The sky is falling the sky is falling

art and photo bryan james

yeah! yeah! get on the train before it leaves the station. In this age of Abundance the worse thing one can do is block the road to excess. Stop, take a deep breath. Lets look at this thing closely. sure the whole idea of abundance is, we can have as much as we want, when we want it and for a relatively low price, good But how do we eliminate the bad choices? Remember Bruce Sprinsteens song "57 channels and nothing on?"Drive through anytown North America,You will find the same crappy fast food outlets,fast clothing outlets and fast lifestyles oulets, from A&W to Walmarts. If you travel to Jamaica or Nicaragua, fly To japan and low and behold, the same abundance of poo! Is this what we are racing towards, sameness.? A deliberate method to create easy markets.for easy consumers. sure, on one end we can have discriminating users of media, on the otherend? is having access to "the NHL fight of the week" necessary? is having access to Gossip girl really that important? i think not.

This isn't what technology is made for

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when we overload the system with stuff i feel it crushes other voices. okay, thats a bit strong,but It takes longer to find stuff! Technology eats smaller cultures, everyday languages die because they do not fit in the digital paradigm

As technologies take hold some cultures die and as cultures die so goes precious information. as an example, before the technology of the written word many tradtitions were passed from one generation to the next, orally, each group had specific codes of reference. with the written word many oral cultures died out, the transmission of information and the keeper of this information was held by those with the right technology. These cultures expanded with the technology they wrote their histories and "omitted" the oral histories. As we move from written to analogy tape a lot of the written work gets discarded, think of the parts of spiritual text left out of the bible etc. think of the tapes of music you have that will never make it to digital format,and be lost.my point is eventually those that own the technology dictates the content. so the major languages will occupy large amounts of room on the internet. languages, like some inuit dialects will disappear,along with how each culture referrs to themselves.

THERE IS HOPE!
One ray of hope in this digital doom, when we think of film we think of America. but the largest producer is
INDIA. Africa, or Nigeria Nollywood, is making inroads producing cheap digital videos that are sold on the home view market. Rarely will we see these films loaded on the internet or on the cable t.v. but they do make the access equal. When africans have as many computers as north americans...WATCH OUT