The Five Contexts of the Shift Age (Entering the Shift Age, eBook 3) by David Houle

Author:David Houle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2012-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

Until the Shift Age there has never been this screen reality, which is fundamentally different from physical reality.

Sure, since television gained market penetration in the mid-twentieth century, and the PC in the latter part of the century, there have been screens, but those screens were either one-way or contained and separate. The early-stage Internet at the end of the Information Age did initiate slow interactivity and provided us with a view into what interactivity might provide, but it was not until the last few years that interactive connectivity both went high speed and became totally mobile. It is these two coincidental developments that ended the relevance of place to human communication.

We now have a rapidly morphing screen reality that is spatial. We all accept the word cyberspace (thank you, William Gibson) as “where we go through our screens.” We know intuitively it is not a place but a space. Further, we know that this space can be plugged into or “jacked into” from anywhere. We know that, once in this space, we can interact with anyone and any entity or source.

This is going to lead to a profound alteration in both consciousness and how we relate to physical place. Just imagine for a moment that you are sitting with someone from the past, telling them that there is a space you regularly go to, that doesn’t physically exist, but where you can “be” with your friends, learn about anything in the world, buy anything from anywhere in the world at any time it is convenient for you. They would not, could not, understand this space, except perhaps in the totally abstract sense. What might be at best a very limited abstract sense of this space, is, for you and all of us, an actual place we go every day, an actual experience we have every day.

This is a radical change in spatial consciousness. To daily enter a spatial reality—screen reality—that is other than physical reality is creating an evolutionary shift in how humanity relates to place. We are often so into this screen reality, this cyberspace, and the gadgets that are the portals to this space that we lose sight, or even awareness, of how unprecedentedly transformative this all is. Is a fish conscious that it is swimming in water?

A whole new space in which to live, a space that has no correlation to the physical place that has defined, shaped, and limited human thought and consciousness until the Shift Age. So the Concept of Place has changed forever. How much more it will change makes one wonder.

Utopia?

The word “utopia” comes from Sir Thomas More and the Greek language, where it means “no place.” So if the concept of place is changing and becoming less important, could that mean that we are moving toward a utopia? At the time of the ancient Greek civilization it was impossible to think of no-place, since everything exists in a place. Since “perfection, an ideal place” did not exist, the word utopia was created to describe the non-place ideal.

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