed with the slogan “Where do you want to go today?”, emphasising the idea of being able to change one’s imaginary environment with a graphic vividness lacking in previous media.

When we follow a hyperlink to a web page on the Internet, we are said to “go to” it. In prevailing thought systems, virtual worlds are achieving the same legitimacy as physical places. The distinction between the two is being found to be, in the most abstract sense, only nominal. The concept of a location is becoming amalgamated as a shared dream as in William Gibson’s fictional consensual hallucination (Pressman 2014, 145). The capability of the virtual to produce any graphic is consolidating the notion of the Internet is a world of pure imagination. In being virtualised, states have in turn regressed, in the collective mind of the public, into a unified mass of indistinct ideas, whose boundaries, while having real effects, are increasingly impermanent.

Flexibility in conceptual functionality

The digitisation of societal functions is affording new flexibility that reveals the increased potential of technology that exists when conceptualised on a theoretical level. The transition of telephone calls from a mechanism to an 75 execution in a software application subsequently has meant room has been made for other apps composed of their own unique programming.

Movements such as this allow a paradigm of versatility and constant transformation. The primordial of technology such as telephones and books are purist in their functionality, whereas their new incarnations of smartphones and e-books are more versatile and undermine the paradigm that these things can be anchored to a particular physical form. Content is, with new visibility, becoming form. Television sets and computers used to do two separate things, but having certain functions restricted to specific devices is becoming a passing phase. The Internet, as an intangible, omnipotent medium, is the embodiment of this flexibility today. As a result of this emerging intangibility, daily thoughts are shifting away from physical objects.

Through available technology, we are increasingly realising that the functionality of an object operates on a conceptual level rather than a physical one. The potential inherent in imagination is being increasingly realised.

Time compression

Featherstone argued that everyday life is in part characterised by "an emphasis upon the present which provides a non-reflexive sense of immersion in the immediacy of current experiences and activities" (1995, 55).

This dominant thought system is relatively absent of the ability to think abstractly and conceptualise alternative potential paradigms. When we are not aware that we live in a world of potential, we lack ironic perspective, and we neglect perceiving institutions’ composition and the fact that they 76 construct accepted narratives. With a fundamental lack of construction comes potential that can be exploited. It is at this launching point that the seed of an institution can be planted most effectively. Featherstone refers to these ideological constructions as “institutional domains” (1995, 55). He characterises this level of existence as colloquial and un-ironic. In this framework, we merely fulfil a role in someone else’s narrative. This is the traditional popular culture as described in Adorno’s “mass culture”: it is “a kind of training for life when things have gone wrong” (Adorno 2005, 91). Pop culture, itself, has been argued by author Shirley Fedorak as forming the core of culture (Fedorak 2009, 3), representative of everyday life in general. In this framework, institutions and concepts are internalised, and their portrayal equates to actors and their relationships creating narratives. An example is the “larrikin” concept in Australia, a term from its colonial time that describes an unruly or uncultured person, and represents the anti-authority psyche that has manifested in Australian culture (Hodge, et al. 2010, 14). In this example a mythology has been internalised and subsequently informed broader social processes on a level that lies beneath the consciousness of everyday life.

Benedict Anderson employs Benjamin’s concept of Messianic time as a timeless form of consciousness that forms the foundation of the "genesis of ", presenting narratives of nation-states as emerging from a more primordial state of simultaneity (Anderson 2006, 24-25). In this view, time is not sequential or segmented through cause and effect, but characterised by a “prefiguring and fulfilment” that unifies past and future in the present. The consolidation of narrative obscures this, creating a demarcation that allows theatres of sequence to occur. 77

I would argue, however, that popular culture is now becoming aware of the irony of manufactured narratives. The virtual has become seen as a world of combined tense, in which all past and present is simultaneously available to us. Castells suggests that the growing capacity for information to be instantaneous means the development of a "timeless time" or "virtual time" representing an eternal present (Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, et al. 2007,

171). The digitisation of society grants a visible accessibility to the ideological composition inherent in imaginary worlds. Animals can also be regarded as perceiving their existence in this way, not situating themselves intellectually within a narrative. With little capacity for thinking outside of their present situations (Lavoie 2008), they largely do not acknowledge sequence. This can be thought of as a representation of the way in which time is treated in today’s online environment, and is being put to use. Jenkins has observed that various institutions are now using models of operation that utilise community participation, in recognition of the new convergence paradigm of (Jenkins 2006). Grand narratives are no longer determined by state actors in a linear sequence. Widespread participation means that narratives are increasingly collaborative and therefore non-linear.

There is now widely distributed opportunity to learn to manipulate the conceptual ideals that guide the construction of consensual reality with a degree of depth that is determined by abstract understandings of technology.

In this way, the separation between paradigms, which compartmentalises knowledge through the concept of nominal eras, is undermined as the collective consciousness becomes influenced through the dynamics of 78 ubiquitous individual participation. The potential in paradigms existing in simultaneity is being recognised.

Images and words

Through the reconfiguration of the world as an ordered and arranged digital construct, the theoretical is becoming more visible. There is an abstraction occurring in what could be characterised as a shift from explicit theory to symbolic imagery. Theory is no longer merely theory, but is being seen as having the capacity to create an image of the world. Contemporary technology—including virtual worlds, sophisticated and advancements in academic theory—has determined that words can more readily become vivid; imaginary stories can take on many qualities of the solid world, making them more convincing. This is representative of a transition between reverence of the superficial explication of words and that of the more nebulous but more deeply expressive symbolism of images. In this way, there is a growing consciousness of the power of the symbols that underlie and compose the visual.

Symbols are used to represent themes that collectively form the framework of a narrative. The existence of virtual worlds comes about through a coherent narrative in the form of programming code; it is only through this narrative of symbolic code that the virtual world can visually exist. The more vivid a world of imagery, the deeper the demonstrated understanding of how to create worlds. Its symbols will be more resonant and the emotional impact of its symbols’ themes, even if they are purely reactions to the aesthetic, will be deeper. This applies also to fiction: the emotional resonance of a fictional 79 world depends on sympathetic characters (Walsh 1997) and a story composed of relatable themes (Prince 1992, 2). The use of concepts that resonate is central to the creation of worlds that appear real.

As politics is based on the notional existence of institutions, it is theoretical by nature. Politics is much more visual today due to information technology

(Rainey and Medley 2013). Our increased ability to synthesise graphics electronically means we are increasingly living in world of visuals. Irony, in the same way, means that words are no longer accepted as representing discrete or monolithic concepts; that is, we are seeing a continuum in their underlying substance because there is more graphalogical engagement with them. Words are seen merely as constructions. Current trends involve corporate logos that are pictures as well as words; the line between the two forms is becoming blurred. Hence concepts can morph when they are viewed through higher levels of irony. This recent shift is revealing that we can change what the aspects of modern culture mean to us by conceptualising them differently. This capacity will be expanded upon in Chapter 7.

Reality returning to its source

Through contemporary paradigms, reality could be said to be returning to its source as a primarily information-based construction. Reality can be understood to occur as degrees of information complexity, which can be illustrated by conceptualising them in terms of the three dimensions.

Saussure, Derrida and Lévi-Strauss all made arguments involving the narratives on which we base our worldviews emerging through the supposed distinctions between concepts on some level of consciousness (Strozier 80

1988, 140-141, 231) (Patte 1976, 56-57). Diogenes Laertius stated that this concept of duality is the dyad, from which numbers, points, lines, and two- dimensional entities emerge, as well as, ultimately, the fully formed constructs of the rest of our world (Rist 1965). The vector created by two such points of binary opposition constitutes a one dimensional line. However, the gaining of an ironic perspective makes us step back from the idea of opposites. The progression of this self-conscious irony introduces the notion that the two points of the vector can be plotted on a larger map, and that the line can diverge, which implies a second dimension. The vernacular of the

Information Age, such as “the fabric of spacetime” and “surfing the Internet”, illustrates that we unconsciously picture information as a flat, two- dimensional surface. As the Internet is increasingly a collaborative human production participated in by everyone, it provides us with a representation of the fact that we plot such maps of ideas ourselves. This awareness provides a further layer of abstraction. The notion of reality emerges when graspable physical objects arise from the two-dimensional blueprint or conceptual map.

This enforces present paradigms by giving the narrative depth and substance, making it appear real. Today 3D printers are a manifestation of this, reflecting the notion in the holographic universe theory that existence is an initially flat fabric that manifests as having depth.

However, such a sequence of incremental irony is circular in that its perpetual distance from truth means that it never produces an ultimate view of truth. Once irony develops to an unmanageable state of inauthenticity, we tend to go back to the foundations of thought systems so that we can continually overhaul them (this is examined in more detail in the section “The 81 past as a context” in Chapter 3). This is an idea that was illustrated by

McLuhan’s idea of both cubism and cinema representing a paradigm in which attention is drawn to the means through which the illusion of reality is constructed. “Instead of the specialized illusion of the third dimension on canvas, cubism sets up an interplay of panes and contradiction or dramatic conflict of patterns, lights, textures that “drives home the message” by involvement. This is held by many to be an exercise in painting, not illusion.”

(1994, 13). This ability to reinvent views of reality is represented by the digitisation of our daily existence, in that it creates new potential for us to rearrange its foundations.

Directions of paradigms

The integration between formerly separate software is paralleling that between formerly distinct institutional systems as the Information Age advances. An example of this is the bureaucratic organisation of the

European Union (Laursen 1999), which represents a convergence of governmental protocols. As a subsequence of the sacrifice of direct control for convenience, global protocols for bureaucracy are becoming more and more necessary for technological efficiency. In the interest of the global delivery and interoperability of services from governments and businesses, the establishment of electronic protocols is required (Janssen, et al. 2010, 3-

4) (Kettl 2005, 44-46). The result of this is homogenous, ubiquitous technological narratives. Particularly in recent years, Apple Inc. has achieved popularity through the neat integration between its software products, creating a “self-reinforcing cycle” (Iansiti and Richards 2009), partially 82 contributing to a trend towards convergence. In Understanding Media,

McLuhan claims that in the era of the electronic, the rich have the same possessions as the poor because the commodification of an object naturally leads to its wide distribution (1994, 134). A manifestation of this can today be seen as occurring in information systems, through the homogenisation of consumer technology. Recently, the smartphone market has been dominated by a duopoly of the iOS and Android operating systems (Thomson 2013).

The marketing of mass produced products to a large range of consumers has resulted in persons of working class status acquiring the same models of products possessed by the exceedingly wealthy. We are seceding to a paradigm of unified ideas moving increasingly in concert, bringing us closer to awareness of a pre-existing unity between them. The Information Age means that paradigms are now more palpable. The characteristics of prevalent paradigms are more explicitly being represented in the form of quantified information. “Trends” on social networking sites coordinate what the public at large is aware of, and our knowledge of these trends in turn reinforces them (Lever 2013). Kalle Lasn’s concept of “cool”, a term he uses as a mass noun to denote market share, reflects this hegemonic structure

(Pickerel, Jorgensen and Bennett 2002). Through the nature of integration, the necessity for unified protocols is creating a self-feeding entity of coordination. Our tastes are becoming synchronised and thus paradigms more fertile and volatile, making systematised narrative and its in technology an increasingly inescapable phenomenon. Through this process of digital consolidation, there is increased consciousness of whatever paradigm is in effect at a given time. This in turn means an 83 increased ability to manipulate paradigms; being aware of something moves us one step closer to being able to consciously influence it. Virtualisation, in this way, is leading to the ability to intercept the unconscious internalisation of narratives. Paradoxically, the increased pervasiveness of paradigms also facilitates ironic views of them, as the same technology that enables their propagation also quantifies and clearly frames them so that it is easy to be self-conscious of them.

Conclusion

The movement of content such as speech, material objects and services is being governed increasingly by digital frameworks. The world as a mechanical construction of discrete moving parts is rapidly being transformed into a fluid electric construction that largely depends on movements of electricity that are free to become any visual content. Electronic processes mean that narrative's capacity to manifest in different forms is being symbolised and realised amongst us in everyday life. The aspects of global culture that are being subjected to digitisation are leading to a paradigm of softness, in which software and intangible digitised constructs are favoured over physical objects. This is creating an abstraction from emphases on material aspects of globalised culture so that our lives are increasingly virtual, acted out through our ideas. In physical matter, softness is accompanied by malleability. This is reflected in the increased capacity we are exercising in shaping shifts in consciousness through understanding mindscapes online. In having more accurately identified public thoughts as substances that are increasingly represented digitally, we have more potential to readily 84 rearrange them through the virtual to create different narrative frameworks.

Like the process of precipitation forming clouds, the more mass or data that the clouds have, the more likely they are to rain down on the ground, hitting us on the head and making us realise that even though we can’t touch them, they have substance. The more the substance of our daily activities is put into the form of downloads, the more we realise the increasingly abstract nature of what matters to and affects us. The digitisation of information turns the most important aspects of our lives into abstractions, meaning that the notion of an abstract world becomes increasingly inescapable. Information technology is making this idea concrete for us, so that we are engaging more with the notion that we can manipulate shifts in thought structures.

Digitisation, the abstraction of daily life into a less tangible form, is the most ostensible mechanism through which technology is shifting the perception of the context in which we experience reality towards a metanarrative. Concepts previously defined in the collective consciousness by physical presence are being reframed as the arrangement of information—narratives. The Internet’s collectivisation of narratives as a unified context is creating a view of discrete concepts as only surface representations of a greater substrate. I will next demonstrate the degrees between the tangible conscious world and the less tangible unconscious one as manifesting in the culture of the Information

Age.

85

Chapter 3: Dreams and levels of consciousness

In his book Neuromancer, William Gibson described cyberculture as a

"consensual hallucination" that is "a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data" (1984, 51). The idea of our sharing a collective dream through electronic media has been widely popularised by cyberpunk literature and films such as 1999’s The Matrix. As we experience this through our now regular engagement with virtual environments, this idea is not argued as much as lived. But what type of picture is this, in turn, creating of the institutions of the waking world? Psychologically and physiologically, we see consciousness as occurring in different states, represented by varying levels of sleep and wakefulness. A sleepy person may be described as “half- asleep”, while awareness is used as a synonym for consciousness.

Consciousness can be conceptualised as existing on a spectrum with distinct characteristics attributable to the various points on that spectrum. I will use this notion to illustrate a corresponding incremental shift in awareness occurring through technological change. We perceive reality differently at different states of consciousness, just as water occurs in the different states of matter: gas, liquid and solid. I would argue that these states of fluidity speak of the journey beyond paradigms that the Information Age represents. 86

Metaphorically, global culture can be said to be falling into a deeper sleep while simultaneously becoming more awake. This describes the concept of a lucid dream, in which the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming. In a lucid dream, purer forms of possibility are achieved through the unification of concepts. In this way, a higher and more encompassing level of self- awareness is being attained. At the same time, through this dream-like awareness, we are also able to see beyond our limited view of reality and thereby manipulate the intrinsic parameters of ideology through which we construct our narratives. With the Information Age, globalised culture is experiencing a transformative process of attaining a heightened capacity for awareness of itself. I will argue that at the same time, the concept of a metanarrative is drawing us towards a reality speaking of a more unified, more catalytic plane of consciousness, at which constructed frameworks converge. The ultimate sum of this is the capacity to not only perceive entrenched narratives but to attain some authorship of them.

McLuhan portrayed the common substrate between paradigms as having the quality of continuity, declaring that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium” (1994, 8). In this view, the units of analysis on which paradigms are predicated are not wholly replaced in a paradigm shift, but are transformed. In a world in which ideas are viewed on a continuum that allows them to merge and divide, concepts once considered discrete more closely resemble one combined substance than distinct objects. This is now becoming concrete through the recognition of the inherent intertextuality of the Internet and the ability of identity to shift as revealed through online avatars. The new rise in popular media of works that question the 87 fundamental tangibility of the real world, such as Inception further illustrate a growing awareness of this.

In order to outline the perception of a spectrum of consciousness that I argue is a reflection of this change, I will provide a model that compares the different levels of consciousness represented in the digital age and how they are seen as manifesting as our perceived realities. To provide a view of this process, I will explore the ego’s role in the formation of narratives, which comprise a separation of concepts yielding the notion of individuality and the ensuing thought structures. Completing this illustration, I will account for the manifestation of solid forms at the level of conscious awareness. I will outline how this readily visible reality that we experience at the most ostensible level is influenced by ideas that originate epistemologically. It is through these arguments that I intend to illustrate that the nature of dreams and levels of consciousness are representative of the transformation of the way we regard reality.

In order to envisage the less tangible reality that we are transitioning into, this must be contrasted with previous views of reality as solid or permanent. I will illustrate how imaginary constructions become less questioned as they reach the surface level of consciousness, and conversely unravel as their underlying premises are delved into. This visible reabsorption of narratives into a larger pool or context from which they originate is what I will argue information technology is bringing about. With this understanding, we move towards a more self-aware view of the paradigms that we inhabit, as the roots of their power are seen as deeper and independent. Paradigms are reframed as dreams, able to come into existence at any time. Dreams can 88 illustrate our movement towards the metanarrative through virtual worlds’ portrayal of reality as collectively consensual and continually revised, the way that information convergence renders the collective consciousness real in the mind of the public, the capacity of ideas to be seeded in consciousness through archetypal structures and the reframing of the past as context rather than something no longer existent. Later in the thesis I will use the identification of the metanarrative as hidden, unconscious and collective to argue for its reach and the fundamental nature of its influence.

Reality as a shared dream

Institutional hallucinations

The digitisation of organisational systems reflects the nature of our constructed institutions as being analogous to a shared dream, both in terms of its unification of society’s ideas and its real and vivid effects. The Internet, as a venue that increasingly embodies the home for all forms of media, is an aggregation of current knowledge and ideas, both through the conscious intentions behind its content and through what it reveals inadvertently about the zeitgeist. Correspondingly, the way in which the bureaucratic and political institutions of daily life are agreed upon in a collective consciousness (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 33-34) is analogous to the kind of reality we see in dreams in that these situations are shared imaginings, temporary narratives that increasingly have the capacity to reflect the current psyche. Through involving the input of an increasing portion of the population, online entities have the capacity to reflect paradigms. 89

The digitisation of information is reducing human involvement in everyday management and bureaucracy, and allowing organisational processes to become increasingly automatic. Through this act of programming, cultural institutions such as bureaucracy, laws and corporations are becoming more explicitly constructed. Applications of information technology are essentially becoming seen as collectivised and systematised ideological constructions.

Historically, self-maintaining technology has imposed an adherence to its own ways of constructing the world, shaping societal behaviour. The Google search engine for example has grown more dynamic, incorporating the management of individual-based information as well as publically available information. This ubiquity enables Google to make suggestions based on personal data and make itself an integral part of the user's life. Extensions of digital systems of organisation can potentially include more physically autonomous elements such as L.E.D. road signs that can dynamically adapt to particular traffic conditions (Millward 2011) and more sophisticated approximations of human intelligence in artificially intelligent self-service stations. As a result, the capacity for our institutions to be converted into vivid virtual constructions increases. Potential exists for the functioning of entities such as government websites to be predicated on programming code that is designed to reflect changes in relevant data, such as legal statutes and current events, in real time. The real world in this way develops an attribute of transient lucidity equating that of dreams. Ideologised organisation extends itself invisibly, becoming an entity that simultaneously is seen as imaginary in its theoretical nature while having real effects. While it is in the nature of a paradigm’s intrinsic ideology to do this, contemporary technology is making 90 this more obvious. The effects of intangible institutions in this way become increasingly tangible. Through information technology, society is increasingly experienced as being dreamed into existence.

An extension of the notion of the cyborg—as defined as the combination of humans with physical technological enhancements—is the incarnation of technology that has not yet reached the full physical of robotics.

The notion that artificial intelligence can be expected to replace human consciousness in all capacities depends on the notion of the technological singularity, which involves a total transcendence of the need for manual control in machines that are predicated on binary (Vinge 2003) (Sandberg

2013, 376-377). However, there already exists precedents to the replacement of humans in certain areas. Before smart traffic lights, simple traffic lights replaced human traffic directors in developed regions because the situation benefits from a simple level of consistency and automation.

However, more sophisticated programming that can be enhanced by the filtering of live, organised information poses a level of functionality that can potentially perform other traditionally human roles. A study by Oxford scientists estimates that 47% of the United States workforce is “at risk” of replacement by automated technology (Frey and Osborne 2013). Included in this is the driverless cars project by Google, which is poised to have a transformative impact on chauffeuring activities (Knapp 2011). Further, modern drones and other robots co-opt aspects of military manoeuvring, relegating much of the burden to software (Singer 2009). Social structures such as law, bureaucracy and by extension social trends are being shaped increasingly by computerisation. 91

Additionally, the products of conscious thought can be integrated into technology. While artificial intelligence as defined as artificial would seem to contradict full autonomy, through its collection of information provided by the activities of humans, it gains the functional characteristic of fulfilling human roles. With electronic interfaces increasingly being online, human input can be stored and used for the imitated appearance of consciousness, as has been achieved in the A.I. called Cleverbot. Cleverbot is an artificially intelligent online chat robot that has been operational since 1997. Its premise is that it “learns” from the verbal interactions it has with users who visit the

Cleverbot website. It adopts phrases and conversational flow from those who interact with it. The result is an A.I. that integrates the input it has received into its output to give the appearance of a conversation in natural English, essentially making it an amalgam of the consciousness of a range of different individuals. This merging is an instance of the overarching history of paradigms facilitating its own unification through technology. These changes in information technology feed the growing interdependence between the physical and virtual worlds: information reacts to the physical environment and the virtual world takes on an increased presence in it. This connection is becoming increasingly perceptible, and reinforces in the mind of the public the presence of the virtual and imaginary in the real.

Virtual worlds as collective dreams

Like dreams, both virtual constructions and institutions represent consciousness being altered into a vivid structure. The example of the digital

Maldivian embassy in Second Life undermines traditional geopolitics by 92 expanding the definition of a nation to include purely abstract, conceptual landmass. Our world as an institutionalised construction is dipping its toes into the waters of the intangible. It is only recently that we are collectively becoming conscious of the basis of these narratives as ideological construction, with institutions predicated on such false distinctions diminishing (Castells 2010, xxix). This parallels and corresponds to the advancing sophistication of digital virtual constructs: our developing ability to weave complex and convincing virtual environments is being accompanied by a resulting realisation that vivid realities can be brought about entirely by persistent and institutionalised conceptualisation. As mentioned in the previous chapter, purely theoretical constructions, such as virtual worlds are becoming considered “places”. This change comes as we grasp what the principles of a place are: a fundamentally intangible plane whose characteristics and parameters we, consciously or unconsciously, determine.

The notion of space as socially constructed that Lefebvre developed (1991,

26) is becoming realised through constantly shifting “cyberspace”. Our contemporary internalisation of cyberspace terms and activities reflect that we are becoming more conscious of this process.

Source of collective dreams

While William Gibson conceptualised cyberculture as a shared dream and consensual hallucination, this insight has implications beyond that of a collective consciousness. The nature of the Internet as an unlimited, publicised collection of worldwide content is conditioning the public psyche with the notion of a vast pool of narrative material. Being made to engage 93 with such technology is exposing us to its potential, which is naturally affecting our corresponding perception of reality, as other technology has done previously. An analogy exists between the constructs of virtual worlds and institutions, such as nations and political leaders: information about our environment can only ever be idiosyncratic to the psyches and mental frameworks of the individuals involved, and so these conceptions of the

“common sense reality” become mere amalgams representing current understandings. They are constructions that reflect the aggregate limitations of current theory; they are never direct reflections of reality, but reflections of dominant ideas. In this way our technology increasingly takes the role of a meta-awareness: the Internet itself is a more comprehensive documentation of human consciousness and the tale of how it transforms, incorporating the established “canon” and the views of laypeople. We can compare online posts from diverse time periods and regions and note changing trends in thinking. Information technology is advancing at an exponential rate, as described in Moore’s law (Moore 2006, 67). This correlates to increasingly rapid transformations in culture being facilitated by the efficiency in the movement of electronic information. Culture changes to a large extent in response to understanding, which is dictated by the mobility of information.

With Westernised culture developing increasingly immediate connectivity between sources of knowledge, societies are changing at increasing speeds

(as mentioned previously, change that is spurred by wide access to knowledge has been documented in France’s introduction to the printing press). The increasing speed in the transition between cultural movements as made visible on the Internet allows the precedent for understanding the 94 superficial transience of knowledge. As described earlier, Google Glass, as an interface that determines what the user sees when they look at their surroundings, is a representation of the increasingly widespread understanding that the lenses through which we view our world is filtered through an agreed upon structure of information, which can be edited to the extent that we are aware of it. This is a technological representation that we are becoming more capable of harnessing awareness itself as a tool for shaping human culture as a world of information. This informs an understanding of the malleability of paradigms, and the more consistent underlying ideas from which they are constructed.

Awareness of awareness, by its nature, is a higher or “meta” awareness.

Gaining a distanced perspective of a comparatively simplistic ideology is equivalent to transcending some of the false dichotomies of its binary opposition, in this way reconciling ideals that were previously theorised as distinct from each other. The shift from one paradigm to another highlights a continuity in meaning between conceptual nodes. While Kuhn argued for a mode of sequence involving the replacement of one paradigm with another, convergence is now being seen to be intrinsic to technological advancement; as outlined earlier, it demonstrates a history of merging media and functionality. With technology becoming more abstracted as more software than hardware and being reconceptualised as fundamentally conceptual, information is increasingly aggregated. As such, each new paradigm offers more visible opportunities to view a framed history of paradigms. There is the common thread of a shift towards a meta-understanding; intrinsic to the nature of paradigm shifts is a movement towards a unified pool of narratives. 95

Peter Elbow apprehended this when he said that metaphor is a device that advances our understandings, in that we locate a connection between two seemingly unrelated concepts (1986, 33). This can be used to grasp that the conscious world, which uses analogies as the bases of understanding, is becoming seen as abstracted from the world of the unified unconscious, but that metaphor reveals the underlying continuity that speaks of this unified foundation.

This unity is represented in dreams, where figures and objects can morph in form and identity (Kummer 2007). As we are experiencing in the virtual, they need not be as static as their real life equivalents. The Information Age is leading us towards a dream world of unification; like sandcastles on a beach, all of its objects can merge and separate due to the fact that they are, at their core, the same substance. This unifying substance that is analogous to an underlying dream world constitutes a pool from which new narratives are uttered. Paradigm shifts occur through insights that are in some way concealed, emerging from a level of consciousness of sufficient depth to be yet unshaped by intellectualisation. I would argue that through the kind of meta-textual awareness encoded in the digital world, our intellectualised constructions are being conceptualised as having a deeper and more unified source in a collective “waking unconscious” the limits of whose awareness is not determined by the frameworks of the conscious world.

The dreamlike unification of information

Institutions such as omnipresent online account systems and the digitisation and pooling of information constitute a unification of areas that previously 96 were separated by the notion that geographic distance made them discrete from one another. This unification reflects properties consistent with a dream world that transcends form, including the dismantling of discreteness between concepts, the increased presence of archetypal symbols through the increased importance of imagery, the capacity for objects to be conjured from nothing, and the ability to think from outside the perspective of given epistemes. Each of these properties can be perceived in Information Age paradigms, as I outline in the following section.

