And So It Goes Online: Slaughterhouse Five & Hypercities

“I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.” –Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five.

 These words were written in 1969, while Vietnam was getting doused in napalm, the UNIX system was developed and the CDC 7600, arguably the first supercomputer, was constructed. All of these events have had repercussions echoing through time, while also becoming the proverbial bug in amber. These ideas of time and space being malleable echo some of the concepts of a Hypercity. I can’t help but wonder if Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is perhaps an indication that a Hypercity is a sort of eventual societal goal, even if before anyone knew what it was.

 The Fukushima and Tranquil_Dragon portion of Hypercities, with its blow-by-blow recollection of fear and destruction, made me think about how the past on the internet is something we can catalog and return to at any time. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is presented by aliens with the concept that even if an event has passed or a person has died, that moment or person is still always preserved in the past and we can return there any time. The Tweets about acts of human kindness paired with fear, dread, death, in Fukushima recall Billy/Vonnegut’s recollections of Dresden, it’s citizens, it’s beauty, and it’s ultimate destruction at the hand of Allied bombers. Today we have the unfortunate business of figuring out what to do with someone’s Facebook or Twitter account when they have passed on.

 The alien Tralfamadorians also explain time in a way that feels very physical. Their perception of time is a mountain range, while the way we perceive time is akin to being strapped to a train with blinders placed on the side of your head. I find that both views sort of collide when you see people critiquing the use of communication technology today. People are going on Twitter and having conversations that would ordinarily never happen or attending webinars or catching up on the news, but the image that is popularly evoked is one of people just looking down at their phones and blind to the world.

 The internet has given us a way to realize this concept of time as a permanent thing we can look back at in a practical way, but not exactly a way that we can emotionally process. Just as triumphs and past accomplishments are posted on Facebook for friends and loved ones to look over, Twitter feuds become preserved ammunition in massive smear campaigns or at the very least it might make future conversations very awkward. But other pundits, scholars, and thinkers have extrapolated on this subject of preserving everything we do online, and it’s not like we can put the proverbial toys back in the toybox anyways. Barring some kind of cataclysm that destroys all online data as we know it, we just have to get used to having so much of our lives preserved outside the confines of our personal recollections.

“Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.”

Of course there is always the juggling of persona that comes with having a life taking an online personality or personalities. Facebook for friends and family, Linkedin for employers, Tumblr for your artistic endeavors, Flickr for your portfolio, Twitter for making catty comments. Billy’s problem was trying to fit in place in time when no one around him can possibly understand what it’s like to constantly jump from one place to the next while also having time be constant, instead of something in the past. Nowadays folks are expected to similarly bounce around places, times, and audiences, but for each audience we have to make sure we are fully committed to our roll even though everyone else is going through the same game of digital musical chairs. Identity is not so much fleeting as it is affixed to a certain point and place. If time is a mountain range, the internet are the trading posts scattered throughout it. We are brought to a point whether we have to wonder if the Hypercity is constructed by us, or if we are the product of the Hypercity. Or is the Hypercity the ultimate crux that we are heading towards and time, place, and information become structured yet fluid? And so it goes…

 

3 thoughts on “And So It Goes Online: Slaughterhouse Five & Hypercities

  1. You Gene Kim

    For 3.11 Fukushima Disaster, Twitter played an important role to alert the incident. One Japanese civilian described his situation on Twitter. He left few messages before he died which was heart breaking. Other than twitter, there are various SNS (Social Network Services). But I think those trends will not last long. In the long run, they will be replaced by new and stronger networking services.

  2. (Martha) Joy Rose

    Thanks for the memories re: Slaughterhouse Five! I appreciated the connection when you brought it up in class. Me thinks perhaps we are actually the products of the systems we participate in, and not the other way around — unfortunately, although we hold fast to the illusion that we are the agents and creators. Also, thank you for helping me identify why I continue to dislike twitter re: your assessment, “Twitter for making catty comments.” MJR

  3. Stephen Real

    I know it should go without saying, but even with the internet, we cannot travel in time in the absolute sense. We are limited by the data that has been captured. After all, people only post selected elements of their lives on Facebook. Even with elements that are there, they may not always be findable or even legible as the technology changes over time, pages get archived off of servers etc. This point was regularly reaffirmed in Hypercities, which repeatedly caveated the idea that we are limited in our perception by the data that has been selected. Some recent high-profile cases like Ferguson and Trayvon Martin surface this challenge, by underscoring that it is impossible to know with certainty what actually happened. The Internet doesn’t change that.

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