Bill's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

I didn’t notice how this week flew by. I spent a lot of hours working on my ethnographic report (and judging by what I’ve seen so far, so did everybody else on theirs). At the same time I started warming up to Twitter again, as it seems to be a great source of links and resources. A lot of the people I follow seem to use it as a real-time social networking tool, although I am positive it was not built for this purpose. Twitter has largely contributed to the Nowism trend. A Trendwatcher.com definition for the term reads as follows:

“NOWISM | “Consumers’ ingrained lust for instant gratification is being satisfied by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences. Consumers are also feverishly contributing to the real-time content avalanche that’s building as we speak. As a result, expect your brand and company to have no choice but to finally mirror and join the ‘now’, in all its splendid chaos, realness and excitement.””

This all important “NOW” moment seems to be partly about instant gratification and partly about anxiety. Are we growing too impatient? In my RL I am a very patient person but during the time I spend online I demand faster input, a more rapid exchange of images and ideas.

Perhaps this has to do with the fact that most of us have too many things to do on the web on a daily basis and too many balls to juggle. We need a faster rate of technological convergence, we need more mash-ups and more services that combine services we already use. In MacWorld 2007, the now hugely successful iPhone was presented by Steve Jobs as “three revolutionary products. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.” And in 2009, Google announced GoogleWave, a tool that was promoted as a new incarnation of e-mail but in essence is an e-mail client, a chat tool and a multi-wiki all rolled into one semi-attractive package.

But perhaps nowism also betrays a fear of death, an acknowledgement of our mortality (“so many tools, so little time”), which is also evident in our long-lasting fascination with the mechanical augmentation of the human body and the creation of Cyborgs. We might have become posthuman in a variety of ways, but we are still tied to our material aspect.

Posthuman MSc students

In our ultimate fantasy, when cyborg-technology overwhelms our biology, mortality won’t be an issue anymore. Paradoxically, while we dream of becoming robot-like, popular culture is full of robots who wish to become “human”. Even cyborgs get the existential blues and once more the grass is greener on the other side.