As in one cell’s division into two, we may perceive two institutionalised concepts as discrete, but examining their genesis reveals that they are only instances of the same genetic information with a unified origin in the D.N.A.

Likewise, two different nation states may be revealed as an arbitrary division of landmass, and two electronic images can be shown to be bits merely arranged differently. Information technology is involving increased engagement with the nature of information for the sake of controlling its movement and form, and this is revealing the ultimate unity of concepts.

Indexing, accessing and communicating information requires familiarisation with how information is able to be used, from both engineering and consumption perspectives. Through this, a new recognition of the role of constructed ideology in affecting the popular consciousness is arising. As

Gleick has found, there is a movement towards the self-awareness of information, claiming "Each new information technology, in its own time, off blooms in storage and transmission... Each new one throws its predecessors into relief" and that "history is the story of information becoming aware of itself" (2011, location 231). This is antithetical to the idea that we 97 are inevitably only immersed in the particular paradigm we happen to live in at a given time, as in Featherstone’s aforementioned idea (1995, 55).

Humankind is developing the ability to stand back and gain perspective from outside of the given episteme, which is facilitating the recognition that the world’s theoretical constructions are ultimately temporary thoughts from limited viewpoints. The global mindscape is gaining the self-awareness of a lucid dream, in which we simultaneously acknowledge the potential of the world we live in while harbouring an awareness that the structures of the collective consciousness represent manifestations of underlying .

Psychometric researchers are now monitoring the changing popularity of various cultural sites through the Web 2.0 user inputs of "likes" and "upvotes"

(Lever 2013). This offers a venue in which even the most miniscule manifestations of the contemporary human condition can be subjected to analysis. The software used for this has further been made available as an app that any user can access. Through technology such as this, society as a collection of Internet users has increased access to understanding of the nature of the thought processes that compose the zeitgeist. Through being aware of the ingredients of our conception of reality, and the capricious ways in which they shift, the world is increasingly being portrayed in media as a construction.

In this way we become more aware of the processes through which ideas shape society. This represents the way in which ideas and words shape reality as signs, which gives us an insight as to their power. Theory itself is built out of the usage of signs, analogous to the symbols that are used in 98 dreams, hence our ability to interpret and perceive the world is dependent on our arranged knowledge of that world, whether the theory exists in the form of knowledge accepted canonically in society, or thought processes internal to the individual. The day-to-day minutiae of contemporary life are showcased on the Internet through symbols. These can take forms such as torrents of brief textual updates, as in tweets, and comedy macros— humorous images accompanied by a particular font that communicate an idea that has become universal in the public consciousness. Web 2.0 acts as a curator of dominant ideas. Image sharing sites such as Imgur juxtapose memes and emergent ideas, providing a vivid picture of the zeitgeist.

Understanding these institutions of the collective consciousness is the first step towards being able to manipulate them and conjure new dreams of reality.

If the narrative of human history were a story, the stage at which it achieves transcendence into a metanarrative could be conceptualised as an epilogue, a commentary that has enough distance from the story to contextualise its significance. While the metanarrative itself transcends sequence, the conceptualisation of the metanarrative as a framework is occurring after the paradigm of sequential narratives. This represents a culmination of awareness. Invariably, awareness shrinks ideologies to the status of smaller parts of a more sophisticated machine as a newer paradigm. Gaining an awareness of awareness itself, or being conscious of consciousness, makes sophistication and advancement secondary; we are then dealing with the intangible forces behind information itself. Concepts then lose relevance—it is the context of ideas that forms our new habitat. Such a unified underlying 99 source of concepts is what Jung’s aforementioned concept of the unus mundus described (Aziz 1990, 57-58), albeit only in the most abstract manner. Another description of such a world was provided in Indigenous

Australia in the form of the Dreamtime, from which archetypal templates and therefore ideas are said to originate and become reality (Rosenfeld 1988). To employ the analogy of states of water once more, concepts here exist in their initial state as liquid: they are versatile, collectivised, and must be exposed to the discriminating coldness of intellectual consciousness to be formed into solid and distinct apparitions. The Information Age is taking us towards this by melting down our concepts and pooling them together.

Paradigm towards the deepest dream level

As our technological progress continues, our consciously constructed societal structures are being subjected to what I have called “unconstruction” through the collectivisation of concepts represented on the Internet. As I outlined in the previous chapter, this extends to the concept of the self. This pooling of individuality represents a collectivisation of consciousness, invoking a transition from having an image of the self to having an image of the world. One is less isolated online; we increasingly form our views from a global perspective rather than a geo-culturally limited one. The collective result of this is that the concept of one psyche is emerging. Through social media, the thoughts of one person can influence the thought processes of the public. Allegorically this might be thought of as equivalent to an unconstructed level at which ideas have not yet divided to form personal narratives, representing that the Internet is returning our thinking to a unifying 100 dream world.

At the scale of an individual’s dreams, it has been argued that the forms that take place in this kind of reality are in service of a narrative that reflects the themes that are contextualised by a person's life (Yuan 1996) (Schwenger

2003). Objects and concepts tend to merge and divide in a way that creates characters that enact a narrative of which the dreamer is the audience. The forms of the concepts themselves are determined by the narrative. We are now experiencing conscious reality as analogous to this: our concepts are expressions of what our paradigms dictate, just as the figures in a story are shaped by what themes are intended to be expressed. In contrast to the smaller narratives, their genesis transcends the image of the self. Worldviews that are more globalised expand the cultural that Freud claimed is internalised in the concept of the cultural-superego (Lear 2005, 196). The scope of the narrative upon which the inner critic is based is more macrocosmic, and its constant fluctuations make it less hidden. This is providing a broader contextualisation of personal narratives.

The themes that manifest in reality are determined by the process of one paradigm begetting another. Shifts from awareness to awareness of awareness create a meta-perspective, and the ultimate paradigm takes the form of a paradigm about paradigms. Because understanding in the

Information Age "becomes making sense of the information and communicational flows" (Lash and Featherstone 2002, 17), cognisance of the operation of paradigm shifts becomes emphasised. In a manner reflecting the universe’s journey towards heat death, the intellectual organisation granted by experiencing paradigms one at a time is breaking down. We are 101 approaching intellectually a mass of paradigms that is unified as concurrent, with paradigms that are not mutually exclusive of one another but contextualised as a greater perspective that allows any of them to be invoked. The metanarrative, which we perpetually approach but fail to arrive at, is the punctuation occurring at the end of the continuity on which the history of collective human consciousness is set. As paradigms are being seen more as facets of reality than the reality itself, our potential to form images of the world is becoming more encompassing, which is reflected in our new ability to recreate the visual. In this paradigm, we are gaining a distanced perspective of perspective itself.

Levels of consciousness

The degree to which a mind is conscious determines its intellectualised

“awareness” of the world around it; the world seems more solid when the mind is more awake. The incremental levels of consciousness correspond to the apparent vividness of reality. As theorisations grow more sophisticated, they become more capable of weaving convincing narratives, but also abstracted from intuitive, primordial understandings. The levels of dreams that we experience are expressions of this: dreams in deeper sleep yield symbolism that relates to the more hidden parts of the dreamer’s psyche

(Freud 2010, 35). Accordingly, constructed concepts tend to break down at a level beneath the one of which we are immediately conscious. As I will explore in Chapter 4, this has an equivalent in particle physics in the Planck

Scale, in which the four fundamental forces of nature are speculated to be unified as one compelling governing force (Callender and Huggett 2001, 55). 102

While gravitation and electromagnetism are ideas lived out by the broad public consciousness in the sense that they are internalised and taken for granted, they become inadequate at this depth that lies beneath the narratives we inhabit. This is the same principle that ensures that we are incapable of witnessing the beginning of a dream; being able to perceive the epistemological basis of a constructed world that we intellectually inhabit creates a superior distance that causes us to consciously transcend or "wake up" from it. In our position as limited by our own consciousness, we cannot wake up from reality itself. While we conceptualise awareness as representing levels of consciousness, metanarrative may be considered intellectually unrealisable in the same way that Lacan characterised the Real as an absolute unable to be expressed through symbols (Johnston 2014).

Convergence of narratives through technology is portraying views of the world as tentative, teaching us that we are only facets of reality and can ultimately only tap into the nature of existence intuitively, not reach it intellectually through separations of concepts that are based on views of ourselves.

Narrative through symbolism

While dreams appear illogical when our knowledge of the real world is applied to them, thematic congruence has been interpreted in which psychological significance can be found, as was argued most notably by

Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (2010, 40, 180, 387). Freud outlined the way in which dreams are a reflection of the inner narratives of the individual: "The theme to which these dreams point is, of course, always the 103 history of the malady that is responsible for the neurosis". Surrealist art is a further avenue through which the unconscious narratives of dreams have been attempted to be brought into the conscious world (Criel 1952). The real world may express thematic narratives in the same way. There is, however, also a recognition that the hyper-conscious intellectualisation of the world, which is intrinsic to advancing technology, convolutes the thought structures that we engage with, making themes lose their primordial forms. In an era wherein we constantly engage with the virtual, this process of abstraction is constantly experienced. Information technology makes us act with the knowledge that there is concealed language that brings the visual world into existence. Globalised culture is ingraining in us the notion that the superficially apparent can be representative of an underlying narrative. The symbolism of a telephone is literally hidden behind layers of abstraction (a software term describing an operating system’s attempt to distance itself from the unintelligibility of source code) when it is turned from an object to a function on a multifunctional device; the same is, I would argue, occurring with the self in its abstraction from the body into bits of online information.

Distinct aspects of the conscious world are being experienced as being unified through a thematic congruence, one that occurs at a subterranean level. As in a dream, the potency of symbolic meaning and its engagement with archetypal forms depends on the depth of consciousness being experienced. In the same way, the virtualisation of the world is making it more dreamlike, and in our attempts to make it comprehensible using archetypes, we are becoming more receptive to the notion of unifying narratives. 104

The conscious level—consolidating institutions

In the conscious world, or what we call reality, we mentally inhabit the ideological parameters through which we have constructed our understanding of the world. We unconsciously build a reality for ourselves, accepting prevalent schemata for the sake of being able to theorise new understandings and add to existing ones in dominant protocol. Because we are forced to process our thoughts through such conceits, the associated ideological constructions become real in our minds. The long term institutionalisation of worldviews through bureaucratic structures means that lawmakers are inherently immersed in outdated paradigms. The increasingly kinetic properties of information in the Information Age means that those old enough to attain political office are predisposed, through their past , to future shock (Jordan 2008). The qualifications of nominal leaders become less applicable at an increasingly rapid pace with each generation. There have been instances of legislation falling behind advances.

Mobile phones were as recently as 2011 legally classified as computers in the United States (Lundberg 2013), despite them being widely available with computer functionality since 1994 (BBC 2014). This demonstrates that the rapidly expanding ubiquity of information technology is impeding decision making that attempts to contain it. Structuralist views contend that change is inhibited by the enforcement of traditions through unacknowledged assumptions that form self-fulfilling systems (Katz 1976, 45-46). This can be used to attribute visible movements in paradigms as “shifts” to an unpreparedness, as opposed to gradual, anticipated change: aggregate shifts in awareness occur through the previous state of awareness being 105 considered grossly inadequate. The ideological notions intrinsic in social narratives create ingrained realities, which have a monolithic presence that proves difficult to move. Our narratives are real to us, but invariably based on artificial categorisation, and exposed as inadequate when newly dynamic information flows disrupt them. The resulting exponential effects of information technology put the collective consciousness in a constant state of instability and revision that reflects the impermanence of dream worlds.

Un-ironic immersion

Featherstone’s previously mentioned characterisation of everyday life as being defined by a primary concern with the present (1995, 55) describes a mental framework that does not engage with awareness of the limits of our understandings. ’s maxim that truth can be directly grasped relies on discrete concepts, as it centres on scientific based on the human senses (Baldus 1990). This is at odds with any unified view, as intellectualisation involves units of analysis. This un-ironic level processes information in a nominal and prescribed manner, allowing no room for the questioning of underlying assumptions. In everyday life, there is seen to be less time for questioning, as concern only exists with fulfilling a normalised set of values effectively. Prior to the era of widespread social media use, this perpetual busyness was identified as one of the conditions of modernity as a reaction to a hyper-connected world (Lorimer 2005). This is the level of consciousness I refer to that does not engage in the abstract thought that allows one to conceptualise outside the current paradigm. This level of awareness also translates to a particular way of viewing paradigms. The limitation of our thoughts to the immediate describes a fixation with the 106 current paradigm. In this perspective, paradigm shifts are considered unilateral, with each new one as superior to its predecessors. Only the views of present are considered adequately sophisticated. This concern for one paradigm creates a chauvinistic favouritism of the present day parameters for success and knowledge, causing us to immerse ourselves in concerns of a nature that is only concerned with an individual based notion of consciousness. In this state of awareness, time is treated as Newtonian, or linear. Past paradigms, as part of the past itself, are discarded because new paradigms are seen as coming into existence rather than all paradigms pre- existing. As in , there is a conception of a linear process of antiquation, in which older paradigms become obsolete because they are seen as lacking in awareness. A different view is emerging that introduces the notion of a distance from paradigms, an ironic distance that offers a unified perspective, able to see all narratives as coordinates on a conceptual map.

Popular culture is now becoming increasingly dependent on changes in the zeitgeist. Having a large platform is less of a guarantee of having the highest degree of popularity. For views to attain a wide audience today, they must resonate with it on a more profound level. Williams’ notion of emergent culture (R. Williams 1980) must be reconceptualised as omnipresent and capable of generating sudden and dynamic effects. In the culture of Web 2.0, any voice can potentially be heard, including those that challenge the paradigm, meaning that the power to influence paradigms changes hands much more quickly. This has been seen in that Twitter posts have been demonstrated to start movements (Bennett 2010, 169, 181). Users who attain 107 a high level of visibility through a mass of web page hits on their channel or profile are equipped with a large audience and a more prominent platform, increasing their influence. For this reason paradigms themselves are much more prone to shifting in response to privately-held views, including subversive ones. Increasingly, popular culture is informed directly by the smallest movements of the zeitgeist, rather than corporate-controlled media.

As such, popular culture is more and more a reflection of changing views. It is increasingly self-reflective through becoming more conscious of all of its constructive components.

The paradigm as a tool of irony

Change comes with what in a simple linear sense is improved perspective.

This is the nature of technology; our means of approaching challenges become ostensibly more sophisticated with more refined understanding. Past technology seems obsolete, making present technology superior by its nature. A shift from one perspective towards a more sophisticated one essentially turns what was once a framework into a mere tool. The framework becomes subjugated into the understanding shown by one with more sophistication. Television as a communications paradigm has transitioned into merely a function of the smartphone paradigm, and video content in general has widely become a plaything of parody. These examples reflect irony, which can provoke the new use of an idea in a way that undermines aspects of the existing framework. Existing inquiry into the idea that new media are "about" older ones is becoming vindicated through demonstrations that knowledge is accumulative, and new knowledge breaks and enslaves 108 older knowledge. This is visible in that merging forms of media are being made compatible through their digitisation, and are subsequently contextualised in other more advanced ones such as webpages. Irony, as such, can be seen to increase its prominence in a culture as time goes on.

Worldviews in this way become treated as merely vivid illustrations for purposes of analogy and understanding, just as dreams can be. Through information technology we are observing increasing contextualisation of our frameworks. This represents a sequence towards a paradigm without sequence. In advancing towards a reality in which paradigms are tools, we are beginning to inhabit a paradigm in which any reality can come about at any time.

The world as the self

The Internet readily frames popular ideas with a new clarity that is creating an awareness of how globalised culture functions as a collective psyche.

Data is extensively documented online, making changes in global thought patterns highly visible and widely accessible. Additionally, the digital protocols of global parameters of thought are becoming unified. The collective consciousness is being quantified and represented in increasingly unified software. In this way, technology is portraying the divergent thought systems of the world as one mind that has merely been refracted through the hall of mirrors that is the phenomenon of the ego, which parses what is otherwise a unified dream world (Pervin 1998, 5). The negation intrinsic in the ego (King 1999), originally Freud’s idea of the view of the self, is at odds with the development in the Information Age of a unified consciousness. An 109 ego is intrinsically negative because it opens up a separation of concepts, including nominal distinctions between conscious that the concept was expanded from. Today, individuals are becoming seen as plotted on continuous ideological spectra at differing points.

Generalised as a collective mass, people embrace what is popular. However, as individuals we can be thought of as having sets of personal ideas that can be found to be adverse to each other when examined. Like a massive object warping spacetime or a stone making ripples in water, the most powerful ideas cause individual thought to warp around them. We attack ideological constructions, trying to protect the sanctity of our own ideas. The more popular a phenomenon is, the more tension that is produced, and the greater the reaction will be to it. Tension produces binary opposition, and this conflict forms the basis of ideological polemics. The fragmentation of the unified is seen when productions achieving salient levels of popularity are frequently attacked in social media. The music of pop star Justin Bieber is simultaneously renowned and detested. In terms of fame, Bieber is highly prominent. However in terms of critical reception, there is a widespread

Internet trend of mocking him as an artist. Despite the commercial success of the song Baby, its video has been identified as the most disliked video on

YouTube (Lee 2011). Weber attributed this form of backlash to a zero-sum- game in which prestige and status are seen as scarcely attainable (Firestone and Catlett 2009, 346). In the Information Age, pre-eminence can be seen as a reflection of one’s own topical relevance, as universal visibility now means that popularity is a direct reflection of presence in the global consciousness.

The status of being on the public mind is scarce, as popularity is quantified in 110 the presentation of trends online in increasingly automated ranking systems.

This is a reflection of shifting ratios in the global mindscape. Attacks by the

Internet audience are made on influential productions as if to fill the role of the Jung’s shadow of the collective psyche (1983, 56-57). The collectivisation of content and audience brings out the full psyche of a culture, including the shadow portion that negates its conceits. Today it is trendy to be against trends. The hipster movement embodies this, as it prides itself on a counter- culturalist stance (Grief 2010). Paradoxically, this first requires the internalisation of a macrocosmic and unitary view of culture.

In dreams, the figures we encounter are commonly understood to represent aspects of ourselves (Ogden 2005, 29). When we awake we realise that the people we saw in the dream were not different entities, yet we still conceptualise other people in waking life as separate. This framework in dreams can be usefully applied to understand the Information Age. The contrasting egos, or ideological images of the self, that reflect and oppose each other collectively create the ideological map of the global mindscape that dominates the paradigm. However, in an environment of increasing connectivity, this otherisation has a perceived underlying continuity. One’s works, visual image, financial activity and relationships can now be shared and replicated instantly. With aspects of people increasingly represented through the virtual, our technology is forcing us to treat identity as connected at the same common subterranean level as aspects of dreams. This has the potential to compromise the fundamental notion of discreteness we theorise between concepts. The progression of the Information Age, through its illustration of collectively-held ideas, is enabling us to gain awareness that 111 instances of consciousness are connected.

The terminal nature of the ego and the Imaginary

In his development of the mirror stage theory, Lacan argued that an infant’s development of an individual ego is a microcosm of the separation of concepts that occurs as a person learns the theories of the world (Lacan

2002, 75-77). This growing awareness during development, that one is only an individual and not a mass entity, can be seen to be a reflection of the way in which the world is developing an increasing capacity to recognise that any one particular paradigm in effect does not represent all of reality. This is described often in terms of the postmodern fragmentation of narratives (Firat and Shultz 1997). An awareness of the simultaneous existence of alternate perspectives that the Internet provides is a step towards grasping the underlying unity of all concepts. However, while this can be called awareness, it is an abstracted form of awareness, as it still parses perspectives into artificially distinct units of analysis. A deeper understanding would be represented by the perception of a lack of boundaries between individuals and between paradigms. The conceptualisation of consciousness as a narrative implies that the collective consciousness is in turn analogous to the unification in the metanarrative and dreams.

The authorial voice of the superego can be reconciled with aspects of

Lacan’s the Real in that both signify an extra-ideological perspective that is external to the view of the self and the Imaginary respectively. The inevitability of brain death means an erasure happens to the conscious narratives of all individuals, including the image of the self as a discrete 112 entity. Analogously, the new malleability and apparent façade of the imagery that makes up the institutions of the world, as manifesting at the present stage of technological advancement, is being illustrated to have pre-existed as inevitable in the technological story of advancement. This reflects the same with paradigms: being able to perceive the paradigm in which one lives as constructed provides an understanding that all paradigms are constructed and based on a common foundation. As the death of ego and the Imaginary illustrate, this stage of progression is intrinsically written into the nature of paradigms itself through the course towards unification. In the dream world, the “duality” in individuality breaks down, and so do the distinctions between paradigms.

The self as worldview

We project the image of ourselves onto our narrative of the world. Our conception of reality is formed by our conceits of separation and individuality, a principle addressed in the concept of the Imaginary (Ecrits 2002, 40-41).

This is now highly visible through the changing online services we interact with, as one’s online settings can entirely change the presentation of the world one is provided with (van der Meer, Gelders and Rotthier 2014). As mentioned, the figures in dreams, despite their appearance as separate from us when we inhabit the dream, are a reflection of aspects of the self. In the same way, narratives project themselves onto the conscious world to create socially constructed amalgams and categories that seem distinct from each other, despite the greater context in which they exist on a continuum. The process by which we project ourselves onto our worldviews is becoming 113 illustrated by the virtual, in that entire worlds now rearrange themselves around who we are.

The beginning of the dream

We cannot see our own epistemology within the context of the paradigm; if we do, the illusion ends, because it depends on the episteme. Awareness of the epistemology means its intellectualisation, which results in its contextualisation under a new paradigm. Until the limitations of our own epistemology are pointed out, the epistemology remains under the surface and is invisible to us. In the same way, we never remember the beginning of a dream because our minds, our selves and our epistemology are being formed at the beginning with that specific reality. It is in the nature of dreams that we become more conscious at the end of the dream, when we awaken.

That is, a paradigm starts to falter when we engage with its limits intellectually. The first widespread instance of this naturally tends to be comedy, since the most irreverent entities are the quickest to dismantle established institutions. For example, satirist Karl Kraus’ employment of satire reflected his belief that it is positioned at the forefront of popularising the questioning of the premises of the collective consciousness (Pizer 1994).

There are no boundaries of possibility in the virtual world, and in the

Information Age popular cultural sites such as comedy that observe flaws in contemporary thinking can direct scrutiny of the idea of “realities” with increased impact. While there is a prevailing view in everyday experience that everything occurs in a sequence of cause and effect, this cannot be applied to the cause of the universe's origin (Edwards 2001, 177). 114

Frameworks exceeding this parameter take us outside of our episteme and undermine our conception of the physical universe as solid and self-justifying.

This mirrors the way we can’t see our own paradigm until we are equipped to transcend it. Information technology increases our ability to reflect on the dreamlike qualities of the world.

Symbols and archetypal imagery dominate

Due to the lack of authority on the Internet inherent to its open nature, it is striking and resonant imagery that dominates Internet culture most universally, not necessarily content produced by large organisations.

Anything that has the ability to appeal to the zeitgeist in an amusingly or informatively novel manner has the potential to “go viral”. As such, persuasiveness and memes are becoming more potent currencies of political influence. As outlined in Chapter 2, entities such as YouTube and Google, which have shifted the concept of the commodity towards the intangible, have commandeered directions of economic influence (Learmonth 2010).

The commercialised featured videos on the YouTube home page are seen by higher numbers of users than any particular television station (Ligato 2015) and search engines such as Google have direct influence over the channels through which users obtain information about particular subjects. It has been claimed that this represents the increasing malleability of public consciousness, including “attempts to shape and control social and political discourse through various means of information, propaganda, and ” (Giacomello, et al. 2009). It can be extrapolated from this that the means of have become increasingly abstract over the course 115 of history. While innovation has always been the most salient factor of dominance, as Hobbes argued, power was determined more by physical domination and the capacity to subject others to it in early tribalistic societies

(Keely 1996, 5-6). It has been established that while the use of violence has declined over human history, there is an increase in less direct and more complex means such as economic power in consolidating societal influence, with control over scarce resources determining status. While economic thought existed previously, humans did not develop prominently as a distinct discipline until the theories that emerged in the Western world in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution (Fusfeld 1994, 24). As I have outlined, this in turn is being succeeded by the manipulation of ideas. The scarce resources that now must be captured comes in the form of the thoughts and desires of consumers. Paradoxically, this shift towards the intangible is due to the new capacity of ideas to be readily presented as vivid and real. Advancing technology provides new means of immediate and immersive connection to new ideas. Any thought can be instantly communicated in a way that appears real. Because the power to persuade has been made virtual in this way, influence over the collective consciousness is more evenly distributed, and power increasingly decentralised. In the Information Age, it is symbols and archetypal imagery that dominate, having the most capacity to shape the collective consciousness. It is becoming sensed that the genesis of an idea’s influence resides in not the volume of one’s voice, but underlying primordial structures making themselves known through ripples on the surface of the collective consciousness. 116

Seeding of an idea

The simplest version of an idea, the archetype, is the one that grows the largest. This is evident in dreams. As mentioned earlier, dream studies have found that the symbolic imagery contained in dreams can be a potent source of self-reflection. Presently the clearest Information Age equivalent of this is memes and other viral content. The term was created in 1976 by

Richard Dawkins to mean the idea equivalent of a gene (Dawkins 2006, 192).

In its neologistic form, however, it has come to mean any viral catchphrase, figure or other online sensation. A meme or image macro is a “programmable joke” consisting of a viral image with a caption. Archetypal images such as this can be used repeatedly in this manner through their resonance with the global Internet audience’s psyche of the time. The popularity of certain macros reflecting the psyche of the collective consciousness is analogous to the imagery in dreams illustrating the psychic activity of an individual. The resilience of an idea depends on the depth with which it resonates. This is evidenced by its ubiquity. For an idea to have impact, it must be previously unstated in that specific form, coming from under the surface of society. The notion of a mediator between an immediately visible conscious world and a unified collective unconscious has been alluded to in (Deleuze

2002, 171-173). In percolating up to the level of conscious recognition, or what we can regard as the waking level, it also gains eligibility to be presented as a joke, since jokes become funny at the point of recognition

(Glasglow 1995, 42).

An example of the seeding of an idea can be found in historical antecedents.

The semantic bases for all of today’s prominent languages are from an era 117 outside the context of the language. The ideological structures contained in language are persistent peculiarities that are deeply embedded in human culture (Crespo-Fernández 2015, 7). The Pirahã people of the rainforest, for example, do not keep account of history beyond two generations, as their mythology is considered immediately present.

Correspondingly, their words for kinship only extend to close family (Everett

2005). Structures that persist do so due to their being institutionalised in consciousness at an early stage. When planted deep in the collective consciousness of a population, an idea can have profound societal influence.

Now that ideas are less invisible, and their growth can be watched from their first invocation online, this continuity between the conceptual and the tangible is being observed.

