Didactic Fizzle

Notable Finds

Seven months ago, near the end of summer ‘09, I entered ParaChat — which, before Omegle, was my chat residence of choice — searching for paper help.

I was supposed to write a three-page essay on the changing civil rights movement. One ParaChat room brought me to a nice fellow; he voluntarily sent me the following large block of text — a college paper he wrote a few years ago. (Note: I forget the alias he used.) It didn’t help me with my procrastinated assignment but it was a fun read, and I’d like to share it with y’all, since this is the sort of place where we share! Tumblr. Good site. Handsome owner. Um, here is that college essay:

The problem in our current social system is that it suffers from an inherent and potentially fatal flaw in its structure: namely the degradation of information which by all rights should not be degradable, and the illusory originality commonly known as individuality. These are the chinks in the mechanism of information transfer and share that all too easily trigger synchronization in our present social structure. This is sometimes referred to as ‘acts of creation in the name of consumption.’

In every society there are certain personalities that are sought for. Characteristics sought by the system itself. Most people are completely unaware of these phenomena. In the vastness of the Internet, people unknowingly are searching for information which jives seemingly uniquely with their own particular understandings. As they do so, they are drawn together, driven to disseminate and inherit information evenly amongst themselves. The experiences and traits of one, become equal to all. They do this because they are subconsciously driven towards the notion of collective thought.

There is an interesting perception that there are those who exist purely because the mediums they seek exist. Wars exist, and therefore so do the soldiers and observers. Alternatively this can be viewed as ‘war exists such that soldiers and observers may exist.’ The same can be said of the Internet. The network exists; therefore there are those who are the creators, and those who exist because of it. This at first appears to hold true when one considers the behavior of the Internet. However, the reality of the situation is that Internet users are really one in the same. Human beings naturally tend to localize upon features which appeal most to their own lust for security and safety, and paradoxically, their own individuality.

Oddly enough it is the search for unity of thought that may ultimately end in Man’s destruction. As more and more people flock to sources of so-called “right” personalities, society grows ever closer to the satisfaction it believes it needs. However, at the same time this is occurring, the very act of unification sterilizes the populace, thereby destroying the organism of Man from within. It is, after all, the uniqueness of the individual that separates the creature of humanity from the machine. As an example, mankind’s quest for artificial-intelligence tends to indicate that creativity and individuality are the hallmark of sentience, and yet at the same time we as humans actively pursue that which makes us uniform.

What does this all mean, you ask? It means that in order for people to continue being individuals in an age where individual traits can be so easily indexed and shared, and information is so readily accessible, people need to be self-motivated towards their own individuality and not that of others. In short, be yourself.

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