Oct 7, 2017 | Dead Water, Facebook
I haven’t looked at my mobile phone today. It’s by my bedside, where it was when I woke up. It hasn’t been in my pocket or been carried around from room to room as I’ve walked round the house. I didn’t take it with me when I went out to the shops this morning, and it wasn’t on the windowsill while I power washed the deck this afternoon.
I was a late adopter of mobiles, and I think I only got one in the first place through work. I quickly got into the habit of having a work phone and a personal phone and keeping them separate. From late-adopting scepticism, I’ve got into the same habit of always-on connectivity as the rest of the world.
As I’ve written here before, I’ve restricted my social media activities quite considerably. I cancelled my LinkedIn account in May 2016, and effectively closed my Facebook account last November, though friends can still get me on Messenger, and I have resurfaced a couple of times when the occasion required it. I still have a Twitter account that I look at for half an hour at a time four or five times a day, and reckon that is probably too much. And I have an Instagram account that I do use but is, by its nature, a more sporadic thing.
My scepticism is not new–I’ve written about it several times including the post below from August 2011
Ramblin’ On My Mind (2)
So I was ready to encounter this in the Guardian and to follow up by reading Tristan Harris. You don’t have to buy in to all of the ideas there to nevertheless consider your own approach to connectivity. Still, much of what Harris and his peers say at least echo my reasons for dropping off Facebook, which I wrote about here:
A Farewell to Facebook?
So I made a deliberate decision to disconnect myself today (except, ironically enough, by writing this blog post.) This isn’t permanent, and I don’t expect a medal for it; I’m not a Luddite and I’m not rejecting the benefits of connectivity. As our landline is these days only an attractor for spam calls, my personal mobile is where I get calls from people whom I actually want to talk to and so it won’t go away.
But leaving the phone by the bed while I go about my day fits with the reason I rarely wear a watch: I don’t want to measure my existence or awareness by reference to technology or the promptings of technology. I want to find a different frame of reference for experiencing life that is more rooted in the inner than by external signifiers.
I know that sounds like hippy-shit, but there we are.
Oct 7, 2017 | Uncategorized
I haven’t yet seen Blade Runner 2049, but I am reminded of something I wrote on my former blog nearly a decade ago
I have spent a pleasant morning and afternoon watching two of the five disks in the Blade Runner, Final Cut boxed set. Disk 4 looks at all of the elements which went into the film – set design, lighting, costume and so forth. It is almost perfect but something has been niggling me about it and it is only now that I’ve pretty much watched the disk through that I realise what is missing – the soundscape and, most of all, the wonderful soundtrack from Vangelis. There is some discussion of it on Disk 2 in the analysis of the post production process and the quality of the soundtrack is given due attention and appropriate praise there. However other similar releases (Lord of the Rings, Star Wars) give much closer attention to the soundtrack and this one doesn’t. This is a major omission and both a great surprise and a very great shame.
One of the segments discusses one of the burning issues amongst Blade Runner afficionados: is Rick Deckard a replicant? Interestingly this is discussed purely in terms of the film. In part this may be because of the differences between the book and the film but it does seem to me that the book (“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) is important because the underlying question of Deckard’s humanity – and the nature of humanity – is the key theme of the book.
In the book it is humans who dream of owning electric sheep while the androids dream of being fully realised humans. However Dick had a further twist – dreaming of owning electric sheep as a status symbol is so far from Dick’s concept of being human that the humans might as well be androids and thus a vicious circle of meaning is set up and explored. Since Deckard dreams of electric sheep he might as well be an android, but if he is an android then by dreaming of electric sheep he has reduced himself to the level of humanity. Ridley Scott, in making the film, planted lots of clues that he believes Deckard is a replicant/android but also leaves scope for ambiguity (and from the deleted scenes the ambiguity is deliberate because some of the clunkier suggestivities have been excised). In this sense it seems to me that for all the manifest difference between novel and film, the core of the novel has been retained: it is the consequences of asking the question which are more important than anything so crude as the answer.
We’ll see how the new movie deals with this in due course.
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