The past as a context

This invites a perception of the past as a contextualising frame. Increased sophistication in the Information Age means that conceptual gaps are bridged and ideas are placed on a unified continuum; the Internet provides a comprehensive medium that showcases a full range of alignments, identities and subcultures. This progressive blurring of boundaries through the convergence of media makes the lack of clear distinctions between ideas more apparent. The integration of television and computer functionality into telephones is a highly visible example. The reaction to this has been a reaching into the past for archetypal symbols to use in modern institutions

(indeed the arch in archetypes means “first” (Liddell and Scott 2016). In modern software, icons of obsolete technology like the rotary telephone and 118 celluloid segment are used as signs for phone and video software respectively. This derives from a need to convey clear meaning; because of their nature as physically distinct objects, they represent more primordial incarnations of these media that are simpler, more purist and easier to grasp conceptually. In contrast, their new incarnations are more versatile and undermine the framework that these functions can be anchored to a particular physical form. Just as context implicitly exists before content, serving as the content’s backstory, the archetypal concepts in the metanarrative serve as the context for the narratives that unfold as a result of the advancements in sophistication of the collective consciousness. The semiotic purity and resulting flexibility of archetypal forms speaks of an underlying narrative that orders primordial meaning. The adoption of finer categories through the growing complexity of our technological narratives allows us to see the quantities in which archetypes recur, which facilitates the awareness of the contextualisation of an archetypal narrative.

Unlimited possibility

Through technological trends and their highlighting of their commonalities with the unconscious world of dreams, we are seeing the fundamental role of consciousness in creating reality. Advancing technology represents our comprehending and reappropriating aspects of reality’s construction.

Institutions of the world are seen as less naturally occurring and more synthetic; there is a paradigm towards a continually recreated world as opposed to a pre-existing one. We are intercepting our process of perception; the process that separates our discovering the world from our creating it 119 ourselves. Perception itself is being newly seen as an act of creation, as we can now watch how popular viewpoints form online. This is an example of the view, increasingly visible in the Information Age, that the world can be not only discovered, but shaped; it can be changed with a shift of consciousness.

Exposure to multiple voices means that established ideas are now constantly challenged. No idea is allowed to stand without its flaws being attacked. They are being challenged by a wide range of voices, due to influence being more attainable. The inherent speciousness of theory is being highlighted through the undermining of previously authoritative canonical institutions. Every assertion is now accompanied by an antithesis visible by its side. A wider range of creative expression is being showcased online, disrupting the ideated permanence of institutions. This is evident in the fertilisation of new subcultures, grassroots movements, and realistic fantastical creations. In virtual environments such as the Internet, there is a developing notion that more instances of reality are possible than the parameters espoused by prevailing theoretical notions. The Information Age is showing us that the variety in our mental frameworks is being expanded in a way that approaches the pure possibility in dreams.

Conclusion

With the constructed world becoming increasingly a product of conscious imagination, our technology is facilitating an understanding of dreams that illustrates the way that consciousness occurs in degrees of reality. While the conscious world is what can be seen on a superficial, quotidian level, dreams are what persist in the depths of our minds; but these dreams cannot be seen 120 while we are intellectualising ourselves and the world into categories of analysis. Their unrestricted possibility and the potency of their symbolism is representative of an underlying unified narrative structure. This substrate is characterised by pure possibility. This link to possibility explains why we use the word dream to refer to an aspiration that may be difficult to realise.

Technology makes the dreams of current paradigms the reality of future ones. In expanding our view of possibility, we are reaching deeper into the collective unconscious, developing a paradigm in which reality is tentative and amorphous, able to shift between solid physical and mental structures in a protean manner. The pure possibility at the core of the world's psyche is being increasingly realised through technology. Dreams expose us to unseen subtleties. Through symbolism, they alert us of the state of our psyche and in what ways our waking lives may be in disharmony. In this way they compose narratives that depict aspects of our minds in ways that are not as obvious in the waking world. While the dreams of an individual tell the story of an individual narrative, the history of technology illustrates the thematic arc of the dreams of the collective unconscious.

Dreams solidify what would otherwise not be thought of as solid. The

Information Age is telling us that paradigms operate in the same way: they maintain legitimacy in terms of themselves, but are exposed when the understandings they inspire have greater context. Virtual worlds can bring imaginary constructs from the invisible part of the spectrum of ideas and provide them with all of the appearance of being real. Our daily engagement with such a spectrum is creating greater awareness of the tentative nature of what appears to be real, and an associated underlying continuum from which 121 our constructions of the real emerge. The possibility that any reality can be a dream shifts perceived legitimacy to a plane that is abstracted from any definitive parameters.

Complex and convincing narratives are being seen as less permanent, as merely constructed viewpoints. Information technology is granting increased control over imagery. Convincing mirages of reality such as virtual constructions, on which societies are increasingly dependent, can be created through computerisation. This is indoctrinating us with the notion that images of the world can have aspects of reality that should not be attributed to permanence, and that technology allows these images to be brought into existence with decreasing effort. A full spectrum of narratives that build worldviews can now exist side by side. Reality is being conceptualised more as a dream, as changes in its structure are seen as occurring at any time through nomination, instead of incremental sequence. The construction of convincing images of the world requires, as it were, an awareness of the way in which awareness itself functions. In this way paradigms are peering into their unconscious epistemic origins, becoming unified. The ubiquitous manifestation of these origins in each part of the emerging culture will be the subject of the next chapter.

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Chapter 4: The microcosm

Falling into place are a number of catalysts that are disposing us towards an understanding that our discrete categorisations of meaning are artificial in their social construction. Information technology is increasingly reflecting that all ideas can be found in one place, meaning that concepts we previously considered to be separate are reflected universally. Advancements such as the introduction of online posting have incrementally reinforced the perception of the nature of narrative as microcosmic of metanarrative. This is because it is increasingly obvious that the full spectrum of worldviews is implicit in any smaller instance of it. While the printed word is limited by a physical presence of the medium, electronic information represents an abstraction from machines that grants a new ubiquity. Written compendia such as encyclopaedias are instances of one work containing all kinds of knowledge. The clarity with which this is symbolised has increased with better technology; the Internet is a leap in the increased convergence of information that accompanies technological progress. Through this we are prompted to sense a greater narrative that enables the local one. Cultural permeation is leading to a new ubiquity, creating new belief in the idea that broader truths can be represented in microcosms. I argued earlier that the

Information Age is defined by a path of convergence. The unifying influence on contemporary trends is instilling in the public a new paradigm: reality is becoming seen as a unified substance whose nature and definition transcend idiosyncrasies such as physical location, outward appearance and 123 associated theories. Ideas are becoming unbound from the material, free to move everywhere. As such, they are no longer only localised, but microcosms of a greater context. The importance of the concept of the microcosm to our understanding of the digital age is the subject of this chapter.

We are entering a framework in which paradigms are seen as not distinct from one another in time or place, but concurrent and ubiquitous. The collective human consciousness has been moving towards this throughout history, and this has invariably occurred through the revelation of continuity between paradigms. The Third Way, which in response to the left and right wing political dichotomy, proposed a synthesis of social policy from the left and economic policy from the right (Finlayson 1999), is a vivid example of new concepts and ideologies interceding between older ones, as is structuralism mediating an objective external world and an internal mental one. The image of narratives being distinct from each other stems from a notion that a given narrative is intrinsically bound to the time, place or culture from which it has happened to emerge. A growing wave of popular perception through information technology lies in contrast to this: paradigmatic narratives are being experienced as, in the most fundamental sense, theoretical, as opposed to bound to physical phenomena. Equality in voices, the power to narrate the mindscape and fluidity in the movement of ideas are being unshackled in a newly intermingling global culture. Even the narratives of time and space, as McLuhan argued, are being eliminated

(1994, 138). Time and space, which discrete units attempt to contain, are being revealed as universal and continuous through self-similarity, a property 124

I will highlight as intrinsic to the Information Age. The continuity between paradigms, symbolised by information today, is being identified as a common and intangible substance that ideologies and narratives are formed from.

Public perception is moving beyond essentialist understandings of paradigms.

Technology itself is no longer localised in a particular place; the function of information technology is its omnipresence and cross-compatibility.

Phenomena such as the boom in new subcultures online illustrate the cross- contamination of concepts that is characteristic of the current weakening of discreteness. I will use further concepts such as the decentralisation of authority and expertise online, the ability of users to generate the Internet’s content and fantasy becoming reachable to argue for a newly emerging macrocosmic perspective as being inspired by information technology.

Supplementing this, I will also employ theories advanced in quantum mechanics as evidence of a pre-existing nature of narratives as unified. This will outline the newly perceived convergence of paradigms under the framework of metanarrative.

The fractal spreading of communication technology

Any form of technology starts its life as being limited to specialists in the related field, or elite socioeconomic classes. In either case, its emergent nature directly implies its exclusivity to a minority of individuals, due to the means of production not yet being optimised in response to its complexity

(During 1999, 33). Technology, as taken to mean the increased sophistication of approaching and thereby understanding certain tasks, is 125 intrinsically about solving problems of distance. The metric of distance can be geographical, temporal or linguistic, but it is always theoretical; distance being conquered through technology represents a mental conciliation between an existing concept and the desired state of affairs.

Technology therefore always grants the ability to affect narratives across barriers of time and space. Sophisticated technology can influence prevalent narratives on a larger scale, having a more significant impact on global paradigms. In this way, technology is voice, in that it is measured not by the terms that define it, but its effect. This reflects the way that J.L. Austin considered speech acts: just as the forms of technological devices are secondary to their bridging of perceived reality and what we can imagine, the verbal components of speech acts are less important than their capacity to reinforce and shape social behaviours. They can “have the function not of communicating but of affecting institutional states of affairs” (Bach 2015). The global influence of any particular ideology is now increased by its amplification through technologies that give it voice through media.

Previously, certain ideological narratives have been self-contained in the scope of their authority, retaining control over their own influence. In other words, the ability to implement them was limited to certain classes because only they had the means to execute them. Older technology meant a lesser capacity for information to spread, and that the means of enforcing the institutionalisation of an ideology's hegemony were limited to remaining in the hands of those who have propagated it in the first place. Their reiteration by other authors is largely prevented. For example, the authority to produce film has been spread out in the form of cheap video cameras and their integration 126 into common consumer technology such as phones and handheld computer game units. Increasingly, any given member of the general public has the capacity to author contributions to the film medium, which remained largely exclusive to specialists and the wealthy until the introduction of consumer video cameras in 1983 (Buckingham and Willet 2009, 5). Similarly, the authority to publish written content has been distributed more widely through the World Wide Web, in that anyone can post online due to the proliferation of consumer computers. These previously elusive media have gained a level of influence and cultural ingraining that means they are being hyperextended.

Their technological advancement and resulting commonness has meant that even individuals of relatively low socioeconomic status possess the means to perform wide reaching speech acts previously limited only to elite groups.

The increasing sophistication of the emergent that defines each instance of new technology in the first place is causing it to grow in complexity until it becomes normalised, with its basic form becoming accessible in fractal offshoots to lower socio-economic groups. As a result, such instances of narrative technology are resembling fractal patterns, becoming so excessively complex that they are breaking down through a progression towards entropy. This disrupts the rigidity and self-contained nature of their fundamental forms, and liberates varying forms of their expression, video production being an example.

In societal systems with higher degrees of centralised authority, there is a prevalent hegemonic belief that all things have a place (Artz and Murphy

2000, 231). Entities representing authority are comparatively respected.

Those in power have a greater capacity to instil in the populace ideas of how 127 language, and by extension, thought, is structured. Adorno and Horkheimer argued that each increment of technology increases the power of the elite to control consumers, comparing the one way participation of the radio to the interactivity of the telephone: “The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programmes which are all exactly the same” (During 1999, 33). The advent of the Internet is the limit of this paradigm, as it mobilises irreverence, with narrative increasingly in the hands of all users as opposed to a central authority. As a result, subversive thoughts that may disrupt this intellectual status quo are no longer unconsciously self-censored as they may have been under a more hegemonic paradigm. The wide distribution of art is no longer limited in its exposure by the relative affluence or political influence of the individual producing it, and so can be more independent of power structures

(Beer and Burrows 2007). Today, content sharing websites generally allow any form of verbal expression. In this way experimentation on an intellectual level is more freely allowed to be conducted in public. The authority to address wide audiences is being spread out to individuals that do not share political interests with the elite.

On an abstract societal level, there is occurring a fragmentation and fracturing of previously discrete entities, such as nations, authority, and more fundamentally, concepts. Regardless of its contemporary lexical category, any word can indiscriminately be used as a mass noun in modern slang. For example, "it was awesome" can become "it was full of awesome". Similarly, 128 any word can become a verb: “you don’t know how to Internet”. This disruption of lexigraphy represents a distillation of elemental semantic forces as if they were a chemical elements to be manipulated independently of natural compounds. Memes are a further example of the use of archetypal icons to convey meaning with the purest effectiveness. As alluded to earlier, the modern definition of "meme" is concentration of the emotion and feeling of a specific sentiment into a singular image that is capable of "going viral", i.e. being viewed by an exponential number of Internet users. Combinations of memes can be even more powerful than singular ones, representing a form of self-aware semiotic alchemy. Meaning can be played with, with experiments conducted in global view, so that their acceptance by the collective consciousness is potentially widespread.

This accelerating breakdown of lexical categories is an example of the unification paradigm affecting the way meaning itself is regarded. Concepts are being broken apart into smaller pieces and treated as more granular.

Memes are an example of the discovered power of symbols. Although they often employ written words, as images, they transcend the limitations of words and fit into the rhythm of the zeitgeist rather than a prescribed semiotic status quo. Derrida argued that meaning does not terminate, but exists as the relationships and tension between nominal concepts (Lawler 2014). Memes offer a corresponding flexibility and mobility in describing the changing nature of the zeitgeist, as they are not bound by the didactic limitations of linguistic structures, but are free to reflect less prescribed ideas that may be more reflective of powerful archetypes. As such, memes are the most agile and iconic means of communicating the zeitgeist, and are widely accessible 129 through their position as reflecting a common archetypal framework. Memes in this way, while heterogenous from each other in their intended meanings, each share the commonality of referring to a substrate that is universally relatable. In this sense, a greater continuum of meaning is implicit through each meme in the landscape of Internet culture; the whole is in each part.

Subculture boom

The scope of the virtual has come to reflect representation of a full spectrum of social groups. Castells said that "a culture of real virtuality, constructed around an increasingly interactive audiovisual universe, has permeated mental representation and communication everywhere, integrating the diversity of cultures in an electronic hypertext." (End of Millenium 2010, 1). It has subsequently been argued that modern technology provides the opportunity for identifying with unlimited social alignments, and that these challenge the broader categorisations that existed previously (Harding 2006).

With the exceptions of those that law enforcement or overextended corporate interests may eliminate, any interest, regardless of how obscure, can now have communities associated with it. Because a much wider range of

“fanbases” now has a voice online, there is a now virtually unlimited propensity for subcultures to emerge. This is generating more flexible social categorisation. Accompanying this is more variation in socially valid forms of expression. This amounts to popular discourse being informed by a wider range of ideas and insights, as the interests of formerly voiceless groups are being heard and becoming visible to the mainstream online. This poses more challenge to accepted ideas and creates potential for social media populism 130 to indirectly influence the manner in which institutions operate, as has occurred in the case of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 (Eltantawy and Wiest

2011). Although the military ultimately reclaimed power, the influence of the virtual was still showcased. In this way, cultural bridges are established that reconcile gaps between subcultures by merging them, exposing the continuities between a culture’s narratives.

Switching paradigms

Each individual in the paradigm of the Information Age potentially possesses the power to participate in the narrative of the world on a virtual level. The name “Web 2.0” is used to indicate that much of the Internet's content is now user generated, as opposed to only produced by those who run the websites involved. YouTube is a highly prominent example. The result is that the collective consciousness is viewable by us in the new paradigm: online, we can see the work of the general public expressed as contributions to the world we are creating. The collective psyche is becoming accustomed to the zeitgeist being represented digitally. This inherently highlights the notion that there is a unified continuity of narrative power that connects the individually distinct narratives that we solidify and reinforce with our unspoken cultural foundations. We are now utilising this through our technology.

Through the Internet, more divergent and dissenting points of view can be voiced. The ability to shape the common medium in which society is cultivated is more evenly distributed. This disruption of categorisations breaches the containment that politicised ideas have been forced into historically. Society becomes accommodating of not only widely accepted 131 schools of thought, but ideas that otherwise could not have found an audience. As a result, globalised culture becomes more all-encompassing.

More varied ideas are now allowed to emerge, and there is an associated awareness that full spectra of paradigms and modes of thought exist. This naturally prefaces a new ability among the general population to consciously change what is salient in popular thought, such as in the “Black Lives Matter” movement (Luibrand 2015).

An analogy to this is the way in which the general public has developed an increased awareness that each instance of software has one of a certain number of programming languages behind it. This is a result of advancement in the increased availability of computers and subsequent computer literacy.

The nature of the operation of computer programs was formerly mysterious and incidental to the mainstream. The quirks of any particular programming language and the way in which they affected the software being produced were not a factor that the public was generally conscious of. The public would not generally be aware of what programming paradigm was in effect at a given time; it was seen as "behind the scenes". However, the trivialisation of expertise that has accompanied the Information Age has meant that this meta-awareness is increasingly commonplace, to the extent that Internet browser software incorporates the use of notifications that assume an understanding of which browsing elements require which coding language and software platform, such as Java and Flash. Technological advancement implicitly means an increased knowledge of forces that previously existed on the invisible segment of human existence. It is the nature of discovery to enhance understanding of the laws that govern our existence (Barber 1961). 132

This represents a transcendence, or distance from, the seeming rigidity of the ideology intrinsic to paradigms. Collectively, we are progressively looking toward the contexts of our understandings, becoming familiar with our existence through understanding our own perceptions of it. Perceiving the framing contexts of contexts themselves implies a wider perspective of the behaviour of our world and a more unified view of it. The equalising effect on knowledge in the Information Age has more evenly distributed the ability of each individual to bring new paradigms into effect. In this sense, the individual can be a microcosm of a broader cultural change.

Free expression

Accompanying the diminishing restraints on variation in subcultures is an increasing acceptance of . In the Information Age, identity is no longer as rigid. One’s gender characteristics can be customised freely online behind an anonymity that veils the user's physical form. Online identity is abstracted and not accountable through any tangible form. The individual becomes indeterminate and liquid, as does the particular thought system that the individual represents. There is increased attention on the parts rather than the sum; we see the ingredients more than the individual. The liquefaction of concepts, implicit in Bauman’s analyses of contemporary mobility (Palese 2013), extends to identity. Identities are blending; this is seen in the current transgender movement and its deconstruction of traditional categories of gender, and corresponds to the new paradigm of mental synthesis that is afforded in the Information Age. Identities formerly considered separate are blended in a manner that signifies a new perception 133 of a relativity between instances of consciousness. In this way, the notion of distance is shaken. Bauman’s notion of one’s social identity becoming more nomadic and the lessened emphasis on persistent social structures is manifesting: “identity is a task, and a task the monitoring of which is their own and constant responsibility... the construction and maintenance of identity are tasks that can never be abandoned, an effort that cannot be relaxed”

(Bauman 1992, 166). This is creating more intermingling between formerly discrete options for identification, dissolving barriers between them and opening up the world to the individual.

The spreading of expertise

The increased ubiquity and easy access to varied forms of information implies a dismantling of the hegemony of expertise. Computers were once an esoteric field that required a degree of specialisation. With the advent of simplified operating systems for mobile devices, computer applications have been abstracted to the form of touchable buttons on a pocket-sized screen that even infants are capable of operating. This trend is continuing with movements such as the “App Store” for Apple’s desktop computers, which sees the operating system adopt full responsibility for the installation of programs by automatically depositing the install files into the correct folders on the machine once the program has been purchased. This is in contrast to an installation process that requires decision making on the part of the user.

This user friendliness means that the capacity to perform complex tasks is becoming something that can be claimed by anyone. Whether or not this shortcut to expertise is merely simulated, it ultimately grants greater power to 134 individuals on a less discriminate basis. As technology advances, general technological authority advances, as does authorship through technology.

Technology intrinsically provides greater power to convey narratives to the consciousness of other individuals. Information technology is essentially the capturing of understanding in a usable protocol. Because digital information is code, its verbal state is also its manifestation. Technology in this way is authorship. As I argued previously, it is in the nature of paradigms to progress towards meta-awareness. For this reason, historical writing is innately bound to become more about history itself, that is, a written account of the expanding ability to master the power of words to influence consciousness.2 This obviates Hayden White’s concept, in a different context, of what he calls meta-history, which purports that "every proper history contains within it the elements of a full blown philosophy of history"

(White 1973, 427-428).

Feeding tube—the digital world as all‐purpose

For Urry, modern society has been reduced to movements of information along lines of technological infrastructure, the "various interconnected nodes along which the flows can be relayed." (Urry 2000, 35). The Internet is the highest currently existing form of this, having manifested in the role of a “one- stop shop” that provides newly convenient solutions to many tasks including shopping, communication and information gathering. Additionally, exposure to the value systems and works of different cultures becomes

2This ability is described in the properties of the linguistic phenomenon of symbolic magic, whose powers are being utilised in the march towards less restricted narrative power, and whose role I will outline in Chapter 7. 135 instantaneously accessible. As a paradigmatic phenomenon the Internet can be summarised as the closing of distance in various forms, so that the role of travel is diminished. Through this, it is easier to observe the self-similarity in fractal patterns that is also found in paradigms. Today, the manifestation of a paradigm in one aspect of culture is invariably seen in other aspects that are traditionally separate and unrelated. Reflecting this, the Internet’s nature as a melting pot of ideas is becoming seen as incidental to the notion of an underlying abstract substrate that precedes theorisation. Hence, as the

Internet's importance to our lives is increasing, we are becoming more conditioned with, at least on a tentative, unconscious level, a view of the world preceding separation.

Because all of the abstract constructions in our world exist side by side digitally, there is the result of less dissonance between different concepts.

The paradigm of unification and convergence symbolised by the trends of technology suggests a new ideological fluidity between formerly monolithic ideals. The mixing together of diverse ideas is inclining us to a realisation that the semiotic material from which ideological constructions are built originates from a common source, and that paradigms are merely constructions of certain ideas arranged in a certain way. This is leading the public to the notion that different ideas and therefore paradigms can potentially be invoked at will, depending on the narrative we want to effect. Once a paradigm has been subsumed by another that transcends its artificial dichotomies, its narrative can be used in a self-aware manner as a tool. This can be for the sake of purposes including the construction of vivid and immersive virtual worlds and the political indoctrination of a populace. It can further be seen in 136 the increased popularity of parody in the Web 2.0 era, in that it utilises older institutions in self-aware mockery. This phenomenon is exemplified by the fact that parodic music videos now generate more revenue than music videos produced in earnest (Boxman-Shabtai 2015). Once a paradigm becomes obsolete, it can be used ironically, for purposes other than those for which it was originally intended. Linda Hutcheon’s argument that parody is central to post- (Hutcheon 2002, 89) is manifesting further in the capacity of the virtual to mock institutions through graphic convincingness, as well as implicitly include a meta-textual awareness through online connectivity. The history of technological development has set this as an arc that paradigms have followed.

Holisticism in social paradigms

The instantaneous spreading of information—such as news of socially unjust events—and the online sharing services that facilitate its path to interested parties has seen organisations subjected to increased scrutiny. For this reason, it is becoming more vividly obvious to organisations that deception and inconsistency in values inherently have a potential to damage the organisation as an entity with an image. There is a shift occurring that is seeing a recognition that the distance between one's public face and perceived actions must be minimised. As mentioned earlier, the public stream of consciousness normalised by institutions such as Twitter has resulted in consequences for several public figures posting disagreeable sentiments. Intended primarily as a platform for continuous personal updates that would otherwise be seen as inconsequential, the openness of Twitter in 137 relation to highly public figures was often overlooked early in its existence.

The concept of concealment is being eroded, and with it, room for secrecy.

Implicit in the growing recognition of a continuity between concepts, such as one's public face and spontaneous thoughts, is an undermining of the that enforces the idea of disparity itself. In its place there is an increasing notion of a whole, characterised by relationships between concepts that are politicised as separate but on a deeper level unified. The much more self-conscious field of business ethics is a recognition that tends to create their own exposure in the Information

Age. The 2007 failure of the Mattel toy company in allowing lead paint to be used in the manufacture of their products elicited commentary that the

Internet is accompanied by full transparency, meaning that negative incidents can and will spread freely to the public (University of Pennsylvania 2007).

This recognition is part of the growing interconnectedness of media and their ability to reach people more quickly and efficiently. The effectiveness of feigning ethical conduct for public relations purposes is limited in an era in which the machinations of a corporation are increasingly exposed to public scrutiny. We are seeing that everything affects each other. This notion of a theme occurring in one area and emerging in another has parallels in natural science that I will explore later in this chapter.

The sustainability paradigm is a trend that corresponds to the traits of inter- disciplinarity and prioritisation of the long term that constitute the essence of holistic views. Sustainability, which, like the specialist field of business ethics, also emerged in the early 1970s (De George 2015) (Burns 2012), is informed by the culture of television, which is capable of depicting crises and struggles 138 across great distances. This technology shaped the collective consciousness in a way that meant awareness of socio-political issues was no longer localised in the same way as print, or lacking vividness as radio did.

Television is an instance of technology making it vividly apparent that an event can emerge in two places at once, to the extent that its own technological limitations allow. Further advances have since increased the potential for events occurring on the global cultural mindscape to be made vivid on a scale that collectivises places and times. The paradigm of relationships between superficially disparate priorities, which is inherent to sustainability, is in this way catalysed. Efforts to de-emphasise the notion of the world as a shared and fragile habitat have been constrained by a growing equity in public influence online. The voices of special interests are being confronted with those of public interests in the Information Age, such as in the growing demand for the accountability of elected officials (Quirk 2011,

47).

The increased discourse and presence in the public consciousness of the relationships between concepts formerly separated by dissonance is producing other forms of holisticism. There has been an increase in the focus on animal rights, with being extended to apes in some areas

(R. Taylor 2001). This implies an increased perception of animals as not having a distinctly different form of being, but a type of consciousness comparable to humans in that they can be regarded as being on a similar ontological spectrum. The perception of a continuity between degrees of consciousness is necessary to afford them a greater general level of empathy. continues to challenge patriarchal structures in society 139 and culture, and has both broadened its influence and complicated its critique with the Information Age. For example, male feminism is a growing phenomenon because there is increasing recognition that equal rights benefit society as a whole, as they constitute progress towards a more meritocratic paradigm. Movements such as and eco-feminism, which argue for a holistic approach to understanding and addressing the world’s problems, manifest themselves in an increased connectedness that undermines the authority of geographical and temporal distance.

A different kind of movement towards unity is seen in the abstraction of various services to online venues, meaning that they are less bound to geography, reducing the significance of time zones. The increased availability of services "24/7" (Piazza 2007) means that the concept of opening hours is being disrupted in that they are less cyclical and more continuous, with no starting or ending points. This globalisation paradigm is providing a view to increased independence from the locality of consequences, conventions and institutionalised traditions, rendering them less geographical and more abstracted.

The condensing of narratives

The ongoing re-conceptualisation of all culture as narrative is enabling the view that all narratives can exist in one place. Here I will illustrate this through principles of science. Andy Pickering’s work to establish the role of social construction in theories in natural science highlights the fundamental role of narrative in constructing reality. He has claimed that “an exemplar is primarily the embodiment of an analogy” (Pickering 1980), i.e. frameworks become 140 entities that influence thought through their reinforcement of underlying . More recently, Donna Haraway's notion of narratives as neither pure fiction nor pure fact has been reiterated by anthropologist Arturo

Escobar, who stated "narratives are, indeed, historical textures woven of fact and fiction. Even the most neutral scientific domains are narratives in this sense." (Escobar 2011, 19). The four fundamental forces of nature (namely electromagnetism, gravity, weak interaction and strong interaction) as theories, can be readily described as narratives as they represent an artificial parsing of concepts that paint an idiosyncratic picture of the world that is not all encompassing. Their distinction from each other is artificial due to their nature at the Planck scale, the most microcosmic scale at which reality occurs (Callender and Huggett 2001, 37). At the Planck scale, these four forces manifest as a unified force. As such, even the four narratives seen as the most fundamental to the universe converge at the most catalytic point, revealing a metanarrative. The Planck scale constitutes a direct indication of the disparate narratives of reality being fundamentally unified. It represents a unification of all phenomena considered discrete. This singular fundamental force reconciling the protocols for the operation of reality illustrates a superlative centrality to the same principle of unity that can be used to understand cultural convergence. The increasing compatibility in information technology protocols reflects this trend; the Internet provides global pathways that are illuminating a framework in which the whole is localised in any part.

French-Tibetan monk Matthieu Ricard has compared William Blake’s concept of a grain of sand as microcosmic of existence to atoms (Tippett 2011). This idea that the universe as a whole is non-essential to the concept of 141 understanding it—and that only the most infinitesimal component of it needs to be comprehended—has gained momentum in the age of globalisation.

With knowledge becoming less dependent on physical journeys, understanding is increasingly regarded as at one’s doorstep. In physics, this has an analogue in quantum foam, the substance through which the material meets the intangible, in that it describes turbulence in the fabric of space-time at the Planck scale (Ng 2010). Energy fluctuations at this scale theoretically can change the texture of space-time at large scales, essentially meaning that the material universe is shaped by the most infinitesimal parts of it. This scientific theory is a further reflection of the trend I argue for that perception is less spread out by geography and increasingly collapsing into a more localised conceptualisation.

Non‐locality

The theory of quantum entanglement indicates that disparate areas of the universe have a connection between each other through their shared presence on an abstract fabric or continuum that is fundamentally theoretical

(Hüttemann 2005). This can be seen as a manifestation of the principle of the aggregate self-awareness that is implicit in the portrayal of information in the

Information Age. I have argued that there is a tendency for an abstract theme occurring in one area to emerge in another. This phenomenon has parallels in certain developments in particle physics. The emergence in the 1930s of quantum entanglement theory suggested a continuum of the underlying forces that govern the universe that transcends location. It is a description of the way in which the states of two or more particles can only be described in 142 terms of one integrated quantum system instead of a plurality of them, necessary due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which prevents us from knowing both the momentum and position of any given particle at the same time. At the quantum level of understanding, the notion of discrete particles becomes incoherent, as they actually exist as unified and continuous energy (Maor 2009). Thus quantum entanglement is when the momentum or position of two or more quanta can only be described collectively in one quantum system due to the way they act on each other.

Conservation law means the total momentum always stays the same, i.e. the nature of the greater quantum system (equivalent to the metanarrative) remains constant. The particles in this system are connected through an intangible field of information in addition to any direct interaction.

Fundamentally, they do not communicate with each other through acting on one another but through the contextualising environment of the quantum system itself. McLuhan’s concept that "the medium is the message" (1994, 7) in this way manifests physically. Quantum entanglement is a vindication in nature of this principle: narratives that appear to emerge from interactions between binary concepts are actually written in the structure of the intangible unified context in which they exist.

As yet, our limitations in contemporary science mean that the way in which each particle affects another cannot be controlled only through manipulating one of them, due to the precision that would be necessitated by the sheer number of variables involved in the greater context of the quantum system. It is ultimately the unifying context that determines how its contents interact; communication occurs through context. The movement of information 143 subsides to the authority of the sum of all information. Extrapolating this principle from a less strictly physical sense to an abstract one, the most fundamental characteristics of a phenomenon's existence are bound to present themselves in more than one facet of our constructed world, because the intangible is intrinsically ubiquitous through the fact that it is not bound to a physical location.

This self-similarity is a natural metaphor for the universe having a

"knowledge" of itself. It demonstrates a consistency with the trend in paradigms towards self-awareness: paradigms shift and ultimately converge through the occurrence of increased ironic distance towards a meta- perspective. Recognition of relationships between concepts that were formerly considered discrete is the process through which understandings advance in sophistication, hence self-awareness is intrinsically unifying. In the same way, the universe when unconstructed by conscious theory is self- similar and self-"aware" through the ubiquity and uninterrupted continuity of information.

Non-locality finds an analogue in Jung's idea of synchronicity, in which the concept of coincidence is attributed to a thematic interconnectedness (2014,

526). The aspect of a logical progression of themes found in synchronicity is consistent with the basic concept of narrative. Synchronicity therefore, as a coordinated mechanism, can be said to be compatible with the notion of an underlying and unifying narrative at the core of reality. While synchronicity has been described pejoratively as (Bishop 2000, 22), the unified

"awareness" represented by self-similarity in the universe potentially allows synchronicity to be accounted for by more than personal feeling. However, 144 the causal independence of such a ubiquitous thematic blueprint would proscribe its exact structure from being able to be articulated in a system of language, as language is only a micronarrative that artificially parses concepts to be comprehensible at the symbolic level. Even theorisation of phenomena at the quantum level has something brought to it by the intrinsically reductive terminology used to describe it (Pickering 1980). For this reason, although academic constructs illuminate patterns by accounting for them as discrete principles, understandings that are unconstructed by the reductive conceits of micronarratives are rendered unattainable, as such a concept is always reductive of the larger discursive field, and can only be approached through technological paradigms and not encapsulated.

Superposition and the fallacy of distinct places

The re-conceptualisation of culture as narrative through digitisation enables the perception of all narratives being localised in one place. Furthermore to digitisation, the field of particle physics presents salient illustrations of the relationship between perceivable reality and narrative. Classical physics has to, rather arbitrarily, assign locations to the particles that make up the universe due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It is only at the conscious level of that energy appears as discrete particles.

Notions that are cogent under classical physics, such as postulations of particle locations, become revealed as artificial conceits at the quantum level.

In this way, the uncertainty principle illustrates that any assignment of a location to a particle only exists as an invention: a simplified means of understanding. It illustrates that notions such as place are conceptualised 145 through the narratives that we attribute to them. We are finding that this is the nature of the narratives that we create; the more participative nature of the media today is making us conscious of the idea that we are integral authors in the realities that we perceive. This portrays the way in which we plot maps of ideas as constructed.

In the era of philosophical realism, the ontological theories we construct have largely been considered dependent on some pre-existing system of physical laws that cannot be changed (Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth 1991,

21-22). However, as I mention above, our own observation of the physical universe plays a more instrumental role in its construction than traditionally thought. The intangible epistemological premises upon which various theoretical frameworks are based can be found to have an impact, through the narratives of paradigms, on the form that the universe takes in our minds.

The forces of nature, like knowledge, bring the unconscious to the conscious, or the invisible to the visible. The aspects of the universe that are highly visible to us, such as objects that are comparable in size to our own bodies, are those that are most vigorously accounted for in canonical knowledge.

The abstract forces through which they come into existence, in contrast, are the least widely known and least readily explained in theory. The Information

Age has made it widely visible that technology performs a significant role in the scope of our ability to perceive a broader view of our existence through global connectivity.

It has been argued that the reification of energy into particles through their observation implies that consciousness is an essential ingredient in the makeup of the universe. Hagelin states that "a quantum field can be seen as 146 coexisting in all possible shapes at once—i.e., in a superposition of field shapes. " (“Is Consciousness the Unified Field? A Field Theorist's

Perspective” 1989, 34). It is only the smaller narratives generated by human perception that make up the world of distinct shapes. The stipulation that particles in the material structures we perceive must be assigned a momentum and position only emerges from classical physics, a process that is revealed as artificial upon taking into account the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Quantum physics has found that in a relativistic system, it is instead the greater context of the quantum system whose superposition determines which packets of energy become sufficiently discreet to have the appearance of distinct particles. That is, content has value in terms of itself, but context is the ultimate authority.

The distinct particles in classical mechanics are conceits that artificially parse what is naturally a unified field. Distinct particles emerging through a designation of momentum and position is the premise on which the physical universe is based. This might be considered analogous to the creation of a vector between the binary opposition in ideology. Deciding where the particle is effectively creates it, just as deciding where a concept is placed relative to others creates a view of the world through ideology. Energy wave reification occurs through observation. In this sense, consciousness creates reality; our theorisation of the world makes the world. It is certainty that makes the pure potential of the unconscious invisible. Intellectual structures always introduce new limitations, and certainty in them buries the unlimited possibilities of existence underneath consciousness. The undefined perception of reality in the Information Age reflects the uncertainty at the quantum level: information, 147 formerly perceived as tied to material objects, can be in multiple places at once through information technology, and is defined more as virtual and conceptual. Our discoveries are revealing that, at the most hidden catalytic level, an overarching narrative determines the realities of which we become aware. The unified field determines which packets of energy form apparently discrete particles, which inform our perception of material structures. In this way the objects and concepts in our lives are equivalent to thoughts. The most deeply held paradigms are determined by a metanarrative that contextualises all of them, and can manifest anywhere.

Amateurism and innovation

The Information Age is reframing creativity as ubiquitous and professionalism as a false distinction, in the same way as energy is continuous and distinct particles are conceits. The barrier between amateurism and professionalism, enforced by our language, is being exposed largely as a conceit by well received amateur productions on platforms of user generated content such as YouTube. Over the course of human history, there has been increased sophistication in our ability to use technology to replicate creative processes that would previously have been performed by humans. The printing press in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ensured that handwritten works would no longer have to be reproduced by hand for wide distribution. In the late twentieth century, we taught machines to compose letters from templates using names, addresses and other information from a unified database

(Barron 1987). Similarly, procedural synthesis in computer-rendered three dimensional imagery means that no two instances of the same type of object 148 have to be identical, as their collection of attributes are randomly varied in real time (Khatchadourian 2015). Whether this is a degradation or broadening of art’s definition is moot. The significance lies in the new idea that any individual can be an artist. Technologically complex art is becoming automatic through the efficiency of computers. The availability of digitised knowledge further creates a bridge of consciousness between amateur and professional. Such bridges contribute to the paradigm of convergence. While this has been criticised as diluting the concept of excellence, in some instances authority has been revealed as illusion by the production of amateur content that is indistinguishable from professional content, such as in online journalism (Hutchins and Tindall 2016). Subsequently, there is now more capacity for instances of ground-breaking innovation to gain exposure.

In contrast with talent that merely shows a high level of competence in meeting established expectations, creative innovations have demonstrated the application of new insights that have not been widely considered (Quiggin

2008). The general public is now freer to demonstrate personal idiosyncratic skills and knowledge, through avenues such as niche blogs, regardless of how esoteric their applications may have been found previously. Any person in this way now has more power to shape paradigms. The institution of the social network is leading to the paradigm that we are all variations of a common underlying theme. This instils the prerequisites for a paradigm characterised by a belief in microcosm, in which technology and the capacity to change consciousness is recognised as fundamentally intangible and therefore universally available. Accompanying increased narrative power is a widespread awareness of narrative. Awareness of the mechanics of narrative 149 ultimately constitutes a new power to narrate. This new perception of an interconnectedness can only lead paradigms in the direction of a metanarrative.

Creating narratives

There is now more awareness of the way narrative can construct reality through shifts in the episteme. Its ignition is not fundamentally based in political representation through governments or legislation, but an appeal to the collective mindscape and an influence over thought processes. Greater understandings of the role of perception are leading to the ability of any individual to use perception to influence the world. The aggregative nature of

Web 2.0 is creating the realisation that we collectively construct the world's paradigms through our speech acts, as this is necessary to utilise Web 2.0 in the first place. Through our increasing reliance on it, the Internet is becoming a representation of the sum of the world's contemporary thought processes and active discourse. It is a vivid symbol of the way in which each individual contributes to society as a medium merely by having the ability to speak.

Every entity has the capacity to recognise itself as having a generative capability of affecting the collective consciousness. This is being realised in the Information Age, as the recognition of there being one spectrum of narrative power is a stepping stone to possessing the power itself. Knowing that we can affect others with our speech gives us the power to exploit this.

Technological paradigms have informed our understanding of the world, and this in turn is advancing the sophistication of our theories and ability to implement the narratives of different understandings. The Information Age 150 has allowed us to see the world as a medium in which every idea exists in a continuum with each other. We are seeing now that no individual, or conscious part of the constructed world, is disconnected; each person is metaphorically "online" in a great network of human consciousness. Any idea can spread and effect new paradigms. All the influence of a paradigm can be contained within a single kernel of speech. Consciousness is a microcosm of the collective consciousness in the same way that narrative can be thought of as fundamentally metanarrative. Smaller ideological conceits, i.e. a singular instance of consciousness or a singular narrative, are being reconceptualised as merely expressions of a pre-existing medium that contains the full spectrum of possible meaning. In this way, the whole of reality's potential narratives is being shown as being within any one part.

Expansion of the thought universe

The world's paradigms are converging in a way that may be illustrated as an increasingly complex organism. We are noticing more that paradigms are not distinct, but expressions of a unifying continuum seen through different lenses. More units of autonomous agency are in its constitution. These smaller narratives reflect biological cells in that they are organisms in and of themselves but also part of a more complex organism. Through the process of more complex narratives emerging, such as the refinement of legal systems, natural science and the Internet, it is becoming more obvious that every narrative is contextualised and informed by the same metanarrative

D.N.A., as common principles emerge between them that reflect principles of a metanarrative, including unification, transcendence and a pre-existing 151 archetypal framework. A further analogy to the generative presence of metanarrative in every smaller narrative can be found in the astronomical phenomenon of the expansion of the universe. As time progresses, the universe grows in size. Its matter becomes more geometrically disparate from itself, but it collectively retains the same source and nature. There is a spread of the influence of general matter, and the universal physical forces associated with it, throughout the cosmos. In this fundamental sense the entirety of the universe is contained in each smaller facet of it. This reflects how the universal properties that constitute greater contextual frameworks are implied by and are inherent to the smaller emergent expressions of it. For this reason, ideas that attain universal relevance, such as the paradigm of globalised authorial voice, do not lose congruence through being spread out.

It is becoming apparent to the collective consciousness through technological trends that the authority to add to the collective narrative is a universal constant not bound by any geographical or political restriction, but contained within every ideological entity and individual consciousness.

Reaching fantasy

Information becoming more abstract makes its inherent ubiquity more obvious. As I figured in the last chapter, when water turns into vapour, it travels up to the clouds and can come down as rain in a remote location.

Virtualised information in the same way can be downloaded anywhere. This ubiquity of information is creating the normalisation of "spoilers", the exposure of a piece of information that reveals an important plot point in a work of fiction or other media production (Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 152

Where Old and New Media Collide 2006, 38). This is being accompanied by an effect that disillusions us from institutionalised narratives, as in the

WikiLeaks scandal. Increasingly, we are all being placed on the same level of knowledge. We are all becoming privy to the world’s collective knowledge and thoughts. Web 2.0, specifically Twitter, gives unprecedented insight to the streams of consciousness of organisations and important figures within them. Furthermore, members of the public are free to verbally communicate with these accounts by posting on them. There is a new ability to interact with famous narratives. The cyberpunk genre anticipated this in depicting as becoming mundane (Cavallaro 2000, 39); the portrayal of cyberspace in

Neuromancer has been received as emphasising “the ‘bodiless exultation’ it gives the user, a soaring through metaspace, where the same mythology is reinscribed not in outer space but in Kantian inner space" (Porush 1994). The general public is becoming more masterful of fantastical narratives because there is increased familiarity with them.

Power in the Information Age is being characterised by both expansion and decentralisation. The Libertarian Progress and Freedom Foundation commented that the "information superhighway" is a fulfilment of “Toffler's

Third Wave society”, "decentralizing power and demassifying markets on an unprecedented scale" (Latham 2002, 182). There is a fundamental movement towards increased protocol use that is implicit to the more widespread systematisation offered by technology, which is resulting in the convergence of government agencies’ activities (Merriman and Skidmore

2001). As systematisation involves the registration and quantification of its constituent parts, this involves a form of ideological subjugation being cast 153 over citizens, with each individual as an extension of its technology. For example, we have come to think of the Internet, the specific network that derived from the ARPANET as simply “the internet” (Rosser 2005); this particular narrative has become thought of as the medium itself.

However, while systems are ingrained with the narrative in effect, this reification also obviates its parameters and increases the public's awareness of its nature. Quantification through digitisation makes the form of the paradigm visible. As technological expertise becomes more widespread, the common person is increasingly more capable of understanding technological narratives on a fundamental level. As such, intellectual is not inherently inhibited in a highly systematised bureaucracy. In contrast, the more equal distribution of authorial power imbues the collective consciousness with an organic flexibility through the capacity to observe and question underlying assumptions. An example is the use of public surveillance cameras being used to hold law enforcement agencies responsible for misconduct (Goold 2003). While the reinforcement of an institution’s narrative through digital quantification reinforces its inherent parameters, this same process obviates its limitations. Through the explication of systems, they are also exposed.

Conclusion

I have argued for the trend of narratives becoming seen as abstracted from material phenomena. This produces a diminished authority of time and space. Current technology is changing global culture in ways that are 154 allowing us a glimpse of the inherent simultaneity and omnipresence of narratives. Now that any narrative framework can emerge at any time, we are starting to see that the roots of all conceivable realities manifest everywhere.

Travel is being reconceptualised as more of an activity of consciousness in the Information Age. It is being reconceptualised as movements within the imagination. Due to the replacement of many of modern society's processes with virtual constructs, mental maps have been reduced to their essence as mere perceptions of the same mass of universal matter. Computer screens appear to take us to different webpages when we have not moved anywhere; they are merely altered arrangements of the same underlying code. A substrate of unlimited potential in this way becomes accessible to the collective consciousness. At a sufficient depth of scientific investigation, about all of the underlying principles of the physical universe unfold from deductions from any minute instance of matter. Analogously, the paradigms that describe the intellectual states of the human species over time all unfold from what is an alternate view of paradigms in which they are unified, the metanarrative. This is illustrated by an origami craft. The sheet of paper is flat and unblemished, and it only resembles a structure when the vectors of folds are introduced, which ultimately produce a more three dimensional object. However, the substance remains the same, and any structure can be made from it.

There is occurring an unconscious reinforcement of the prerequisites for society to accept this notion of self-similarity, to which the concept of a metanarrative of unparsed meaning is central. There is an increasing acceptance of the notion of microcosms reflecting an omnipresent 155 metanarrative. This leads to the idea that many of the intellectual categorisations of our world are sustained through the narratives of the collective consciousness rather than pre-existing, and idiosyncratic to the prominent paradigms of the particular time. A paradigm eventually becomes overgrown and unwieldy in the face of the new social changes that have emerged in the wake of its influence. When it becomes large enough to become an institution, it becomes rigid and overbearing through its continued reinforcement in social structures. This rigidity must acquiesce to a decentralisation of the paradigm, relegating its influence to fractured offshoots of its ideology that represent its refinement. Authority in the

Information Age has shaped itself in this pattern. The Internet has decentralised skill, knowledge and therefore authority by spreading it out.

The concept of authority has been built to a height that its narrow foundations can no longer support. Through its assertion, it has faltered. The paradigm that there is a linear succession of paradigms is itself currently being compromised. The simultaneity and omnipresence of information that is intrinsic to convergence patterns in the Information Age is challenging the traditional notion of sequence. Traditional understandings of paradigm shifts have developed to the point where they are beginning to falter. Paradigms are based in discreteness, in that they dictate the parsing of concepts and points of time. To the extent that unification is undermining discreteness, the notion of the paradigm is eroded. The increased ability to bring narratives into existence is undermining the linearity of paradigms. While Baudrillard denied the idea that history would end with an ideology-based notion of a

“metanarrative”, he declared "if there are no more dustbins of history, this is 156 because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin." (2001, 263). Information is now ubiquitous, and this means the potential of the full spectrum of narratives to emerge at any place or time. This quality of representation will be further explored in the next chapter along with the additional element of comparison to aspects of living entities.

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Chapter 5: Ideas as figurative organisms

While memes have been compared to organisms (Dennett 1990), and their capacity to reproduce is seen as mirroring an objective intrinsic to living beings (Trifonov 2012), they display traits beyond those of a genetic dimension that can be understood as illustrating ideas as figures. The concept of the meme as a discrete cultural unit has been criticised as lacking empirical evidence (Lachapelle, Faucher and Poirier 2005), but it may retain some usefulness as a metaphorical illustration of the propagation of ideas.

Ideas can figuratively be thought of as organisms. The word figure can be traced etymologically to the Old French word figurer, meaning "to represent"

(Harper, figure (n.) 2013). The various concepts this word represents is consistent with a particular semiotic field. Figure can be used to describe an avatar, number, shape, form or person. All of these meanings share the theme of discrete representation of a wider spectrum of abstract, unrealised meaning. Fontanier designated the figure as a form of trope that presents ideas in "livelier and more striking images than their proper signs" (Derrida and Moore 1974). Essentially, a figure is a manifestation of a piece of the semiotic undercurrent; the word speaks of a dynamic analogy that has ingrained itself in consciousness. Contemporary technology is enabling an awareness of the way in which an idea becomes alive in the collective mind in this way. While narratives are what we use to describe the world

(invariably in a way that is artificial), I would argue that the figurative concepts we employ in these theorisations are equivalent to giving specific characterisation to the essence of archetypes. This is identical to the way in 158 which are reinterpreted in culture over time, as in Lévi-Strauss’ mythemes (K.A. Watson 1973). In the virtual arena, individuals, as a concept based on the artificial notion of the ego, can also be said to constitute falsely discrete concepts that form the ontological basis for the simplified narratives that we inhabit. Ideas further embody the figurative in the sense that they are metaphorical; they are not living things, but merely representative of what I have characterised as the greater living consciousness that constitutes a narrative that unifies paradigms.

Changes in cultural sites have illustrated that ideas are not sustaining their reified state in the journey into the Information Age, and that they are unravelling into unformed information. The contingent materialisation of ideas is becoming trivial compared to the abstract patterns emerging through digitisation. While narratives based on the temporality of paradigms have

"expiration dates", we are now being forced to engage with a deeper pool from which our discrete concepts emerge. An unlimited conceptual potential positions this plane outside of time because it is representative of a more complete history of consciousness, rather than an idiosyncratic framework.

As different aspects of a unified awareness, figures, such as people, can be described as organisms, but in terms of the unified awareness itself, they are only representations of living consciousness. Figures are by definition figurative; that is, they are representative of a whole, but may not constitute the whole itself. Information technology is taking advantage of the understanding that the more comprehensive awareness, which represents a larger consciousness, is its collective state; individuals are mere aspects of it.

Ideas in new physics have also suggested that the visible world is a 159 manifestation of the general consciousness of the time, which is correspondingly a temporary aspect of—and a simplified and shallower narrative than—what transcends human encapsulation.

Narratives, as constructed arrangements of information, can be understood through information technology as intrinsically partial reductions of a more continuous common substrate. The worldviews cultivated by these portrayals of reality propagate themselves through the medium of society. In witnessing the new transience of ideas in the Information Age and their attributes as mortal rather than monolithic, we are seeing paradigms as having only nominal awareness. We are more conscious of the fact that awareness is only temporarily ascribed to paradigms, which is positioning an underlying metanarrative as having a consciousness that is, in contrast, not terminable.

This is being made apparent through the Internet serving as a medium for showcasing the behaviour of “viral” content, the temporary nature of ideas online, the Internet as a reflection of minute changes in consciousness, the way in which a narrative grows until it is unconsciously assigned the status of an entity, the creation of “living” societies in the virtual space, the way that ideas are becoming apparent as mere actors in narratives and the constant activity of a world that is thoroughly online. These ways in which the

Information Age portrays concepts as being characteristic of organisms simultaneously expose the limitations of their consciousness comparative to their greater context.

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Living entities influencing the world

The literal meaning of zeitgeist as "spirit of the times" is reflected in the way that cultural memory of time periods revolves around the perception of archetypes, a role assumed by the “hippie” in the 1960s (Miller 1992) and the

“yuppie” in the 1980s (Lowy 1991). This notion might be thought of as the temporal equivalent of Hegel’s geopolitical notion that the weltgeist, or world spirit, is derived from the “concrete universals” of historical figures, resulting in particular ways of philosophising about history (Leo 1993, 261). Ideas of the character of the collective consciousness inform the way in which we relate to our times. The potent symbolism of archetypes gives them direct representation of the particular characteristics that define them, in the same way that the ego is based in its own characterisation. Thought frameworks refer to perceived characteristics. Jung’s view of archetypes was that they all cohabit the collective unconscious (1968, 4); like Lacan’s individual instances of consciousness before individuation into personae, archetypes are not discretely defined until they emerge into the solid forms of the conscious world. While the symbolic order created through the distinctions between archetypes can affect worldviews consciously and unconsciously, these distinctions are only an appearance created through their resonance with the dominant common beliefs of the time. The status of archetypes as intrinsic is limited through culture. Their longevity is dependent on the depth of the ideals that they represent; the more fundamental their symbolism, the more generations they will appeal to. The narratives in dreams and stories are reflective of the notion of an ultimate unity that lies at the genesis of 161 archetypes, transcending their original separation. Aspects of one being are splintered in dreams into multiple entities, and characters in a story can come from the mind of one author. Parallel to this, potentially more conscious constructions such as theories and personae selectively take semantic material from the fabric of potential meaning and cut it into instances of shapes and forms, just as constructions are formed freely on the Internet. It is being made increasingly evident through technology that archetypes are not entities in and of themselves, but perceived representations that encapsulate particular areas of consciousness. Just as paradigms, archetypes do not direct the events of the world as they appear to, but can be visualised as expressions of a more overarching and unifying continuity.

Ideas as egotistical assertions

As I have outlined, discreteness arises as a synthetic concept from the conscious need to categorise and order information. Consciousness, as awareness, develops from the fundamental conceptual divide between the self and others; all awareness starts as self-awareness. This principle of negation through the ego is the first step in a life of categorising meaning artificially as concepts. One's perception of the world is organised around one's view of his or herself, as the worldview derives from the ontologically fundamental ego and must reinforce its narrative. This means that the particular binary oppositions one accepts, and the ideology that arises from it, are fundamentally the product of the negating principle enacted by the ego.

Thought at a conscious level, being awake and existing in the world of human narrative, does not occur without this fundamental definition of the 162 self, as we see the world through the way that we see ourselves. The various narratives of human theorisation therefore are contingent on the self-image of those perceiving them. For this reason the constructed world, as comprising visually discrete concepts, is entirely infused with the narrative power occurring in the depths of a being’s consciousness.

There has been an emergent claim that the most narcissistic ideas are dominating culture (Latonero and Shklovski 2011) (Garrison 2011), with “the everyday malignant narcissist who has their very own of personality” becoming more common (Manne 2006). This phenomenon of self-reference, with the author as the object, represents the popularisation of the view that the conscious will is the creator of media, as opposed to an objective reflection of reality. Egotistical creation is increasingly being seen as the prime source of the inception of narratives.

Culture is always being cut into smaller pieces through our theorisations, as I have illustrated with the proliferation of subcultures through the invention of the Internet. For this reason we are now more than ever before aware of the movement and behaviour of ideas and concepts and the way they are rearranging themselves into new paradigms. Because ideas are less monolithic and more subject to scrutiny and analysis, they are more mobile and capable of floating in a way that allows their behaviour to be perceived.

Culture would therefore appear to be mobile, always in transition; in contrast to Kuhn’s notion of paradigm thinking, in which the paradigm that one inhabits is perceived or assumed to be static and unchangeable (Redfield

1998, 47-48). Paradigms are in the Information Age increasingly being seen as in a constant state of contestation and revision. 163

Minutiae is increasingly visible

Microcosms containing the entirety of the collective consciousness are increasingly being seen as everywhere, even in the stories unknown to society at large. In the Information Age, our idle thoughts are becoming published. Anything that crosses any person's mind, whether it is of great concern to their values or not, can be made publically viewable through social media feeds and other self-publication. Idle thoughts are an aspect of the culturally intangible, as they are less canonical to institutions, and are therefore part of the paradigm shift of reaching a world in which the intangible is visible to us. Paradigms are becoming more reified, tangible, and manipulable. They are here with us so that we can see them. This increased appearance of ubiquity makes movements within the fabric of a culture more noticeable, resulting in the appearance of paradigms as more vital and transient, or "alive". An example is the student occupation of Taiwan’s

Legislative Yuan, the speed of whose growth was dramatically amplified through the Internet (Chen and Liao 2014).

Shifts in large entities such as attitudes and values are intrinsically gradual and difficult to perceive because influential, established institutionalisations form part of the fabric of a culture the longer they have been present. They shape the protocols of language upon which societies are built. As they become institutionalised, therefore, they are less likely to change form. The homogenisation of their structures across time inhibits shifts in their form.

Any new paradigm inherits traits from an older variant in the same field. This is analogous to Jung’s characterisation of one's ancestors as the archetypes 164 of the self (1968, 102). This changes, however, with technological advancement. Large institutions naturally become more viscous in correspondence with advancements, with their component parts becoming subject to the constantly changing online world as they are increasingly integrated with the Internet. Institutions are extended like Mandelbrot fractals, with their spindly extremities more articulate and sensitive to their paradigmatic environment. In this area, an interfacing can be perceived between institutions and consciousness, in that speech acts that become canonised in popular thought can be a product of end user interaction, as in the editing of open projects such as Wikipedia. At this intersection the generative nature of consciousness in institutions becomes visible, rather than hidden through remaining exclusive to private meetings unseen by the public.

Contemporary trends are illuminating the power of idle thoughts to shape institutions. Posts intended as offhand comments that are posted on social media by famous or influential figures now have the potential to have ramifications that affect the political happenings in the background of their field, such as Kim Kardashian’s endorsement of a morning sickness drug triggering discussion of its side effects, resulting in the United States’ Food and Drug Administration interceding (Sweney 2015). Even posts involving unknown individuals can make headlines when the speech or occurrences documented highlight tensions and controversies that register against the collective mindscape of the time. Issues of social injustice such as incidents of perceived police brutality have furthered discourse in new directions, affecting current paradigms (Newman 2012). Further, content produced by 165 amateurs and posted online can now reach millions through the power of its resonance with the thoughts and feelings of the public. There have been cases of individuals amassing notoriety and influence through the popularity of what started as independent productions (Wunsch-Vincent and Vickery

2007, 4). Popular culture now has more acutely significant influence on institutions. Political structures and popular works inform and compete with each other over the scarce resource of the public psyche. User-submitted content has been used by those with power to consolidate attitudes and views that favour their political interests, and it has been used polemically as a force of subversion (Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013, 2). When individuals nominally independent of organisations have the power to become seen and influential, the minutiae of the world's idle thoughts become part of the larger battle for the collective psychology. Previously unknown individuals and events can become symbols of in the effort to establish political dominance. In this way, the potential for individual concerns to be a significant part of the collective consciousness is highlighted through the highly kinetic nature of information in the Information Age.

Culture as cult

The way in which cultures spread can be said to correspond to the nature of virii, which fundamentally interfere with the operation of their host and propagate across regions. Memes are also of course viral in behaviour, and the neologism viral describes online content that behaves in this way, illustrating the nature of ideas as figurative organisms. Various ancient societies extending back millennia have been documented as being culturally 166 led by a shaman who would be capable of shaping the consciousness of the group through his understanding of symbolic magic (Stone 2003, 87). The word cult has etymological roots in cultivation and , and as stated earlier, the word culture is derived from the same root. Cult can also refer to the perceived ability of a shaman to cure any illness. A group following such a figure would as such constitute a cult. Today's societies, while more sophisticated in their contrivances, are predicated on the same principle.

Symbolic magic is used by influential groups that gain so much influence that we describe them as entities due to their effectiveness in shaping consciousness: corporations, although they are not literally corporeal, have in some regions been assigned legal status as “people” for purposes such as ownership and contracts (Totenberg 2014). Public relations of even large corporations issue messages that attribute to corporations, such as gratitude for the customer's business, as if each individual in the corporate structure feels the same way. Attitudes can be spread within a culture, but the peculiarities of individual psyches as unique manifestations of the greater consciousness mean that emotional intricacies are always varied. While a cult intrinsically normalises attitudes and beliefs, the notion that all individuals within the group experience the same emotional reaction to its ideology is itself a conceit propagated by its narrative. Participants in a narrative, when it achieves a certain scale, begin to think of the narrative as an entity.

Viral beginnings of culture

Lacan argued that the forming of human consciousness occurs through division, with a person's sense of self determined early in their life when they 167 mentally establish a divide between their self and others (King 1999). As well as the individual consciousness, this same principle also manifests in culture.

Eliade argued that the ideas that take place during a culture's primordial era are the ones that determine the basis of a collective consciousness through what he called hierophany (Reno 1972). Lacan’s idea of the self forming as a myth in infancy has an analogue in the beginnings of a culture when it breaks off from other groups and establishes its own socially constructed rules. In this respect the ideas defining a culture are formed in the same way as those of an organism. Self-awareness, analogously, is considered synonymous with consciousness. Qualia, as qualities or properties perceived at a personal level, represent a measure of intractably subjective experience (Ginet 1999), and whether through illusion or not, an affirmation that one is conscious. This notion of one’s own existence is being extended through paradigm shifts to include concepts of a living collective consciousness. With the expansion of communities through online connectivity, theory of mind is being applied to increasingly inclusive groups. Awareness of awareness itself is being extended so we now think about thought systems on a global scale.

Collective self-awareness of the parameters of widespread thinking is creating a process of diffusion that is shifting the mindscape towards new paradigms (Meyer-Dinkgräfe 1998). Deferment through différance (Lawler

2014), and the way that constant re-evaluation changes the directions in which meaning is deferred, suggests an inherently kinetic quality in the underlying continuity that unifies them; paradigms move because they can essentially be considered to be alive—awareness brings them into conceptual existence but also subsumes them into a greater knowledge. The 168 initial requirement for separation merely highlights that the essence of conscious awareness is intrinsically unified, and exists on a macrocosmic scale, suggesting a broader consciousness.

Going viral

Our narratives determine the shape of our awareness. The particular narratives that emerge are determined by which ideas have the right degree of contagion. The behaviour of memes is commonly described as viral because ideas are now envisaged as living parasites. The technology of the new media has accelerated and reinforced this. The term “going viral” is a neologism resulting from online content sharing. Ideas are thus conceptualised as organisms that feed on consciousness. The more individuals an idea infects, the more personal psychological conditions it is subjected to and the more complex the “organism” becomes as it grows larger. Adapting to different variations of ideology, the idea mutates, sustaining its capacity to remain in the cultural mindscape. However, as I have highlighted, ideas are not fundamentally discrete, but tenuously defined due to their abstract nature. In the cultural context created by the Internet, it is becoming more obtuse to nominate instances of ideas as discrete, or sememes in semiotics, when they are simultaneously positioned on a visibly unified continuum. The way in which we ascribe properties of consciousness to viral content invites a corresponding idea that instances of such content are only avatars or nominal aspects of a larger conscious continuity. The extent to which this notion is readily facilitated is corresponding to the fluidity of information that advances in information technology afford. 169

Using ideas as organisms

We now perceive virii differently. Traditionally the word virus has been regarded as a mere expression of the entropic side of the universe; an element of nature beyond our control that we have to adapt to merely in order to minimise its negative impacts. Now in the Information Age, in which the power of information to spread exponentially is being observed and documented, there is a growing popularised awareness of the capacity for iconic imagery (not necessarily visual, but all media) to spread. Previously, access to this knowledge or technology was restricted to the elite: those in the business of public relations such as politics and marketing. Now, the general public is learning that a narrative can be expressed and institutionalised through using what resonates with the zeitgeist. While something going "viral" is never guaranteed, the constant documentation of what is popular (what social media call "trending") allows unprecedented opportunity for amateurs to connect with the greater populace through reflecting contemporary beliefs. This is particularly effective when the belief is popularly held while so far not yet expressed in popular media.

Viral content can be commercialised and built upon as a brand. When a virtual sign becomes iconic, it can be leveraged for the purposes of those who control it. In the Information Age, the virus is not merely naturally occurring and chaotic; its particular movement can be steered. While a powerful viral idea can be used to shape the collective consciousness, the idea can in turn be shaped by those who unleash it. This power to govern the course of an idea is increasingly in the hands of the general public. Ideas can 170 now more easily be influenced by social movements through the Internet.

The virus can be infected by us. Paradigms themselves are becoming, in this sense, self-aware.

Going live

In the Information Age, no place or time dies or is dormant forever; ideas from all eras and places are continuously present virtually, regardless of how one is situated. Additionally, institutions are increasingly online, capable of constantly updating. With the advent of the Internet, software is considerably more prone to changing, meaning that the technology we use is constantly evolving in a much more visible manner. The presence of software is increasingly ubiquitous, with even articles of clothing now beginning to have their own firmware. This effectively means that, increasingly, all of the physical objects in our lives are plugged into the Internet. Technological convergence in the rise of protocols between disparate systems means that the potential for unified systems is increasing (Galloway 2013); all the objects in our lives are developing the ability to "speak" to each other and be on the same terms. This overarching method of processing and therefore influencing reality is consistent with the defining characteristics of a paradigm. These phenomena are paradigms in more visible and kinetic forms, as if they are living. Hence, our paradigms are increasingly being characterised by being tangible to us: we can consciously witness them, making the concept of paradigms progressively “meta”, itself a term that has been adapted by and spread throughout popular culture (NPR 2012). 171

A world that is always “on”

The shifting of stores’ opening hours to twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, a development increasingly prevalent among large commercial entities, is a removal of the separation of day from night. The placement of the two concepts on a continuous spectrum represents a unification of time in a way that parallels the pooling of information online, and is a response to the needs of a more globalised world. Effectively there are no degrees of separation between different economic time periods in this paradigm; instead, there is increasingly dominant in the Information Age a in which time is singular. Any activity in a society could be said to imply the movement of resources, which is how economics is defined

(James, et al. 2015, 53). Continuous economic activity is in this way synonymous with general societal liveliness. The “24/7” model represents a partial breaking down of the segmentation through which information flows may be constrained. A convergence between day and night, in contrast, allows cross pollination of models of thought that may previously have been culturally separated. Efficiency in communication and travel are advancing proportionally to technology because technology is the elimination of distance; geographically, temporally and conceptually. It has been argued that continued sophistication in communication and travel are rendering the world so small that we are increasingly in need of one time for all locations

(Oke 2009). Philosophically, unified time means more than clock synchronisation. In Euclidean time, time is indistinct from space. The

Newtonian inclination to segment time is subsiding to the natural sovereignty 172 of narratives based in abstract themes rather than events, which is inherent in our inability to determine the state of a particle without arbitrary segmentation. The unification of time in society reflects the notion of there being “knowledge” of one part of the universe by another. Through this engagement with unity, this new perception of time in human culture intrinsically includes a perception of the universe as unified on a fundamental metaphysical level. Thereby a perception of other manifestations of the unified substrate is gained.

Living online worlds

Online computer gaming has further reinforced the elements of transience and present-tense in virtual worlds. Avatars (player characters) that the user encounters in these worlds can now be controlled by humans. These online role playing games emerged in the twentieth century; they are graphics based computer games played online that involve interactions between thousands of human players. Virtual worlds in this way can accommodate avatars that have lives that unfold in real time. As fictional characters, they are conceptual, but nevertheless the worlds have properties that represent a living system. Socially, the interactions taking place constitute the form of a society, with verbal and nonverbal engagement. On a sensory level, the presence of different minds and constant exchange of ideas represent the development of a collective consciousness almost as much as they do in person. Although containing only avatars of living beings, this ultimately only constitutes another layer of abstraction from the consciousness of the metanarrative; it is the same abstraction caused by the ego’s diffusion from 173 the collective consciousness, taken to the next degree. The technology of the virtual environment exposes the distinctions between minds as illusory, as the abstraction of the corporeal world to a digital one means that the distinctions are now appearance based, contingent only on graphical and audial elements that are easily manipulated. In this environment, the nature of consciousness is more obviously unified.

These worlds also contain arbitrary but commonly accepted rules that determine the nature of interactions, abidance by which is taken for granted as necessary for existence in the world. The programming code on which these games run is representative of our ideological constructions. The increasing familiarity of online worlds to popular culture is obviating to the public that our thought systems are not inert but infused with and made active by human consciousness. In the case of open source software, which can be modified by anyone, the programming is determined by a group consensus representing a collective consciousness. This reflects the principle that the awareness of unity achieved through aggregation leads to transcendence of a world’s consensual but hidden premises.

Virtual worlds without the objectives of games, such as Second Life, serve as venues for unlimited thought experiments. In this virtual world, the laws of physics serve as little more than distractions, which means that there is a complete lack of consequences of the events that take place, and constraints on possibility are no longer a consideration. All humanoid avatars can defy gravity and freely fly between locations, trivialising distance. This freedom for play, in Schechner’s conception of it as performance and experimentation

(1993, 26-27), unlocks an entire intellectual arena of experimentation. A 174 virtual world in this way is pool of unlimited potential that can inspire any new perspective with its unique capacity for uncanny occurrences. It is equivalent to the Darwinian notion of a body of water with live cultures from which rudimentary vertebrates emerge from. Like in a quantum vacuum, complex structures in virtual worlds can spring up from whims. This mirrors the way that asexual reproduction means common D.N.A. across the resulting organisms, and gives us an insight as to the nature of ideas in their abstract, unrealised form. Virtual worlds are analogues of the metanarrative in that they represent a collectivised medium of diffusion from which any possible manifestation of consciousness, or narrative, can split off. The increasing prominence of online virtual worlds is ingraining in general understanding a unity between instances of consciousness.

Continuity as narrative

The word continuity reveals a link between ideas and authorship. It has definitions in both the sense of an incremental connection between two conceptual nodes, and in the sense of a story. Just as that of the word figure, the use of this word can be attributed to a common semiotic field in the unconstructed substrate that has merely manifested in the form of two notionally discrete concepts. The distance between concepts is a continuum; it is also a narrative formed by the specific frameworks that Saussure argued is inherent in concepts (Profant 2010). The concepts in a narrative are often its characters. In this sense they are living actors with roles in the story, the role of each being the conceptual site it represents. This is analogous to the way in which the people we encounter in dreams are merely aspects of the 175 dreamer in dream psychology: although appearing to be separate, they are only fulfilling different roles in a unified story. Paradigms in the conscious world function in the same way, as they are singular bodies, or complex organisms, with constituent parts that appear to be unconnected but come from a common unconscious source, thus unifying paradigms in a greater narrative. We are all actors in the story of the paradigm that we inhabit.

Conversely, paradigms each have their particular roles in the metanarrative, embodying each of its aspects. The Information Age, with its placement of all information on a spectrum at a scale of globalised culture, has the role of ingraining in us the notion that paradigms are unified. The interactivity between ideas and paradigms as fluid narratives portrays consciousness as continuous throughout our world, with its apparently discrete aspects merely narratives that have become entrenched in the dominant psyche as part of an epistemological framework. The collective perception of living beings is revealed as psychological reflections of hidden fundamental structures of the unconscious.

Temporality

As cathartic release of emotion or intellectual clarification is what a narrative arc builds towards, a narrative is about its ending. Our cognitive emphasis on an ending was outlined by Kermode, who argued for our need to deny eternity in our conceptualisations in order to position the story of our own lives as central (2000, 3-5). Metanarrative, meanwhile, as a story about stories, implies transcendence of sequence. I have argued that narratives have an in-built expiration in that they are inherently built on falsely separated 176 units of analysis and it is thus in their nature, as analogies, to break down.

Narratives, paradigms, ideas, and the ego all "die" because of the fundamental lies that they are based on. Paradigms die in that they shift and morph into another form, however the overarching structure of which they are part is constant in providing the context in which paradigm shifts occur.

Any given paradigm has parameters and limits imposed through the invariably simplified and specious concepts from which they are formed. In this way they are doomed to be temporary. Movements that attempt to encapsulate a higher symbolic order are limited. They are limited by the primitive technologies through which the expression of the theory is attempted, including those of language, the nature of the medium used, and the means of making the argument resonate with the emotional core of its contemporary audience. Similarly, the advocate of the position is also subject to the zeitgeist, as informed and motivated by the prevailing underlying themes of the collective medium of human society. The metanarrative is not subject to the constraints of eras, as time is itself merely a narrative that allows the conscious world to be conceptualised and organised. We are intrinsically incapable of seeing the metanarrative without prejudice or ego as our psychology is deeply embedded in these boundaries. Perception of the

"story about stories" is antithetical to our own infinitesimal existence, and makes it immaterial to our lives, and therefore unending.

The paradigm as an entity

The narratives a culture adopts at its inception invariably grow in complexity, and combined, take on the appearance of an entity, as if they seem to 177 constitute the basis of all consciousness. This role, naturally occupied by the metanarrative, is appropriated variously by paradigms, making it seem like their pictures of the world are to the same extent part of our living reality.

Underlying premises are hidden, and a paradigm begins to seem as irreducible as a person. We react to paradigms as if they have a nurturing role towards us, nourishing our intellectual growth as individuals and collectively as cultures. In this way we perceive paradigms as the living reality of the universe when they can be more accurately framed as playing the role of the relationship we have towards the universe. Jung addressed this with his mother archetype that he claimed exists deep in the unconscious, “the matrix—the form into which all experience is poured”

(1968, 101-110). Our framework of the world is as a parental figure in that we internalise it and relate to the world through it. In order to hold on to the idea of ourselves and consciously operate, out of necessity we perceive paradigms as more than paradigms; we accept them as being an unchanging picture of the world as if they are what allows lives to take place, facilitating consciousness itself. If our sense of identity derives from our own constructions, thinking of ourselves as alive necessitates regarding the thinking world we have created as alive. We unconsciously imagine ways of thinking as constituting “life” itself, as we see it as a context embodying the essence of living things. For this reason we also refer to our world experience with this word. Edgar Morin illustrated this in describing the individual’s pursuit of social immortality: "Universality of royal consciousness exists solely through the negation of its presence in the consciousness of others"

(Bauman 1992, 67). That is, one is able to attain social prominence only 178 through a social framework that is concealed as internalised normality. In the same way, frameworks are aspects of consciousness that present themselves as representing reality, and hide their presence in the epistemological assumptions of the public. Now, however, with social frameworks shifting in and out of existence in a manner that is highly observable, paradigms are represented as more mortal. The new transience of paradigms diminishes the sovereignty of our narratives. In a world in which the infrastructure of ideas is such that information moves freely, the public consciousness is constantly subjected to a revision of dominant thought structures, such as through social media movements, and the current paradigm is revealed as merely an aspect of an entity, rather than itself living.

The current use of the word metanarrative is often applied to the collective views of a greater geographic area while still only describing one time period, for example, class struggles in the United States of the twentieth-century

(Baringer 2004, 3). The reason for this is perhaps the habit of perceiving paradigms as permanent fixtures whose change over time is limited to mere elaboration rather than fundamental disruption. A dissonance is harboured from historical perspective here because it disrupts the comforting notion that reality cannot change. There is a high degree of unconsciously placed in the idea of the permanence of the paradigms one happens to live in.

Psychologically, this ensures a sense of security that reinforces the thought constructions that stem all the way down from the inaugural thought construction of the ego. For this reason the constructed narratives at the foundation of a culture tend to be continuously built on, rather than re- examined at a progenitive level. The more ubiquitous aspects of collective 179 consciousness must be traced back to the common denominator. While rhizomes may offer new entry points for thought frameworks as Deleuze argued (Smith and Protevi 2015), the rhizomatic model is itself an attempt to contextualise finite narratives, as seen in his comment on cultural narratives in the United States: “Everything of importance that has happened and that is happening proceeds by means of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, the subterranean mobs and gangs—all successive lateral shoots in immediate connection with an outside” (Brott 2010). A semiotic field, through its nature as not definitive, contains further permutations of the idea. An intangible source of different thought constructions would suggest unification in the same way, because a common source itself implies unity.

Division through geopolitical boundaries is an example: it is an artificial construction that negates the geographic oneness of the globe, and this is being confronted through the unifying effect of the new virtual representation of states that I previously mentioned. Narratives stem from the constructed ordering of ideas that become unconscious. The notion that paradigms are alive as separate entities is ultimately a product of this initial division. This personification is now being continually undone through the highly visible pooling together of paradigms through information technology. There may therefore be more utility in conceptualising the metanarrative as an organism than to treat narratives in the same way.

The sophistication of the organic

We are increasingly harnessing the subtle complexity of nature in our technology. The two are interfacing to create a potent source of 180 unprecedented sophistication. The world is becoming more alive in the sense that it is increasingly resembling the organic qualities of nature (McLuhan

1994, 128). Sophistication may be measured by the minuteness of the scale at which it operates. Moore’s law for example establishes that processing power can be contained in increasingly smaller microchips (Moore 2006, 20).

However, nature’s sophistication extends all the way to the infinitesimal level, as it is the basic material context through which he universe exists. This is in contrast to the superficial form of organisation employed by synthetic constructions.

Increasingly today, technology is now more closely resembling the organic structures in naturally occurring biology. The previously mentioned trend of modern technological design principles emphasising curved lines illustrates this. The smaller the scale we are capable of manipulating, the more subtle the narrative of the technology becomes and the more potential it has to affect the universe at a fundamental level. It is for this reason that quantum foam is simultaneously conceptualised both macrocosmically in terms of its effects, and microcosmically in terms of its catalysts. As outlined in the previous section, narratives are most powerful when they are deeply embedded in the unconscious so that the "host" or audience is not aware of the influence the idea is having on their thoughts. In contrast, the extent of our widespread sophistication up to this point in history has overlooked the smallest scales of reality. Physics is still popularly conceptualised in terms of its classical incarnation, not at the quantum level at which the narratives of the four fundamental forces break down. Quantum physics challenges common perspectives at such a fundamental level that the transition to its 181 widespread mental internalisation is hindered by resistance. Our paradigms revolve around simplistic binary opposition between concepts rather than acknowledging the context of the relativity that forms their medium. Because today’s technology forces us to engage with the concept of source code increasingly, the artificiality and temporality of constructions from binary is becoming widely evident. As we approach a widespread understanding of such notions, we are gaining a new perception of the universe’s malleability.

Ideas as caricatures

An idea is defined by what it is not, characterised through its limitations. Yet, for an idea to reproduce it must have its own vivid role and vitality, giving it the appearance of being. It must have traits (of which a synonym is

“personality”) to function as a semiotic entity. Ideas as discrete concepts emerge through energetic philosophical defiance. Orwell’s Fahrenheit 451 similarly explored the notion of ideas being accepted more easily if they are

“happier”, i.e. simplified for ease of comprehension (Bradbury 2012, 88). In the theory of the culture-industry, this is exploited in the construction of ideological worlds (Adorno 2005, 7). Hence, the world we regard as lively in its movement is a projection of popular ideas that are caricatured. Information technology makes us more self-aware of this process, as we can now witness worlds that are convincingly living and breathing arise purely from the implementation of ideas, such as in emerging virtual reality technology. This premise concurrently obviates the simplification inherent in the construction of narratives. Just as persons in the age of social networking, the living essence of an isolated idea is revealed as the continuity of which it is a 182 representation. We may think of a cartoon to the real world as constructed reality would be to metanarrative.

Reproduction through collectiveness

McLuhan addressed the term Darshan, an Indian spiritual concept meaning

"being" in large numbers (1994, 110). Darshan reflects the idea that the essence of consciousness lies in its collectivised, unified form. In culture, smaller narratives or manifestations of consciousness represent aspects of the unified consciousness, but are ultimately only representations in the literal sense of re-presenting an all-encompassing ocean in a minimised, selective and digestible form. We are all authors of the metanarrative in the sense that we individually contribute to the collective beliefs, thoughts and feelings of the global culture. An idea does not last if it does not demonstrate the ability to procreate through resonating with the individuals that it encounters, and therefore subsequently spreading. We are all responsible for the implications behind the speech acts that we introduce into the greater ecosystem of ideas, even those who do not have an immediately visible platform. The Internet highlights that the authorship of the world is found in the greater living consciousness reflected in the worldwide trends and collective thoughts of the generation. Thinking of the human population as an amalgam facilitates the perception of schizophrenic but ultimately integrated movements in the construction of reality through the reification of information.

Conclusion

The increasing self-awareness in our paradigms can be thought of as giving 183 them an increased degree of apparent consciousness. In the transition from the paradigm of "offline" to that of "online", previously inert objects have gained an ability to reflect elements of awareness. This is a microcosm of the way in which paradigms journey through stages of awareness. Our awareness of our tangible environment builds the knowledge that the paradigm asserts, and subsequent awareness of the paradigm itself leads to our becoming conscious of its limitations. This moment of identifying the paradigm simultaneously represents the implication of it being placed on a spectrum by which it is defined. In developing an increasing capacity for meta-awareness, we are becoming more capable of perceiving ideas outside the parameters of our established paradigms. The quantification of ideas through the Information Age makes their construction more tangibly visible, which grants us a superior distance that allows unconventional thinking. In this way, we are becoming more conscious as our technology affords more awareness.

The increasingly kinetic and transient nature of ideas in the Information Age is giving them a perceivable trait of movement that further illustrates paradigms as being aspects of a consciousness at a more profound scale.

Understanding, as the core of technology, never remains static, as it always implies the journey in consciousness between knowledge and the contextualisation of knowledge. Characters in stories always move, whether it is physically or mentally. The characters in our narratives, whether they are conceptualised as ideas, living archetypes, or the view of the self, are abstractions from the metanarrative that create movements on the surface level of consciousness and the appearance of paradigm shifts. The 184 convergence of paradigms through increasing connectivity, however, is reframing these views of movement as of perspective, with what is instead an underlying dynamism of perpetual potential. What the Information

Age is revealing about the nature of worldviews through graphic representation will be outlined in the next chapter.

The unifying backdrop of the Internet is an increasing challenge to the capacity of discreteness between ideas to represent the collective consciousness. As the limitations inherent in an idea become apparent through this unifying frame, a continuum of shared meaning from which ideas collectively draw is being internalised. As a product of this, any specific thought framework has a more fleeting gravitas, so that its tendency to be psychologically positioned as an authority is less permanent. Like a dream awoken from, its reality is more transparent as a trick. It is now through information technology that narratives are being seen to be made up of conceptual units that have only been brought to life through paradigmatic storytelling. Discrete concepts are being revealed as merely analogies or metaphors that resonate as representations of what is a unified metanarrative. Consciousness is seen less as held by discrete ideas, but manifesting from an underlying unity.

Information technology is showing us that, if ideas represent consciousness, that consciousness is better represented by the greater pool that is the metanarrative’s collectivisation of ideas. In this way, the aspect of narratives that might be considered equivalent to living ideas is a further instance of discreteness between conceptual units breaking down in public perception through technology. The examples of changing views of consciousness that I 185 have highlighted in this chapter are providing an additional insight into the way in which the unifying notion of the metanarrative is prevailing in the

Information Age. Consciousness is being redefined as fundamentally collective.

186

Chapter 6: A world of graphics

As their “Word of the Year” 2015, Oxford Dictionaries chose an “emoji”, an icon used in text messaging to express emotions (Hall and Parry 2015). This was a deliberate but telling indication of the contemporary use of graphics to represent and communicate. There is a growing recognition in popular thought that symbols make up the world. In this chapter I will address the current metaphysical transition of ideas into the images that we consider as our reality, an idea that W.J.T. Mitchell calls the age of the "pictorial turn"

(2002, 231-249). As I have outlined, the Internet’s nature as dominated by symbols is bolstering an awareness of the nominal and thereby tentative nature of the world that we inhabit. This is enhancing the wide understanding of a combined spectrum of increments between the ideological and the vivid.

The perceived tenuousness of reality intrinsic to constructivism has grown to the point of triggering a collective questioning of the epistemological assumptions behind the units of analysis we employ to make sense of the world. This has the natural effect of exposing formerly solid institutional apparitions as sophisticated mirages. The compromised concept of professionalism in Web 2.0 is an example of this. The units of analysis we use to construct theories are artificially discrete, and implicitly the mental framework by which we process the world is filtered through symbols that are merely compelling to the zeitgeist at the given time. The particular symbols that make up collective human perception change over time in reaction to advancing technology, which represents the extent of humankind’s sophistication as driven by the undercurrent of change as an essence. The 187 trend toward convergence, which I have argued is intrinsic to technology, implies the notion of unlimited potential in the visual world becoming more tangible to global perceptions. The most advanced scientific theories we have access to imply that solid objects are more accurately regarded as unified at an abstract level as a continuum of energy. Correspondingly, the symbols with which our theories are constructed are being reframed as blending into a unified backdrop that precedes the more artificial principle of categorisation. With global culture becoming more viscous as opposed to solid and reified, the flexibility to consciously integrate alternate signs into the constructed world’s perception of reality, through imagery, becomes more graspable and self-conscious rather than a natural, unconscious process.

The superficial nature of paradigms, as frameworks that are commonly accepted, gives the visible surface of the world immediate importance to the operation of the collective consciousness. This surface level of consciousness, at which the broadly apparent aspects of accepted reality are consolidated in everyday thought, is the plane on which paradigms are inhabited. Narratives are made vivid through visual representations. I will identify elements of information technology that illustrate the power of the visual to create and recreate the global mindscape. This will include the spectrum between ideas and solidified images, the capacity of the visual to reify unconscious ideas, the bridge between fantasy and reality and the consistent patterns that underlie superficial change. These concepts will illuminate the temporary nature of apparently permanent epistemic institutions, indicating that the power to shape reality is more potent in proximity to an overarching metanarrative. 188

The visible

The most universally compelling ideas are the ones that have attained the highest level of vividness and visibility, as they are the ones that seem real.

Corporations have found that their success is defined in the aesthetic impacts they make, including their mascots, logos, musical jingles, or their presence as an icon in the public consciousness (Moreo, Problems to Go,

Problems to Solve 2000, 68) (Moreo, Games of Persuasion: Exercises in

Media Literacy 2000, 44-45). This is found in the power of online memes, which derives from properties that make them likely to become widely visible according to the cultural context in which they are transmitted (Heylighen and

Chielens 2008).

The self, also, is increasingly functioning in a similar manner. Whereas previously one’s social persona would exist primarily through communication that is verbal or in person, online profiles have created a far wider level of visibility, and so one’s self is primarily made graphic through the clear and organised symbols offered by social media. Through such new expectations of online engagement, global culture is becoming increasingly visual.

Mallarmé, the nineteenth century symbolist, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book, purporting that ideas must be converted into some vivid institution in order to have a canonical existence. Susan Sontag amended this in 1977: “today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

(1977, 24). In the Information Age, concepts are now not considered legitimate or real unless they are made visible online. This is engendering in us the idea that what is accepted as real is merely what is visual or vividly 189 apparent.3

Successful ideas, when they resonate with the zeitgeist and as a result become circulated and reinforced, can be characterised as vividly graphic; their persuasiveness causes them to taken for granted as an indivisible unit of analysis. In this sense, we can postulate that how “real” something is depends how graphic it appears to the collective consciousness. Baudrillard said that “We might almost say that reality is jealous of fiction, that the real is jealous of the image.... It is a kind of duel between them, a contest to see which can be the most unimaginable” (Baudrillard 2003, 28). Further, the visual has been used to refer to the perceived cultural landscape, or worldview, as opposed to merely the ocular; Walker and Chaplin refer to vision as a social process made up of cultural meanings (1977, 22). In this chapter I will use the term to refer metaphorically to the more general sense of the aesthetically vivid. As mentioned earlier, Jung claimed that, psychologically, the visible world could be said to be made up of the visible part of the idea spectrum (2014, 215). In this model, even the most graphic and tangible cornerstones of our constructed world are only the illustrative analogies that our understanding is capable of reaching. We simplify to create the world that we live in; as art historian Barbara Maria Stafford argued, "we should imagine analogy, then, as a participatory performance"

(Stafford 2001, 9). The experience of the human consciousness is defined only by that of which we are capable of being conscious. This implicitly excludes understandings that transcend discrete units of analysis.

3This also represents an increasingly greater concern with the lens through which we see than the object being seen. This is a shift towards a self-awareness built into the construction of our own paradigms. 190

Contemporary technological advances illustrate that the visible world is composed of analogies that have been made graphic. Whole consensual worlds are built online through the interaction of appealing signs. We are now living the idea that the conscious world is ideas and theories that have been well defined through mutual understanding by the collective consciousness.

These paradigms, however, are only analogies that subside to the unified substrate that precedes conscious intellectualisation. The thought structures that we take for granted as real are compositions of resonant analogies that appeal to the extent of our sophistication at any given point in history (Hamlin

1976). That is, the paradigmatic framework through which we perceive the world is like any other form of our technology; it represents our current understanding of the world.

The front page of the Internet

Reddit calls itself “the front page of the Internet”, deriving this name from its position as the most prominent online forum with the most diverse userbase

(Sanderson and Rigby 2013). While sites such as Facebook boast higher numbers of users, Reddit represents the most collectivised representation of the general public’s presence in sites dedicated to forums. Imgur is the image hosting section of Reddit to which user submitted images are uploaded and subjected to ranking in order of the speed at which they spread. This positions it as an abstracted illustration of the thoughts of the technologically engaged world in general. Imgur facilitates memes in its very design, even featuring guided software called meme “generators”. The most popular images on Imgur are the most abstracted ones; the ones that capture the essence of an idea, such as the archetype of “Scumbag Steve” which is 191 applied universally online to instances of selfish acts by males. Imgur as a cultural site signifies a simplified cartoon surface of the Internet, and reflects the superficial constructions of the contemporary world, with its accepted idea forms as caricatured and archetypal. The integration of these attributes into the intentions of the website indicates increased conscious awareness of the power of archetypes to makeup the visible world.

Between images and words

To the end of information compression, there is an increasing blurring between acronyms and words (Melenciuc 2014) as well as between words and logos in popular culture. This demonstrates an incremental abstraction from literal to visual. An example is the literary initialism transitioning into being referred to as the visual acronym, and the acronym’s subsequent use as a spoken word in which an acronym ceases to represent initials and its meaning becomes circular as a reference to a specific constructed context

(Rodriguez and Cannon 1992, 266-271), an example being NATO. In this way there is some acknowledgement and embracing of meaning as merely arbitrarily nominal, as opposed to in reference to an object. Here an idea is treated as being shaped by its own method of expression, more than any tangible discreteness. Literal meaning in this way is downplayed in significance and nomenclature becomes more exclusively aesthetic. The reality is formed by the word, instead of the reverse. The ultimately visual nature of narratives is emerging through trends such as these. A literal parsing of meaning into discrete units is being increasingly sensed as superficial, as the world is functioning increasingly through the employment 192 of images (Snavely 2005). In a retreat from the literary, technology has allowed and revealed the effectiveness of quick, iconic images. As mentioned earlier, it has been suggested that tasks must now be achieved at greater speed to keep up with societal expectations. Icons representing apps necessitate instant convection of concepts, as they are switched between constantly. The content our software presents is entirely changed in a way that merely depends on which image we tap a finger on; our environment is built on our choice of narration through images.

Politics has been described as being about words (Diamond 1969), in that it is defined by contests of rhetorical persuasion between nominal institutions.

The primary nature of politics as literary is becoming revealed publically, as it is transitioning into being more obviously about the projection of constructed realities. Recent decades have indicated a trend of an increased role of imagery in politics; two images of Barack Obama being examples: the “” poster created by artist Shepard Fairey that would become iconic and earn approval from Obama’s campaign (Tolbert 2010) and the viral, student- authored image portraying Obama as Batman villain the Joker (Johnson,

Dowe and Fauntroy 2011). This corresponds with a growing understanding that politics is about the construction of a particular image of the world in the collective mind of the populace. A 2008 paper on the impact of images on cultural consciousness reflected this, determining that:

Rhetoric is the art of discerning and deploying the available contingent

means of constructing, maintaining, and transforming in a

particular context. Clearly in our current context, advertisements,

fashion, bodies, buildings and images are seen as at least as 193

persuasive as speeches (DeLuca 2008).

The increased abundance of intricately constructed images in the Information

Age facilitates a wider familiarity with the idea that something vividly convincing can be created from nothing. The progression of technology in the computer game industry is a reflection of the increasing vividness with which we are able to portray the imaginary. Productions in the adventure genre of computer games began in 1975 as purely text based, i.e. the content of the game was represented only by words (Montfort 2003, 9-11), but later utilised graphics, and have progressed to the point of incorporating rendered visuals now considered at times photorealistic (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith and Tosca

2013, 143). Once again, this corresponds to the way in which the imagined distinction between writing and pictures as two separate forms is being blurred. This phenomenon is indicative of a growing fundamental perception of a continuity between the theoretical (literary) and the real (graphic). In other words, we are starting to sense that our narratives give form to our world, and each of them emerges from a fluid plane of meaning that unifies them. The ironic distance we have gained from graphetics, the field that connects the two forms, is an indication of how the literary and graphic are being merged. Images are no longer seen as simply representations as they have been regarded traditionally, but a method of fostering alternate perceptions of reality. Content and the visual form it takes are seen as the same. As in the example of the McDonald’s golden arches, logos are now pictures as well as words. This corresponds to an increased engagement with graphetics, and is a demonstration that concepts considered fundamental can shift when further levels of irony are extrapolated from 194 them. This recent shift is revealing that apparent forms change through shifts in perspective. We are rapidly developing the ability to summon vivid and convincing images, visual and mental, into existence in ways that can create new narratives. We are more and more becoming authors, consciously deciding for ourselves what we are looking at.

Vector graphics

String theory, which emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century, can be seen to complementing the notion of physical information. The theory posits that particles are merely the appearance of one-dimensional strings in various vibrational states. As strings in this theory are truly one-dimensional, they might be considered less objects and more vectors signifying relationships. As the essence of narrative can be thought of as the relationships between concepts (Gergen and Gergen 1988, 18-22), strings might be said to equate to a physical manifestation of Derrida’s différance, or the meaning in between words. String theory may provide for us the framework of a totalising narrative system that makes up existence. While there is limited awareness of the theory, it can be seen as a manifestation of the fundamental principle that what we perceive is determined by the consolidation of narratives. Our exploration of string theory may coincide with knowledge of other forms of reality control because it corresponds to a stage we are at in the overarching march towards narrative self-awareness.

Similarly, in quantum mechanics, the world perceived from the perspective of classical physics is interdependent with abstract vectors that underlie the directly observable (Hagelin, “Restructuring Physics From Its Foundation in 195

Light of Maharishi Vedic Science” 1989). This roughly coincides with

Derrida’s hypothesis that concepts are distinct from each other through their distance from each other. Like the image of the self, a concept is defined by what it is not; in this sense, the lines of différance constitute a tension between concepts. Ideologies such as theoretical narratives are transient because of this delicate tension. Yet the world, as a construction, is built on these fragile separations. Each instance of this duality is a one dimensional vector, and when integrated with other dualities it becomes a two dimensional map of reality. A child’s drawing could be seen as an analogy of this. Upon gaining more complexity, these ideologies become three dimensional and form the solid “ice” form of the analogy I employed earlier.

This reflects constructed reality; we pinpoint conceptual nodes in our minds and then live out the tension between them. Vector graphics in computing provide a vivid representation of this; pixels are not needed, as a line can be produced automatically when two coordinates on the canvas are inputted

(Lunemann 1995). The ease with which we can travel between websites is creating the notion in the collective consciousness of an arena of ideas with

“sites” that are apparently distinct but in fact are contextualised by a continuity that unifies them.

Illustrating what is hidden

The visual, or real, is being revealed as fundamentally theoretical through the bridging of the theoretical and graphic. Advancements in technology are seeing it become increasingly intangible. Traditionally, technology has been perceived as manual, defined by direct, hands-on physical manipulation. As I 196 have outlined through the examples of cloud computing and 3D printing, a merge of software and hardware is occurring in the Information Age. The dominance of computer programs in everyday life paints a picture of a world manipulated at the level of thought. In this way technology is increasingly being reduced to its essence as a narrative. It is furthermore coming from an increasingly deep level of consciousness. Less conscious effort is now required to use technology; one does not even need to be awake to use it.

Convenience and efficiency means the exertion of less effort. Previously, technology required one’s full engagement. Now, it can be employed for complex processes through the mere use of fingertips. Prototypes exist that integrate neurological processes, meaning the necessity for even less conscious effort (Jarosiewicz, et al. 2008). Gradual cyborgisation means that control of our machines is becoming more intimate in us; humans and machines are now more closely connected. Donna Haraway calls the cyborg

"a creature of social reality", which she defines as "our most important political construction, a world changing fiction" (1987). Technology is becoming more internal as it is visibly occupying a deeper space in our minds. This overarching transition of tangible technology to a more abstract method of operation merely highlights the pre-existing characteristic of technology as ultimately intangible, with its ultimate form realising its nature as nothing more than understanding. The graphic visibility of this trend means there is increasing awareness of technology’s fundamental intangibility in the form of a paradigm. Since the ushering in of a paradigm is only a collectivised contemporary understanding, it can be thought of as the use of pure technology to its fullest extent. The most advanced technology is 197 that which can fundamentally alter the collective consciousness by making a particular worldview graphic. Essentially, technology is illustration; it is the bringing forth of understanding from the unconscious to the conscious so that its desired effects manifest in the visible world. This link between the conscious and unconscious is being more exploited as we advance, and as we gain awareness of the ultimate power of the metanarrative to affect change.

Imagination as graphic

Parallel to the increased emphasis on software over hardware, fiction is becoming more graphic. Through technology, fiction has become more capable of employing tools that make it more graphic and create the illusion of it being real. The most vivid example of this is the film medium, which is capable of integrating pre-rendered computer generated imagery (C.G.I.) produced on advanced computers. In some instances C.G.I. is now indistinguishable from reality. As mentioned earlier, stereoscopic video displays have allowed them to attain the illusion of having entered the third dimension and e-books are starting to incorporate video and sound. The role of vectors occurring between particles in quantum mechanics serves as a further illustration that we fill in gaps in perception with our minds.

Correspondingly, A.R.G.s present a new multimedia form designed for promoting fictional worlds that integrate Augmented Reality and other media into daily life, bringing fiction into the real world. Commercial portrayals of reality are further established and reinforced by advertising and promotional media. 198

This reflects any other institution, in that civilisation is a continuous act of make-believe, where ultimately arbitrary protocols are reinforced through cooperative role playing. Like fictional characters, corporations are now to some legal extent regarded as people. The imaginary constructed image of an institution with a name has started to come to life as a person in the collective consciousness. The transition between idea and person is in this way spelled out. Adding to this is that reality television is blurring the line between truth and selective fiction (Nichols 1994, ix). The link between the imaginary and the tangible is being revealed to us through technological change, and this represents a growing fundamental understanding that there is a continuity between the graphic and the theoretical, one that is achieved through use of the vivid.

Ungrounded fantasy

As reality becomes perceived as more theoretical, fiction is implicitly becoming more audaciously vivid. Even the most absurd of premises can now become incarnate in realistic renderings that convincingly imitate elements of the real world. The “original” and “prequel” Star Wars film trilogies, released decades apart, amply demonstrate the shifting nature of fiction in the culture of technologically developed regions. The comparatively low budget original trilogy, having no precedent within its fictional universe, attained success through being grounded in reality. The films did not go into elaborate detail about their settings, instead drawing on archetypes and having a simple story (Iaccino 1998, 1). By the time of the prequel trilogy’s inception, the Star Wars universe had expanded its fictional scope through 199 emerging media such as computer games, to the point of becoming its own living universe, with its own timeline and political structure. The storylines of the new films were received as convoluted (Brode and Deyneka 2012, 133-

134) and instead of being accessible and relatable, seemed to derive the justification for their own existence from the original films, as if the original films were an adequate substitute for a thematic basis in reality. The newer films were presented as so abstracted from reality that they had little pertinence beyond their own world. The plots, instead of being justified through observance of film theory from the real world, were primarily concerned with the internal rules of their fictional world. While this was ultimately the result of directorial approaches, the capacity for these approaches was encouraged by the technological context that had emerged in the intermission between the trilogies. The new breadth of entertainment media allowed a new vividness of the Star Wars universe. Eco noted in 1984 a similar transformation in television of the time, saying that "its prime characteristic is that it talks less and less about the external world" and that it instead "talks about itself and about the contacts it established with its own public" (Eco 1990, 246). Popular culture in this example illustrates the trend of fictional ideas attaining more vividness than what was possible before the

Information Age, thereby illustrating the perceived ability of any spontaneous narrative to compete with other views of reality.

Consciousness leaving a pattern

Pareidolia, the perception of patterns in merely “random” data (Marsching

2003), illustrates the power of the graphic to make us believe that the world is 200 comprised of discrete concepts. In this way, patterns that appear to us seem real as discrete figures even if they are part of a sea of unified data, as the underlying connection between seemingly discrete packets of energy has demonstrated in quantum physics (Nene 2005). At the same time, we tend to dismiss patterns of meaning that are detected in the pursuit of underlying significance as artificial. This may be attributed to the phenomenon of linguistic determinism, which purports that language acts as a lens through which frameworks of thought are reinforced. Theorisations, as claims, inherently propagate themselves as true to the exclusion of others, and so the detection of any unifying continuity is discouraged and hindered by their language. However, when conceptualising the visible objects in the world as themselves parts of patterns, the search for underlying structures gains some legitimacy. A metanarrative of underlying data would imply a coordination with its manifestations on the surface of consciousness. As part of a sequence of paradigms that collectively make up the metanarrative, no arrangement of visible phenomena would be without significance. What may be dismissed as pareidolia can illustrate that seas of unified data are not meaningless, but that the patterns we detect have roles in a grander underlying structure. The patterns we see on the surface are not ultimately the ones that are essentially “real”, but looked at in relation to each other, they form a larger and more significant picture, one that is not visible.

Pareidolia, while defined as the perception of patterns where there are none, is more commonly understood to be concerned with the appearance of faces or figures in unrelated objects. It has been speculated in evolutionary biology that this inclination to see consciousness where there is none arose from the 201 genetic advantage of being able to detect predators before they attack. The

Information Age however has demonstrated that patterns are frequently governed by consciousness. The behaviour of viral content is now traceable in automatically collected data, and the general public is now being exposed to the fact that content conforming to an underlying archetypal order has more potency, as this order governs recurrent arrangements of data on the surface of the popular consciousness. The effectiveness of employing archetypes has long been understood in fields concerned with effective narrative such as fiction, but information technology spreads out visibly quantified narratives in a way that renders their behaviour observable anywhere.

The appearance of consciousness

Artificial Intelligence is an attempt through computerised means to emulate the behaviour of human speech or action (or fulfil its aims to an enhanced degree), and in the process of this imitation, reduces consciousness to its appearance. The convincingness of this technology serves as an increasingly visible illustration that what is functionally real is appearance based. We are at the point of being able to create A.I. that passes the Turing test, which determines that verbal interactions with a robot are indistinguishable from those with humans. This provides a representation of our increasing ability to create vividly realistic constructions in the virtual arena that are sophisticated enough to substitute for the real. While more subtle elements of speech such as tone and insinuation mean that actual ongoing convincingness would require reaching the fabled technological singularity, A.I. remains an 202 illustration of our increasing ability to create persuasive and manipulable narratives with our technology.

As Cleverbot is a depository of the vernacular, popular references and syntactic mannerisms of various inhabitants of the Information Age, it is a vivid symbol of the collectivisation of consciousness that is occurring in global culture. It paints a graphic and easy to understand picture of the trends that information technology in general is following, namely the increased visibility of the theorisation behind notionally distinct concepts and the resulting new paradigm that perceives a continuity between them. Perception makes up paradigms, and A.I. means that we can see that increasingly convincing narratives of reality can be used to affect perception as our understandings grow more sophisticated.

One idea, different appearances

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take

a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We

give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We

keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they

are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use

through all the ages. ~Mark Twain (Paine 1912, location 2828)

If all thoughts are merely permutations of those that surfaced earlier, new paradigm shifts are achieved by being exposed to new appearances of existing ideas. That is, we are able to perceive ideas in a new way or develop different assumptions about their truth. The fact that the natural world was 203 once understood under Empedocles’ model of a mere four elements as expressed in On Nature is an example of how a base model can mutate into something more intricate (H.S. Long 1949). Primary proponent of ecological- evolutionary theory Gerhard Lenski purported that the measure of a civilisation’s sophistication is its capacity to process information, with an ostensive allegory provided by the increasing complexity of a biological lineage in doing the same thing (Lenski 1977). A wrinkle is added to this through examining Jung’s model, in which the collective unconscious does not change but the visual appearance of the superficial world fluctuates

(Yetwin 2009). Through the fact that this change is now happening more detectably, certain constants emerge. The fluidity and flexibility of the virtual has led to an increased acceleration of potential insights and discoveries of the way in which reality functions. Information travels faster and reaches a more global audience in the Information Age. Further, the virtual utilises what is merely potential form and allows it to manifest in a distinctly visual manner, which serves as an illustration of frameworks that can form the basis of new paradigms. The visual forms on the Internet are unlimited due to software that makes the conjuring of any complex image possible. The key concepts that paradigms employ to construct their narratives are solidifications of ideas that might otherwise be vague and unrecognised.

The Internet as a source of highly powerful viral content facilitates the capturing of uniquely iconic content, which prior to the Internet would potentially pass by unnoticed. Through visible quantifications of trends, we learn more quickly the internal particulars of paradigms through the Internet’s highly visual presentation of information. An example of this is that the global 204 cultural mindscape has changed in that it has become normal to question whether what we see is real. The trickery of parody, Photoshopping and

“catfishing” are so easily achieved by the typical Internet user that there is now a tendency to regard new media as not necessarily authoritative, creating a constant aura of suspicion. The Internet has in this way served as a venue for the rapid movement towards the paradigm that the legitimacy of an official-looking form should be subject to scepticism. This represents that the ability of appearances to shape perception is being more widely recognised in the collective consciousness. Reflecting this is the dismantling of the appearance of authority through the Information Age. In Web 2.0, one’s level of creativity, instead of one’s image or status, is being looked to as the capacity for new understandings. We are now reaching behind the visual appearance of our world.

In the Information Age, anything can be found online. Esoteric questions no longer terminate at simply leaving one wondering what the answer is. It is not just that we can find answers to any question, but that even idle questions tangential to the task at hand are normally pursued today due to the ease and immediacy of finding an answer. This means knowledge becomes more specialised and individualistic, with individuals having a greater capacity to educate themselves according to personal interests and needs. Knowledge correlates more closely to the particular variation between individuals. This emerging picture of a society in which each person has a body of knowledge that is less homogenised develops the collective ability to grasp the notion of the personal nature of knowledge and the way in which perception is filtered through the narrative of individual ego. The pictures painted by conceits, on 205 both the scale of individual ego and philosophical paradigms, are being more seen as merely projections that are accepted due to their apparent vividness.

The logo as constructed reality

The nineteenth century word logogram, which means a sign representing a word (Harper, logogram (n.) 2016), pertains to the use by institutions of logos as graphic representations of their names. Its root word Logos originally had meanings including “to reason”, “speech” and “an account” (Harper, logos

(n.) 2016). These meanings correlate to the principle of creation through narrative. Emphasis on the design principles of software icons is increasing in importance with the ubiquity of apps (Hou and Ho 2013). As aforementioned, smartphone interfaces are composed most visibly of rows of icons that represent applications that can be switched between without the user needing to pause to read their labels. This is an illustration of our new need for quick iconic images that can be processed quickly and without much engagement with words. This need for iconic imagery is emergent now because our technology makes use of the creation of vivid worlds of imagery that compete to compel us towards the vested political and economic interests of individuals and established institutions.

This abstraction of words into images represents the increasing vividness of the theoretical in global culture; words are becoming graphic. This symbolises that the narratives behind our understandings are becoming visible to us so that we are aware of them. Images are more visible than words by design, and for this reason major institutions today generally employ logos to claim their place in the new landscape of the collective 206 consciousness. Imagery is the most persuasive means of making a conceit appear real and its narrative compelling; images aspire to have the same vividness as words. This is the means through which the ideology embodied by social institutions achieves a foothold in the public consciousness, and is able to propagate through indoctrination. The visible world, as something filled with the results of ideologising, both through deliberate machination and unconscious epistemes, can be considered an analogue to the use of logos and a demonstration of how technology is understanding, and understanding is a picture.

The imagery of stories

The history of mythology has provided many vivid examples of the use of iconic stories to illustrate understandings that correspond to the particular era from which they emerged. Myths are only heightened narratives (Sansonese

1994, 36); that is, they create caricatures of contemporary understanding. On a scientific level, the understandings implicit in newer myth tend to be more sophisticated than that in older myth due to advancements in knowledge and technology itself. However, on a more metaphysical level, the truths of myths across different eras have the potential to retain the usefulness of their symbolism due to their universality. Myths across different eras and regions have been collated in ways that reveal common patterns that suggest that they are merely interpretations of the same unconscious material from different viewpoints. Each of them paints a different picture and provides different analogies, but what they represent retains an independence from any particular form. It has been argued in works such as Joseph Campbell’s 207

1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces that character types retain a degree of consistency in their use in fiction across time (Campbell 2008).

This suggests an intangible stability, an understanding of which can be reached through the metaphysical interpretations of symbols. McLuhan used the term "visual continuity" to refer to predictability and coherence in the solid world, as stemming from the principles in western number systems of correspondence and sequence (1994, 110). The unconscious order of archetypes and primordial semiotic material that myths are composed of can be thought of as an underlying order of which the conscious world is a reflection. Our theoretical approximations of the unconscious archetypal order represent its rising to the surface. The appearance of common semiotic forms between the unconscious and conscious must provoke a re-evaluation of the notion that the constructed world is entirely made up of arbitrary signs.

Although this view of the universality of myth and archetypes contrasts with views prevalent in post-modernism, I am arguing in this thesis that this structuralist view still has utility in illustrating patterns emerging in the behaviour of ideas’ movement in the Information Age.

In living out our particular paradigms, some of their hidden premises naturally rise to the surface of our conscious awareness, because we continually have to consciously theorise in order to navigate reality. In this way we become aware of our paradigms’ background or context. Through inhabiting our paradigms, we reinforce them through technology. In the Information Age, this increasingly involves their parameters being quantified through digitisation, creating a vivid encapsulation. Transcendence of our thought systems is allowed to happen through increased self-awareness. Modern 208 myth becomes less specific to an era because we are more self-aware. The rising to the surface of our epistemes that contextualise our waking theories allow us to reach higher "meta” understandings through the overhauling of our theories. Each time we discover another of our hidden assumptions, our understandings of the world are contextualised further, so that they are increasingly contextualised in the grander order representing the sequence of paradigms, or story about stories.

Monitoring the invisible

Information needs a visual manifestation to become content. To those of us with eyesight, this is predominantly ocular. In the Information Age, personal computer monitors are a clear symbol of this process. Without a monitor, a personal computer invisibly processes information according to the programs written through our constructed coding languages. This is a manifestation of the principle that the visible is informed by the invisible, and represents our unconscious underlying epistemology that produces the constructions at the level of our consciousness awareness. Our technology is reinforcing this principle to the collective consciousness. The computer monitor allows us to observe the way in which information becomes graphic, as it provides an insight as to the underlying processes of the system and the way visuals are constructed. Computer monitors allow the user to witness C.P.U. processes by providing graphic representations. The contemporary understanding of this premise of a continuum along which virtual constructs transition into something vividly visual is encapsulated in Source Code, in which a virtual world literally becomes real. 209

The above concept is becoming more evident through the advancement of technology. Recent developments have seen a wider range of physical objects being connected to the Internet, including, as previously stated, clothing. The term the Internet of things, coined in 1999, describes the concept of the growing number of physical objects with network connectivity

(Varnelis and Tuters 2006). Furthermore, a wearable consumer device has been developed that integrates a camera and a projector so that it can read and display information about objects and gestures (Maes 2016). The effect of these developments is that abstract information is increasingly appearing more instrumental in the immediately perceivable world.

The data we ascribe to individuals, places and things can now, through technology that allows this information to become graphic, be seen in the real world in addition to the virtual world. The versatile nature of the digital means that the visuals employed in these graphics can change the appearance of the world around us, for example through the convincing lifelike appearance of holograms found in recent art and technology exhibitions and the intimately integrated nature of augmented reality. The increasing digitisation of our surroundings means that information is now being made visible from more and more angles. The world is being composed increasingly of visual manifestations of our unconsciously established, agreed upon thought structures. With these advancements, modern societies are being conditioned with the notion that the visual world that we inhabit on an intellectual level is an expression of our underlying paradigms. Technology such as the computer monitor represents the movement towards visible paradigms. With this we can observe and predict, and what we can predict 210 we can model and emulate. The capacity to bring about paradigms wilfully is dependent on being able to accumulate theoretical data on these thought structures by observing the movements of the information that make up the visual mindscape of a culture.

Conclusion

Through the employment of images and graphics in emerging technology, we are beginning to see that the visible aspects of our world through which we define reality are subject to change. McLuhan calls this “the illusion of the third dimension” (1994, 19). i.e. the illusion of the real. McLuhan further uses the Yeats quote “the visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream” (1994, 35). Parallels to this concept manifest in various areas. One is the invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, the most microscopic and innate of which is gamma radiation, whose source is the nucleus of atoms and therefore the most central. Another is philosopher

Friedrich Schelling’s original concept of the unconscious mind, which remains eternally present but elusive to our conscious thoughts (Lindsay 1910).

These concepts represent the way in which the invisible metanarrative always creates the visible narratives, even if it is not obvious at the surface level. Information technology is forcing an everyday engagement with these notions.

Understandings are always illustrations, meaning that the ideals of a paradigm are what is immediately visible. Seeing is perceiving; in seeing the world we bring something to it. We cannot see the world without processing it mentally. Perception on a conscious intellectual level requires categorisation 211 in order to distinguish ideas in the events we experience. Perception is in this way contingent on theorisation, with the imagery we perceive as the products of thought frameworks that lie underneath our conscious awareness.

Technological trends are increasingly making information visible. This is illustrating the inherent construction in all that we see. In this new translucence, we are seeing that what we accept as real is merely an eloquent assembly of idea material. For tens of thousands of years humans have had the ability to conjure up images. Now, with virtual worlds providing convincing alternate realities, it is being made widely obvious that reality and images have a common basis in the manipulation of symbols. Ideology is concerned with shaping consciousness. It employs the basic foundation of binary concepts to create an image of the world that moves people, on a fundamental emotional level, to action. Images create movement, and are fundamentally composed from movement. The relativistic tensions between concepts push and pull on the psyches of those whose unconscious ideologies integrate them. This kinetic effect on the emotional core of individuals leads to further narratives that paint further pictures of the world and so on.

Any image or worldview ultimately proves partial. The conceptualisation of the world as a static image frozen at any particular point in time is undermined through the dynamism of the world. The world is constantly in a state of paradigm shift; it is constantly incognito between one paradigm and another. This is why it is more potent to examine paradigms in terms of their overarching context instead of in terms of themselves; a paradigm as a picture of the world cannot be said to exist because it is constantly shifting. 212

The only narrative that isn't undermined by transience is the source of narratives. The combination all of the perspectives on Earth, and what each of them brings to the world around them, amounts to a vision of the world that is capable of seeing the world in any possible way. We are unconsciously emulating this lens through technological advances that subject us to the philosophical implications of broader possibility. In the next chapter, I will outline our growing harnessing of the narratives that compose our images of reality.

Paradigms form our picture of the world. While we inhabit a worldview, the perception is taken for granted as unchangeable, as if it is simply the nature of the world. A lack of ironic distance prevents engagement with the underlying narratives on which paradigms are based. In the Information Age, however, it is constantly spelled out for us that “pictures” determine what the reality is. The apparent is the level on which the virtual claims its legitimacy.

While waking up from a paradigm allows us to see its context, the paradigm is simply reality without this context. As such, changing the picture of the reality means changing reality. The imaginary has effects with real influence.

Information technology has brought us closer to this understanding, with the implication that there is the basis of a unifying framework of potential that contextualises all of these possible realities. 213

Chapter 7: Narrative as a technology

In the 1976 foreword to The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Daniel Bell said that “If industrial society is based on machine technology, post-industrial society is shaped by an intellectual technology. And if capital and labor are the major structural features of industrial society, information and knowledge are those of the post-industrial society.” (Bell 1976, xci). I have argued that the nature of paradigms is that they converge, and that paradigm shifts take place through continuity being found between concepts previously considered irreducible and distinct from each other. Concepts become more fluid, allowing perspectives to shift. The unification of paradigms in time and space is being facilitated by the resulting connectedness of the Information

Age. We are developing tools that are capable of shaping consciousness, letting us summon various narratives at will. This is itself a paradigmatic process catalysed by shifts in understanding, and occurs through its conscious realisation: awareness of the tendency of paradigms to unify implies the perception of a conceptual plane on which they are one, and from which they emerge. This developing perception of a metanarrative from which smaller narratives emerge is advancing our capacity to integrate its principles into our technology. Our ability to construct complex narratives such as government institutions, virtual worlds and political campaigns is a rudimentary microcosm of this developing ability to exploit the nature of narratives as fundamentally unified. Created entities such as these grow in sophistication over time, being able to be ingrained on a deep psychological level with increasing effectiveness. 214

In this chapter I will outline the growing perception of a manipulable quality to the changing conceptualisation of our reality that characterises it as fundamentally based in narratives. Current developments in information technology indicate an emerging understanding of the capacity to alter the underlying premises that worldviews use as foundations. With information increasingly being viewed as a substance from which anything can be made, the role of the intangible acquires a central relevance. I will argue for this through exploring the new convincingness of the virtual, the parallels of current technology with symbolic magic, the creative aspect of explanation, the use of narratives to gain power and the internalisation of consumer technology as understanding. Our consciously-constructed narratives potentially appear to be more vivid and real as our technology speaks more of the metanarrative. This allows us to reach into the hidden plane from which paradigms emerge in order to intentionally manipulate them.

Physical information

With the promulgation of virtual worlds and the mass public subsequently dealing more directly with machine code, which in computing is regarded as the most fundamental layer of a written program, we are developing an advancing familiarity with the notion of a world being made of information intangible to our senses. Machine code has a theoretical foundation in binary, with ones and zeroes being the digital basis for complex software. Software is a graphic abstraction of the binary, making the underlying code intelligible.

In its root cause as a physical interaction, however, the distinctions between units of ones and zeroes are enforced artificially through the separation of the 215 circuits that represent each of them. This represents the artificiality of parsing information, a distinction that may be considered analogous to that between the organised phenomenal world and the absolute One in Neo-.

The metanarrative may be thought of as different as an underlying protocol in which information is not parsed, but unified. The more superficial layer of binary breaks meaning into discrete units. Although binary exists only in this artificial, conceptual sense, its manipulation can generate convincing imaginary worlds, analogous to ideology.

This is analogous to virtual particles, which are conceptualised to exist in theory, but are not directly observable and are not governed by classical physical laws (Peskin and Schroeder 1995, 80). Despite this, virtual particles have effects on the material world. Similarly, it is claimed that physicists are increasingly defining the physical world as fundamentally information, with matter and energy as incidental (Bekenstein 2003). Physical information is the information composing a physical area. A physical thing is a manifestation of information that is specific to that one instance (i.e. the information is the physical composition itself) by which it is defined. It describes not particles but the relationships between them. As such, physical information can be thought of as the code comprising the universe. This agrees with the principle of observation creating matter from energy waves, with the common principle being that one’s worldview serves as a reflection of the ego’s narratives. Information implies division through the negating effect of knowledge narratives. The composition of matter from information suggests that the physical world is effectively a construct of shared consciousness. 216

Language as narrative

Our embodied cognition means that we understand the world through metaphors about the physical (Cowart 2016). While metaphors employ physical actions or events to denote meaning, the dead metaphor is an indication of the way that ideas become unbound from their physical equivalents over time (Orwell 1998, 23-24). Phrases such as "she is a bitter person" no longer need to evoke a thought of a physical occurrence to have their effect. A finding in neuroscience has paralleled this: “the N400 (brain response) to the less concrete subgroup of metaphors patterned with that to nouns in the literal concrete expressions.” (Forgács, et al. 2015), i.e. dead metaphors are processed similarly to ideas of the physical. We are starting to live in the reality that language does not require an association with the physical to have a mental effect. This is more widely clear through the virtual, which provides an arena for verbal exchanges that is abstracted from the physical world. There has been a shift in the perceived basis of tangible reality from the physical to the verbal. This is reflected in the recent canonisation of the colloquial sense of the word “literally” that means

“figuratively” (Coleman 2013), as disruptive as this is to literacy. Whether or not a statement has a physical basis in truth is secondary to its power as a metaphor.

Here is revealed a perception of the concept of what is real: if a thing is thought of as tangible, it is tangible. Recognition of this has occurred on the fringe of the public consciousness in views expressed by those such as theoretical physicist John Wheeler, who said that “what we call reality arises 217 in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions” (Gardner 2007, 38).

While this view has been expressed in academia in arguments such as this, the public engagement with virtual worlds represents a broader shift in which the world is treated as constructed of paradigms based in the binary oppositions of language. Awareness of this has been exploited through the use of words in forms of persuasion. Bringing about shifts in consciousness, or bringing new realities into existence through speaking, has its antecedent in symbolic magic (Morrison 2003, 9). The Sanskrit word maya, originating in the Late Bronze Age, describes this phenomenon of reality as illusion, being

“that which causes duality” (Baba 2004), a trait consistent with Lacan’s view of ego, whose deceptive effect creates one’s picture of the world (King 1999).

Speaking the name of a concept signifies mastery over that particular semiotic unit because the speech act implies its distillation into a concept and thus integrates it into our conscious theory; we can then summon the concept whenever we choose to. In antiquity, this has precedent in Plato's Cratylus, a dialogue in which Socrates questions whether symbols such as names emerge arbitrarily, or have a link to the true underlying nature of a concept

(Sedley 2003, 3-4, 18). This notion of a true name recurs in narratives throughout history, such as in Rumpelstiltskin, which involves a girl freeing herself from an imp by speaking his name. The word spelling originally derived from the Proto-Germanic root word spellam, from which the use of the word in casting magic also originated (Harper 2015): magic in the medieval era was considered nothing more than words embodied with material power. Books of magic called grimoires detailed ways in which realities could be shaped. The Lesser Key of Solomon was a mid- 218 seventeenth century grimoire containing a list of the sigils (true names) of seventy-two demons representing Hell's hierarchy. This was considered as giving magicians power over these archetypal characters (Salomonis 2001, xi-xvii) (the term characters may also be interpreted here in the alternate sense of forming parts of words). Physical information may be understood as an object’s true name, in that it is the object itself, described independently of any human language.4

The Major Arcana references a corresponding metaphysical framework. The

Fool, as 0, represents unconstructed natural primordialism (Creekmore

1982). Subsumed to this order is the Magician, denoted by 1, who employs speech and symbols to bring about change (McDaniel 1981). Nonstandard analysis in calculus describes the relationship between zero and infinity: an infinitesimal number, always quantified as zero, can be inverted into infinity; both zero and infinity represent the same starting point of consciousness through their transcendence of integers. Hence, looking behind our finite narrative frameworks allows us to perceive and employ the infinite nature that they inherit from the metaphysical plane. The symbols such as integers and other concepts that shape the parameters of the conscious world can be seen to be finite expressions of a greater order. Canonical human understanding itself is nominally an expression of the fact that we can invoke concepts that we have encountered and internalised. Categorisation through words provides intellectual comprehension and the ability to synthesise

4 Quantum information without classical information provides a general description of an object that is not instantiated, providing only a basis for a vector space with potential pure states. The genericism of quantum information could be thought of as mathematical expression of archetypes, as they establish broad themes without a specific signifier. 219 ideas. Once an abstract concept has been integrated into one’s psyche through understanding, one can bring it about in the form of a narrative.

Simply put, understanding something consciously allows one to persuade others of it through creating an image. The persuasiveness is dependent on the depth of the understanding. Discovering a core truth (about the structure of the abstract foundation upon which conscious reality is built) allows one to speak in ways that resonate with others, influencing worldviews. The increased cognisance of archetypes and code in the age of the Internet signifies a growing awareness of this process and its integration into popular understanding. This implies an incremental increase of our capacity to bring artificial narratives into effect more consciously. A paradigm can be thought of as the most powerful true name. Internalising the causes of a particular paradigm gives one the power to invoke it. It is not merely an archetype, however, but contextualises archetypes in a narrative through which they can work. A paradigm is hidden deeper in the unconscious, closer to the metanarrative than archetypes. As such, the ability to bring about a paradigm through speech gives one the ability to change consciousness at the collective scale, and meets criteria of being the ultimate technology.

The role of the virtual

“Smart devices” such as the smartphone, now a normalised part of everyday life and a symbol of the connectedness of globalised culture, represent a new form of mystic shamanism. The idea of the Word is condensed into the operating system, marketed into a public image as utopic and unlimited in its potential applications. The smart device is seen as magical. Apple’s slogan 220

“there’s an app for that” embodies the new paradigm that any range of realities can be summoned into existence through the use of the symbols present on the device in one’s hand. In this new worldview, every task has a corresponding magic solution. We have only to download the app from the invisible ether and its weightless, formless aura anoints the device with new power, as it were. The invisible and omnipresent entity of the Internet is the astral plane on which these magical applications reach us and affect us in tangible ways. Thus we increasingly have access to anything we can think of, and this is accessed through connecting to an abstract plane that serves as a unified source of forms and figures. The engagement with this concept in everyday life, to the point at which it becomes mundane, accustoms thought systems to assimilation of these ideas on a conscious level. Further widespread technological literacy is creating a deeper awareness of these processes, and accustoming the general public with the fundamental notion of the intangible governing the tangible. In this way a paradigm of increased reverence of the abstract is being motivated.

Operating systems have a structure and order that shape the way in which their applications run. This is conceptually equivalent to an underlying order that unifies narratives on a fundamental level. While supporting a wide range of possible narratives devised by human consciousness, the consistency of the recurring patterns governing them suggests an underlying order composed of inescapable abstract principles. This notion has popularised the perceived legitimacy of structures that underlie existence. The global village has undermined cultural relativism, as no controversy can today remain only regional; controversies are subjected to global scrutiny. There is growing 221 belief that principles that are abstracted from specific geography are worthy of attention even though they are intangible. Our use of technology in the

Information Age speaks of a growing understanding that even specific constructions arise from a less concrete unified source. Technology corresponds to our understandings, and our understandings in the

Information Age have developed to the point that technology reflects an intangibility antithetical to materialistic positivism.

Technology making the small big

Technology implies advancements in understandings of the nature and behaviour of the world. Lyman Bryson identified this connection when he said that there is a “technology in explicitness” (McLuhan 2011, 21), meaning that technology is an understanding made visible. As an explanation, invention is a speech act, bringing understandings into existence in ways that can have effects on the world. Technology may be conceptualised as degrees of consciousness, with theoretical understanding as the most conceptually intangible form, and its impacts in the visible world as the most tangible and conducive to conscious awareness. We bring a different form of reality into existence by speaking it through technology, which comes to represent the collective understanding, and is, at the full extension of conscious awareness, institutionalised in academic paradigms and eventually popularised.

Like any other phenomena, understanding the means through which consciousness comes into existence allows the manipulation of its composition, as the “ingredients” are controlled. In biology, artificial 222 insemination is an example of creating a new instance of consciousness (a child) through the manipulation of natural principles. Naturally this involves making the invisible visible through technology, in this case, reproductive cells through the perceptive power of microscopes.

Origin is by definition invisible for two . It implies a conceptualisation of the subject in some other state than what is the common focus—otherwise it would not be considered the origin but the thing itself. Secondly, creation always occurs initially at the smallest scale whether it is physical, social, psychological, etc. because it obeys natural laws at every scale; nothing, however small, can escape the fundamental ways in which existence operates. This is the essence of fundamental. Reflecting this, technology involves creating ripples on the surface of consciousness, forging a connection between superficial intellectualised awareness and the paradigmatic movements hidden underneath consciousness. More powerful technology that creates bigger waves in society does so through understandings that are more central to the behaviour of existence. The most advanced technology is that which utilises the smallest, most subtle and most hidden principles in our understanding. Such is the case with the Large

Hadron Collider, incidentally the world’s largest machine (CERN 2015), which measures the behaviour of subatomic particles through smashing together particular compositions of quarks, which are as small as any particle

(Phys.org 2015). Technology makes the small large. The larger, more visible aspects of existence are dependent on the movements of hidden forces. As the Information Age is bringing the purely conceptual and invisibly abstract into visibility, our ability to see and harness the subtler forces of existence is 223 resulting in a greater ability to shape the visible world of which we are more readily conscious.

Technology creating paradigms

Language has a capacity to influence the perceived world within the society that speaks it (D'Andrade 1995, 56). Because the particular state of a society’s advancement influences language, the sophistication of technology creates a specific picture of the world that convinces the public of its immutability. Understanding can only extend to the limit of prevailing technology, which is why the general public perennially finds it difficult to accept that new forms of technology are possible (Iowa State University

2013). Public incredulity is a common reaction to impressive technological achievements as it forces a fundamental questioning of worldviews.

Technology solidifies the nature of contemporary understandings into forms that are themselves revealing of the collective consciousness. Television, for example, represents the understanding that ideas are accessible collectively and simultaneously without being bound to a particular geographic or temporal restriction. However, television also creates a roughly coordinated movement of content, with content being dictated by those with the authority to determine it. This reinforces the implicit paradigm that some individuals have more authority to create than others, a paradigm that has been challenged by Web 2.0. It is increasingly the case that every individual is part of the collective medium of global human culture. Ideas are reinforced through individual action. Their acceptance does not depend only on conscious agreement with a dictated finite narrative, because they are 224 reinforced implicitly through being embedded in the unconscious and communicated through speech acts, institutionalising them. Ideas, as shifts in human consciousness, are brought about through speech acts, the use of symbols to alter the world of consciousness.

Time and artificial narratives

In virtual worlds, time behaves as only an appearance. In Second Life, what appears to be an inevitable passage of time can actually be altered by the player. Any state of affairs can be recalled and re-enacted at any time. In

Second Life, notions of “before” or “after” are diminished because time isn’t linear; it is merely a way of thinking about the potential arrangements of matter in the world. In this way, a “point in time” is revealing itself as only a conception of a certain state of affairs. This way in which time works in virtual worlds is an expression of the same principle under which the perceived state of a particle unconsciously forms the basis for its physical manifestation: the narrative at the core of existence shapes the realities that are perceived at more solid levels of consciousness.

Virtual worlds such as Second Life are providing an illustration of time’s non- linearity. However, this understanding has an implication further than the perception of time: it undermines our tendency to think in one dimensional narratives with a starting and ending point. The principles behind this technology disrupt the gravitation towards ideological binary on a one dimensional spectrum, and instead we become more inclined to see ideas as belonging to a unified three-dimensional spectrum that is continuous instead of disparate or scattered. In this way, the binary dialectic at the basis of 225 ideology is understood and can be manipulated in visible ways in the world of ideology.

The merging of time

Because possibility is unlimited in the virtual, nothing is lost to time. The appearance of any era can be simulated through the instant summoning of imagery and its associated emotions. As the virtual is more heavily integrated into our lives, the notion that ideas are lost as history progresses is challenged; ideas are increasingly seen as timeless. The Information Age is teaching us that abstraction into the purely theoretical means unlimited possibility. Our paradigms being abstracted from themselves in increasingly macrocosmic views of existence means an increasing ability to wilfully affect narratives that shape the global consciousness. We can pull paradigms from across time and invoke their constructs consciously. The simultaneity Jung described as being intrinsic to synchronicity is reflected in emerging perceptions of time manipulation. As previously outlined, technology expands the limits of perceived possibility. The unlimited creation of constructs has origins in the virtual and imaginary, but advances continually revise the power we also have over the external world. Virtual worlds establish the foundation for the understanding that each instant and place is pregnant with infinite possibility. In the virtual, a forest can become an urban environment with a shift of perspective. There exists within this technology the implicit, transformative notion of the alternate state pre-existing, having created itself, and merely awaiting discovery. 226

Gaining power from narratives

The exploitation of crises has been identified as having potential benefit for political figures (Boin, McConnell and Hart 2009). With the perspective of the

Information Age this can be reconceptualised as a use of narrative technology that shows understanding of the binary at the core of ideology that is also represented in information technology. It has been argued by post-structuralist proponents of theories of unconscious binary opposition such as Nasser Maleki that a tribe, individual or nation is always defined by what it thinks of itself as being in relation to what it is not (Nasser 2014).

Concepts exist in relation to each other, and the relativity that exists between concepts is the narrative that has been constructed. By using fear of threats to a populace’s state identity, the public can be more easily manipulated into partaking in a politicised view of the world. Images of the world are created through manipulating binary in reality as well as in the virtual.

Psychological conditioning of a populace has been argued to be inherent to totalitarian regimes (Pipes 1995, 281). This frequently involves the employment of dialectics that portray regions outside the nation as threatening in some way. This extreme example of cultural indoctrination illustrates that cultural identities emerge through the creation of narrative tension between duelling concepts. An example is here found in Fox News, a

United States television station politically aligned with the Republican Party

(Morris and Francia 2010). At the time of George W. Bush’s presidential administration, the station was able to employ a simplistic otherisation of the

Middle East, which has been theorised as being in order to engender public 227 support for unilateral foreign policy (Jaramillo 2009, 161-162). This deliberate use of dichotomy for political gain constitutes a conscious exploitation of the way in which narratives function at a large scale.

The use of media as a tool for indoctrination is a practice has only grown in sophistication. Advertising tactics have begun to manifest with increasing subtlety (Osborne 2007, 14). Advertising theory dictates that consumers should harbour feelings on a deep psychological level that are conducive to having them make commitments to the entity involved (Holbrook and Batra

1987) (Ridout and Searles 2011). Methods are employed that aim to generate deep feelings of inadequacy and the suggestion that this can be rectified through purchasing the company’s product. These deep feelings, stirred up at a fundamental psychological level, are aimed at the consumer’s sense of identity in order to inspire a deep need to reinforce one’s narrative of self. If the consumer can be led to believe, consciously or unconsciously, that their base ego is compromised, then that insecurity can be exploited for corporate purposes. As I have outlined previously, the ego can be interpreted as representing the level of reality at which fundamental divisions are made between concepts. The sense of the self exists at the centre of a person’s perception of their world. Advertising that targets a person’s sense of identity exploits their very worldview.

The fact that methods of political indoctrination and corporate manipulation have been integrated into a systematic theory itself represents a growing conscious realisation that the narratives we unconsciously accept govern our perception of reality on a level buried in our minds. All fundamental truths are vaguely understood in the human psyche, but are obfuscated through 228 attempts to understand the world on an intellectual level. However, understandings of the intangible percolate to the top of human consciousness because they are fundamental to our constructed reality. As we go deeper into our own minds through technological discovery, we bring understandings of the intangible forces of narratives into the world of realisation.

Building the world from information

The means through which such conditioning and spreading of narratives can take place are being facilitated through the new ubiquity of information technology. As technology progresses, it is increasingly representing its most abstracted definition—its purest, most progenitive form: information.

Technology and paradigm shifts are becoming intertwined in conscious awareness. Further, we increasingly exist in a world comprised by our minds, with technology reflecting this capacity to change visible reality. Virtual constructs that are increasingly indistinguishable from the external world can be controlled in their entirety through subtle manipulation. Online advertisements have developed an autonomy in targeting the specific interests of users, meaning that conscious input is not even required

(Pepitone 2010). Algorithms adjust automatically in response to changing thoughts and desires. The online world is increasingly becoming a mirror to shifts in collective consciousness. Technology is becoming one with the unfolding history of paradigms.

The concept of a world composed of structures of our own making is not limited to the technology of virtual worlds. Digitisation is increasingly resulting 229 in the establishment of digital protocols that allow a communication between real world systems that have previously not been capable of holding digital information or being automated. The computerisation of bureaucratic processes for example allows more efficient cross referencing between geographically disparate offices. This constitutes an infusion of specific ideologies in computerised form into processes and objects that have previously been inert. This can be seen in the integration of Internet connectivity in objects such as clothing. Now, we can use objects as living extensions of the peculiarities of the public consciousness. The institutionalised ideas of humankind now manifest digitally in objects that traditionally have only been background scenery. While this digitisation has been widespread in the form of personal computers since the 1980s, it has more recently begun manifesting in a way that is more visible to the collective consciousness. Consumer electronics are now capable of synchronising their information with each other in ways that directly affects their functionality.

Synchronisation in cloud computing means that a user can sign into the same virtual account on different devices and have the devices behave in ways that retain information specific to that user. A converged system of cloud based information processing and increasing automation through more efficient “intelligent” devices means the processing of visible representations of global data is coordinated, and representative of widespread paradigms.

The automatic sharing of data between previously unconnected areas of the human experience signifies our world more resembling structures of our own making. For example, divergent paths in a train track were made to switch mechanically, and then electrically. Sophisticated buildings are now capable 230 of physically changing shape through user interfaces (Ponsford 2014).

Processes in the physical world are increasingly computerised, and what is computerised is increasingly taken online and coordinated as a more wide reaching automatic process. The shape of a given object in our world is increasingly determined by macrocosmic, abstract code built on human ideas.

Abstract institutionalisations of ideology such as these cloud based processes represent a new visibility of paradigms, in that the accepted arrangements of concepts are manifested in the physical world. This constitutes an understanding that the particular construction of the world is shaped by an underlying parsing of concepts that is accepted on a level psychologically fundamental to a culture. Software manifests as layers of abstraction from files of ones and zeroes, known as executables. As with conscious awareness, the more abstracted the layer is, the more simplified and visible processes are to the user. Being able to write a program’s code, however, allows one to author what is visible to the common user. At the same time, ones and zeroes are merely imaginary symbols used to represent whether or not a circuit has an electric current running through it or not. In this way ones and zeroes are representations of the physical, meaning that they are fundamental to the abstracted world cultivated by the computer program. This positions them ultimately beyond the control allowed by programming. These principles of reality are also represented in the metanarrative; which is perceived through simplified narratives that can be consciously manipulated by humans, but ultimately independent of human control. 231

Instant catharsis

With information now being abundant even to the point of redundancy, we live in a culture that is constantly being informed. With wearable augmented reality H.U.D.s (Heads Up Displays) on the verge of their introduction and probable mass consumer availability, a tendency of information to inundate our consciousness and even corporeality, to the point that we no longer have to actively seek it out, is being instilled. The previously mentioned concept of the spoiler is becoming outdated; we are now increasingly being exposed to such varied information that we are often informed beyond our control.

Westernised culture is being increasingly characterised by knowing how stories end. Constructed narratives are losing their mystique. We see behind the scenes of fiction more now than ever before; the general public is disillusioned as to the processes of filmmaking and other productions.

Celebrities expose streams of consciousness on social media. Myth is losing its mystique as the creation of myth is no longer only in the hands of the elite.

Any user can create modern myths such as three dimensional animated stories or caricatured personae online. The story arc between desire and fulfilment is being shortened with technological conveniences. We no longer have to wait for the point of catharsis, as we can write narratives ourselves.

With instant access to information there is instant gratification (Wilkinson

2010). Because of the growing ubiquity of information, we are being conditioned with the notion that creating narratives does not require travelling any conceptual distance. A bridge can be created between the driving base desires of the unconscious and input at the level of waking consciousness. 232

Symbols as fluid

Technology is used in ways that signify how we perceive and organise the world and the course of history itself. Neil Postman, as mentioned earlier, said that technology is representative of our methods of perception (Postman

1979, 39). Now that technology is overtly concerned with flows of information, it is used as a means of changing perception. The era of the Internet is accompanied by the element of semiotic fluidity. More than any previous method of storing information, the content of webpages is capable of morphing entirely and fusing together through “redirects”. Correspondingly, advancing computer animation software allows virtual constructs, such as virtual embassies, to be manufactured with inhuman efficiency, which can change ideological landscapes when they interact with bureaucracy and the political environment. The rate at which the symbols change now exceeds the ability to contain them through resolute concepts. Baudrillard’s hypertelia alludes to this, as it describes the point at which the simulation has become its own entity, no longer serving as a metaphor for reality but serving as reality itself (Foss, Foss and Trapp 2014, 324).

The effect of this is a symbolic environment that is seen as mobile and malleable. Fluid information means the perception of a world of fluid concepts, with reinvention of that world within grasp. Sufficiently advanced technology with intrinsic characteristics of unity, ubiquity and intangibility coincides with a corresponding ability to impact on the collective psyche.

With technology defined by information, the portrayal of narratives that change consciousness becomes more apparent and accessible. The 233 narration of new worlds of consciousness is represented in Eco’s comment on experimental narrative:

There has to be a return to new forms of narrative, less naive, less

consoling, like the discovery of experimental fiction. If you destroy

every possible form, as in Finnegans Wake, you can only come back

with a new form… What people called post modern, or meta-

narrativity—writing with irony to reflect upon our yearning and desire to

create (Parsons 1993).

The further employment of irony in popular culture and therefore our collective authorship means that ideas are used for purposes other than their originally intended ones. These shifts in meaning have an extension in the new sincerity movement in arts and entertainment. In the new sincerity, the self-awareness of irony is employed without any aspect of , in an earnest embrace of the strange (Collins 1993, 257-262). Similarly, the nominal era of “post-postmodernism“ has been described by architect Tom

Turner as synthesising notions of reason with those of faith (T. Turner 1995,

9). Through the diversifying effect of these movements new continuities are found that reveal a greater unity from which any narrative can potentially emanate.

Manufactured places

With information having become substantial enough for concepts to function as places and people, reality and consciousness gain new malleability. As web sites are occupying the same space in the collective consciousness as 234 places, conceptualisations of place are becoming more salient than geography. Baudrillard said that "Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map." (Baudrillard 1983). This virtualising process applies in information technology in that we are increasingly embracing the idea that part of travel is now the manipulation of our imaginary constructs. Advancing technology means that we are possessing a greater ability to have what we want in all places at once. Communication and travel are unifying previously distinct categories. As in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, our idea that anything has a specific “location” is an ideology that we artificially impose for the sake of fitting it in with existing reductive theories. Instant transportation involves not geographic travel, but transforming conceptualisations of one’s environment. While transporting oneself to a different place mentally has been a role of books, books require more imaginative synthesis of knowledge than virtual environments, which are unlimited in number and instantly cater to the specific requirements of unlimited users. As I stated earlier, online communities mean esoteric questions can be answered without having to wait. One can transform one’s mental framework and relation to the picture of one’s surroundings by instantly reworking one’s knowledge.

This increased engagement on the conceptual level also means that identity is more fluid. As explored earlier, the increasing role and functions of

Facebook profiles are causing them to become rendered as more of a primary persona of the Internet user in the 2010s. This is an extension of 235

Alan Watts’ argument that people are decreasingly thought of as individuals in and of themselves and more as masks. He pointed out that the idea of personae came from early plays in which actors’ masks were given this name, which etymologically referred to a mask through which sound would be projected (Chase 2011). In this framework, people only exist through the ways in which they communicate with each other. This fluidity in identity has only increased. One’s attributes can now be seen as subject to constant re- composition. Instead of expanding on one’s conscious experiences through encountering discrete places and people, we are now bringing them to ourselves through summoning ideas.

The public internalisation of technology

The manifestation of scientific discoveries has become part of the public consciousness through consumer technology. The first commercially available quantum computer was released in 2011 (Merali 2011), and uses quantum mechanics to achieve the exploitation of superposition. While in classical computing bits represent only one or zero, qubits can be one, zero, or any superposition of these two states, meaning that the qubit does not have to be exclusively one or the other: binary is transcended (Barnett 2009,

45). This creates new possibilities for information processing. In order for a public desire for these products to be fostered, the marketing of devices such as this necessitates presenting to the consumer their comparative advantages (Khan 2006, 251) over more traditional computing. As such, the very means of presenting the product to the public ingrains a certain level of collective knowledge of it. The operation of such devices is subject to the 236 same principles that govern expertise in computing in general, namely that the continued abstraction of complex processes serves to simplify the technology to the point that anyone can be an expert in its operation. At the same time, however, being able to take advantage of the new features of this technology creates an intrinsic awareness of its capabilities, and challenges the assumptions behind the perceived limits of possibility. The introduction of more advanced consumer technology generates more informed understandings of the potential to shape one’s surroundings.

Future narrative technology

We are realising that technology that is capable of shaping narrative is not restricted to a remote point in the future, but is only dependent on the application of more sophisticated methods of conceptualising what is already in our hands. This has been characterised by Shaw as a realisation of a theme in Tennyson’s “The Flower” (Shaw 2005, 200), a poem containing the passage:

Read my little fable:

He that runs may read.

Most can raise the flowers now,

For all have got the seed.

As McLuhan commented, “it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.” (1994, 12). This illustrates my argument that we are increasingly able, through technology, to reach back to the source of our reality in order to create our own. If we were to fully understand any particle 237 to the extremely minute degree, we would by extension understand the entire universe, as the same principle behaviour is present in each small part of the universe. As technology is, in this sense, understanding, the ability to shape our environment with these revelations only awaits our creative application of this knowledge. All technology is advanced through understandings that become more “in depth”. We have only to look inward to the principle operations of a phenomenon to gain a more nuanced ability to predict and manipulate it. The social sciences are able to divine generalised theories and models of human behaviour through studying the behaviour of samples of individuals. This premise of microcosm of course extends to other areas in which samples are used to establish patterns that can be used to predict the behaviour of other examples of the same phenomenon. From studying subatomic particles, scientists have extrapolated knowledge about the properties of objects large enough to be visible (Stannard and Casarett

1964). Through this we can see that all of the so-called laws of nature are available to us in the present place and moment.

Advanced technology implies advanced understanding in both the sense of what is present, and in the sense of the greater context across which paradigms unfold. A technology’s underlying premises tend to perfuse a society, illuminating the direction of its discourse, which in turn further feeds the altering of epistemological assumptions. Technology has a metaphysical power that causes its mere presence to shape the collective consciousness.

The Internet has had effects that have meant a gradual restructuring of both the means and manner of conversation. Communication is now quicker, more direct and more visual. Distances to hidden truths are being shortened. 238

The understandings that allow a new technology to come into existence themselves constitute a movement forward into new paradigms. Application of these understandings results in the practical manifestation of the technology, which is itself an innovation. Technology itself can further paradigms through acting as a foundation of greater efficiency in the endeavour for more progress, as it means we have the means to attain desired effects more easily. The effect technology has on the public consciousness is a further advancement of paradigms, as a paradigmatic force itself. Gaining an understanding of paradigmatic movements is the most powerful level of understanding we can aspire to gain, as it represents the understanding of understanding itself. The more meta the understanding of an instance of technology, or indeed technology as a concept, the more potent it is. The most advanced technology therefore is not purely contingent on time, but on the ability to shift perspectives through authoring what is seen consciously.

Conclusion

Technology begins as a theorisation. The image in the popular consciousness of knowledge manifesting as books is symbolic of the nature of technology as narrative. The theories upon which technology is based are created from parsing and ordering information as languages of thought. Our utilisation of the principles that are used to form new technology is equivalent to discovering an ancient book of the arcane that allows machinations that should not be possible. Revisions of epistemology invoke the ancient, as they involve us returning to the source of our thought. A further demonstration of 239 this equivalence is written works that explain the principles of writing. This is a microcosmic instance of metanarrative, as it constitutes a story about stories. This is how metanarrative works to provide the tools needed to re- write the narratives of reality.

There is taking place an increased awareness in human thinking of the dynamic and generative framework of the metanarrative. We are allowing ourselves to be employed as agents of the creative function of the metanarrative. In becoming tuned in to the intangible thematic arcs occurring across the history of paradigms, we are being acquainted with the universe's mood swings. In expanding our conception of possibility through technology we are living in the world of its dreams. We are learning the language of symbolism, becoming more aware of the generative significance of the symbolic and therefore more capable of shaping unconscious thought processes.

Technology compels us because of the inherent superiority that it offers.

While Luddite perspectives may depict it as a shortcut that diminishes the self-reliance of humankind, an alternate perspective is that it highlights the extended nature of consciousness, in that the self is found in other places through the connectivity and reduction of distance that technology grants us.

The Information Age is showing us that technology is not about abandoning the aspiration to perfect the self, but finding synergy with other individual psyches. This fundamental urge for reconciliation drives us at a deep emotional level, as it is motivated by the principle of unity in the metanarrative as unlimited by intellectual categorisation. Advancements in technology reconcile concepts that have become separated through 240 of thought. This is what makes one understanding inherently more sophisticated than another in the archetypal order. Switching between paradigms at will implies a masterful understanding of the way that paradigms come into existence. It requires understanding information as a substance, which contrasts models of thought that depict it as an entirely imaginary reflection of a material world. This comes into place upon the internalisation of the principles reflected in certain technologies of the

Information Age. Because ultimately only the metanarrative contains the power to author paradigms, our capacity to do the same on a conscious level is proportionate only to our capacity to become one with it.

We artificially create a timeline that asserts discrete states of matter. We do this on an unconscious level, as in a dream in which we are not aware that we are dreaming. However over time we have approached a new paradigm in which we order ideas in a way in which we are more conscious of the process. This reflects the awareness we have in a lucid dream. Oneness with the metanarrative implies prescience. In sufficiently examining an idea, we can determine how it naturally unfolds. Reality is created as we literally

“realise” it. There is only metanarrative until a narrative is conceptualised.

The speech acts that we bring into existence consciously are the narratives that we are most conscious of, and the underlying beliefs we harbour are those that we are less conscious of. The narrative at the deepest unconscious level, the metanarrative, is that which we are least capable of encapsulating with theory, but our increasing closeness to it is making our narratives more sophisticated. 241

Technological trends have always been aligned in the direction of giving us increasing capacity to change reality. New everyday ways in which we are engaging with information itself is involving the manipulation of intangible phenomena that shape consciousness. Previously, the knowledge of these operations was restricted to particularly influential members of society, but the trends of user generated content and the more equal distribution of expertise have meant that the power to influence thought on a mass scale is being decentralised. The ability to wilfully invoke worldviews to shape the collective consciousness in a particular way is now more commonplace. With paradigms as part of our technology, our understanding has correspondingly shifted to a contextualisation of paradigms. For this reason we are unavoidably becoming more familiar with the characteristics of metanarrative, so that our consciousness is collectively becoming one with it.

242

Chapter 8: Conclusion

Thesis summary

I have detailed the spreading out of authorial voice as offered by technology, and the way in which this means the power to shape the collective mindscape is distributed on a less discriminate basis. This in turn means the accelerated creation of sub-cultures and the effective interaction of formerly distinct cultures. We have seen what effect the collectivisation of information has had on the breadth of its distribution and on the provision of a range of online services. The increased range of ideas and expertise being circulated also means a further increase in the kinds of services that are available online. This process of abstraction means a reduction of traditionally tangible activities to a theoretical state. The range of activities this is applied to is limited only by the constraints of contemporary technology. The witnessing of this process is revealing that traditionally tangible activities are in fact fundamentally theoretical, and the ease with which they are switched between constitutes the development of an awareness that all ideas are unified on an abstract level. This lays the grounds for an understanding that theory itself is versatile in its formlessness. As paradigms are theoretical by definition, this implies a meta-awareness that is allowing us to determine which constructed philosophical world we want to live in at a given time, to the extent that our technology allows. Thought at a conscious level is 243 restricted by an inherent need to process and therefore parse ideas into artificial units of analysis, and so the technology of humans as conscious beings is limited. However, the increased freeing of our technology from the limitations of the tangible has allowed applications of paradigmatic technology that we did not previously consider possible. The digitisation of global culture has resulted in a vivid world of information that has put the collective consciousness in touch with the notion that the intangible is fundamental to and sovereign over the tangible. With this developing understanding that there is a continuity between the theoretical and the visible, we are starting to sense that reality occurs in degrees of consciousness, or degrees of fundamental acceptance. The perception of this continuum is causing us to regard concepts as essentially unified, with no distance between concepts other than what is artificially constructed. As such, we are beginning to see each idea of the human experience as microcosmic of every other. With the increasing perception of technology's relevance in our lives, we have, as a subsequence, become more expert in using it, and more inclined to be aware of the scientific principles behind our technology. This means that as a species we are more accustomed to the basic principles of understanding the notion of the unified metanarrative and certain implications for our epistemological assumptions. We have an advancing understanding that the narratives of the seemingly solid emerge from a transcendent substrate that constitutes the abstract source of forms and shapes. This seed of understanding implies that instances or aspects of consciousness are manifested as the concepts that our theories hold as discrete, and that we as notionally individual sentient beings are also 244 instances of these manifestations.

Our growing awareness of these principles has appeared in the form of our technology's increased capacity to render vividly realistic constructions that convincingly mirror the visible world, the laws of nature and human intelligence. Parallel to the advancement of this ability to create the vivid and graphic, we are developing a fundamental understanding that what appears to us as real has the genesis of the theoretical. This is resulting in a new understanding that this intangible, catalytic plane of conceiving reality has an underlying structure of unconstructed forms that constitute a totalising narrative of consciousness. The etymological combination of understanding and creating in the concept of conception is being realised. With each advancement in technology, there is growing awareness that information technology is not transforming the world as much as it is making the world’s inherent nature more obvious. This conscious awareness of the metanarrative is giving us a more refined capacity to entertain various paradigms at will, so that we can control the connection between reality and paradigms more consciously.

The examination of the Information Age through the lens of an ontological view of metanarrative yields direct parallels to everyday as performance (Schechner 1993, 26-27) (V. Turner 1975, 28-30). The ability to effect change through online participation obviates the idea that all narratives are participatory, reinforced throughout society as a medium (Stafford 2001,

9). With a conception of society as theatre, we can perhaps differentiate it against a world of the Real underlying it. 245

The Internet Age is an increasingly “make believe” environment. The Internet, as a world of constant semiosis, has created a perceived shift in the role of representation. Formerly seen as merely imaginary, representation is increasingly seen as fundamental to the formation of our reality. Participatory culture has led to a new self-awareness in the acting out of narratives.

Performance and play have become serious, and frivolous fantasy is conversely becoming seen as constituting everyday interaction. There has been an ongoing reclassification of realities as narratives. We must not allow elitist value of fantasy and the virtual to mount a dismissal of this as bathetic. Concurrent with the new perceived impermanence of reality, there has been a legitimisation of game play. Social structures are being increasingly seen as capricious rules in a game that allow a picture of the world to spring up from nothing. We now show some ironic distance in our recognition that we are stepping into a game space that is determined by these rules; virtual worlds have made it increasingly obvious that they are seemingly real constructions from false binary.

Findings

This thesis has involved the investigation of new forms of technology and the ways in which they are creating a reconceptualisation of paradigms as being unified in a metanarrative. Using a background primarily based on “cyber theory” and philosophy of technology, I have re-evaluated metanarrative according to recent developments in information technology. Through this I provided an interrogation of certain premises that have not been previously challenged using a metanarrative framework. 246

In this thesis I have engaged with approaches to unified narratives by technology theorists. I have re-evaluated Lyotard’s assessments of the concept of metanarrative (Childers 1995) in light of developments in information technology that increasingly depict discrete concepts as emerging from a unified continuum. This thesis has also applied this notion of a point of convergence to McLuhan’s expanded definition of media, which holds context as equivalent to content. Further, I have built on the position espoused by McKenzie Wark that using information is becoming “third nature” to us in our ability to reorganise the world as quickly as communicating information (Wark, 1997), outlining our growing ability to reach into the metanarrative to remake the world.

This thesis has also provided an angle from which contemporary thought frameworks can be apprehended in the Information Age. I have challenged ideas of “”, which states that today’s works and their perception oscillate between the ideals of modernism and the disruptive quality of postmodernism (Levin, 2012). My notion of metanarrative, in contrast, argues for a framework that provides a metaphysical context for such oscillations rather than being bound by their parameters. I have further argued that unconstruction is a revision of the notion of deconstruction. While deconstruction argues for the fundamental absence of a stable reference point for meaning , unconstruction references an underlying source from which units of analysis can be said to be unified, in effect transcending them.

I have argued, as an example of this, that information technology’s portrayal of place as floating has been legitimised in society, with virtual environments 247 making geography changeable. Unconstruction, through the virtual, provides access to an arena in which different worlds can be deliberately assembled.

This is a fundamental plane on which narratives can be consciously written.

I have further outlined how the redefinition of technology as information is leading to a reconceptualisation of everyday phenomena as information, including our selves and the external world. I have presented Jung’s psychoid archetype, depicting the material world and the mind as extreme ends of the same spectrum, as analogous to the virtual’s portrayal of reality as occurring in degrees of persuasiveness. The convincing imaginary reality of virtual worlds also gives public credibility to theories of the physical as fundamentally information. My presentation of narratives of reality as essentially ideological invokes issues pertaining to the concept of mind and the extent to which our physical selves define us. N. Katherine Hayles argued for a new framework of patterns and randomness replacing that of presence and absence (1999). I have addressed this through arguing that with developments such as quantum computers becoming commercially available, even the ones and zeroes of conventional computer hardware are being transcended. The abstraction from the physical becomes more widely relevant. This is, as it were, an abstraction from patterns themselves from which a wider perspective is gained.

The field of science and technology studies has been treated as interdisciplinary from its inception. As the study of the effects of technology on society, it is inherently the study of how one field affects another. This need is being exacerbated with the increasing abstraction of technology from physical forms, which brings a much more amorphous quality to the 248 functionality of technology. Interdisciplinary education scholar Julie

Thompson Klein characterises Web 2.0 as being defined by online interactions as opposed to the infrastructure of hardware and software (Klein

2010). My arguments have outlined that this redefinition of information technology needs to be extended to a conceptualisation of projected consciousness. I have argued that fields dependent on institutions, such as academia, impose parameters that need to be transcended to keep up with current developments. User-generated content has itself become an institution. If using my premise that reality is a world of roleplaying constructed narratives, as in a virtual world, attention needs to be directed to happenings previously regarded as trivial. This thesis has argued for a need to broaden definitions of narrative, and that the paradigm of commentary as the new content illustrates a shift in the importance in directions of analysis.

Future work suggestion

Engagement with imbalances in the public psyche

There are potential benefits to the social sciences and humanities engaging more with the advantages provided by the new ability to track changes in the zeitgeist. Shifts in perspectives can be monitored in ways that quantify intangible elements of the collective consciousness as well as merely ostensive reactions to social issues. Ideally, such information would not be exploited merely for political leverage but employed in endeavours to address fundamental issues in the psychology of societies. The study of social movements in conjunction with virtualisation paradigms is an area in which 249 further development is warranted by the collective nature of consciousness that the Information Age is making apparent.

Synthesis through interdisciplinary approaches

The premise of this thesis calls for the recognition of an underlying continuum that precedes the conceptualisation of our ideas as notionally distinct. This principle must be applied academically; namely in the form of increased extrapolation of the discoveries made between disciplines into more abstract notions that can be applied through an interdisciplinary approach. Specialism ultimately enforces the constructed framework of thought that is accepted at an unconscious level. It follows that success may be found in a process that is already happening, that is the increased emphasis on the publication of amateur perspectives. While this is inherently more haphazard and prone to redundancy with academic canon, the lack of structure means more epistemic flexibility.

Correspondingly, developing sophistication in understanding the metanarrative requires a meta-perspective from various fields. When addressing the metanarrative, the narrative of a physicist's worldview can be enhanced by that of a fiction writer and so on. As with sustainability, the need for interdisciplinarity in the meta-analysis of narratives is central, as meta- analysis is by its nature holistic. At this elusive level, frameworks no longer operate according to their own peculiarities but subside to a more universal one. It is for this reason that any approach to the metanarrative that is not interdisciplinary will be skewed toward the prejudices inherent in the units of analysis that the particular field is predicated on. Philosophy is enhanced by 250 analyses of deep findings in fields that examine the behaviour of narrative at the most microcosmic scale possible. For this reason engagement with the underlying philosophy of each field is necessary.

The capacity of users to empower, dismiss and recirculate works by organisations is becoming more influential than the works themselves. While anecdotal samples of user-generated content are not broad enough and require further corroboration, this can be achieved through new fields of meta-analysis. Research on the interactions of virtual worlds and social media commentary could provide a more intricate picture of shifts in consciousness. This could involve the least significant data being given significance by the breadth of the samples used. It is fortunate that the growing influence of the frivolous is intrinsically occurring through the same process that gives it thorough documentation; digitisation readily facilitates academic study. Further, virtual worlds represent the cutting edge of reality synthesis. The dynamics of this area in this way warrant treatment that equates them to those of real life interactions.

The mind‐body problem

In philosophy, the mind-body problem is an area that warrants investigation in relation to the new paradigms emerging from contemporary technological advancement. The understanding that the "tangible" emerges from an idea substance, which is highly abstracted from the physical world, offers relevance to the nature of the boundary between mind and body. The body may be revealed as an idea itself. The notion of reality occurring on a spectrum of tangibility implies the absence of such a dichotomy. The body 251 may be understood as the manifestation of intangible themes in the same way that solid matter in general is fundamentally intangible.

Real world symbolism in relation to synchronicity

There is academic potential in interpreting events in the real world as symbolising themes that coincide meaningfully. In order to exhibit any level of predictive or retrospective powers in understanding paradigm shifts, the premise of overarching themes in the history of human advancement must be acknowledged. For this reason, a legitimisation of synchronicity is the most central requirement in applying awareness of a metanarrative. Studies in history may be enhanced by examining events as parts of a literal Symbolic

Order.

Symbolic magic

A possible continuation of this research is increased academic engagement with principles in symbolic magic. In order to master our own paradigms, we must learn the “true names” of phenomena that we are now disposed to quantify, i.e. establish their significance in the underlying archetypal framework. This process necessitates that we resist the inclination to take artificially constructed names as a basis for mental categorisation. Such logocentrism only reinforces the perceived legitimacy of ultimately temporary narratives. Accordingly, aversions to concepts such as symbolic magic should not be entertained on the mere basis of their nomenclature and associations. For symbolic magic to be taken seriously as an appropriate ground for cultural examination, deeply entrenched positivist institutions of 252 thought will have to be apprehended. This means re-evaluating the way in which we write about institutions: the generalisation that stems from categorisations should be scrutinised; emphasis should be placed on analysis of ideas on the basis of their attributes as individual entities, rather than their grouping together according to entrenched associations. Of course, a strictly academic movement for this cause may not yield imminent results in the changing of the zeitgeist. For wide engagement and discourse, popular narratives would have to reflect these principles. The mindscape is defined by its aggregation as a collective consciousness. Models of the operation of elements such as symbolism and archetypes in popular entertainment, therefore, must be further developed.

Final statement

In being increasingly compelled by technology to treat information as the only ingredient of reality, and the discreteness of information as based in hidden narratives, globalised culture is beginning to engage with the notion of constructed views of reality being contextualised as one greater medium of potentiality. Our technology is now reflecting the unified field’s capacity to potentially allow anything to emerge into existence at any time. We find ourselves in the position of Inception’s protagonist, with access to unconstructed idea space that is waiting to be formed into functionally solid realities. The depth of possibility offered by the metanarrative is being hinted to us through the expanding possibility of information technology. We can now play with the shape of the real conscious world in a way approaching that of the dreamlike fantasy of virtual worlds. The extent to which we can 253 take advantage of this depends on our ability to identify patterns in our own changes in awareness.

254

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