2 posts tagged “neighborhood”

I've talked about the following online several times before (including here at VOX just a little further below, or perhaps on the next page depending on when you're reading), of how I believe in this new mental condition that's recently come about because of the Web 2.0, which in an attempt to coin a phrase I call "Global Displacement Syndrome" or GDS; it basically can only come about in people who consume a massive amount of amateur creative content from around the world at once, usually through online means, just hundreds of photos at Flickr and hundreds of videos at YouTube every month, just like I've been doing more and more in my own life over the last several years. Because when you do something like this, you end up getting not only the cool high-end artsy stuff like usual, but also just a ton of casual and informal media from around the planet too, photos from birthday parties and school events, cellphone images of a neighborhood statue posted a hundred times a year to some moblog or Photobucket account, showing that statue in a hundred different states of weather and daylight. And I've said before, getting that kind of regular multimedia input into a neighborhood halfway around the planet from you makes you...well, not exactly a local, you can't exactly call it that, but no longer a stranger or simply a tourist to that city either, with you now knowing a lot more about that city each day than a simple tourist would know.

When you get too much input in your life like this, when you spend too much time thinking about it all like I have, then your brain can get into certain strange mindsets at certain times, which for me always seems triggered by things like warm summer afternoons, pot, laid-back European dance musicians, and a host of other things. And that's a mindset where it suddenly becomes difficult to determine rationally just what city you're in at that exact moment in your life -- whether it's Chicago or London or Frankfurt, Sydney or Seoul or Ljubljana, Rio or Toronto or Cape Town. In fact, it's like you're not in any of those particular cities at all, but rather a strange and mystical world where all these cities have combined into a tenth, entirely fictional one, one where you and all your online friends from these other nine cities are all living at once, a place just as real and concrete in your head as the actual physical city you're currently located in. And when I'm under the spell of GDS, like I've said before, I sometimes have these really strange experiences here in Chicago where I physically live; for example, when I look out the window next to my computer here at home (the image seen in this entry, taken just a few minutes ago), it's hard for me to tell whether I'm still in Chicago or maybe suddenly in another one of these cities just mentioned, that if I were to actually go downstairs and open the front door of my building, hell, who knows, maybe I just will find Barcelona or Oslo or Saint Petersburg right beyond.

I find myself getting into this mindset more and more with the passing years, the longer I'm exposed regularly to all these hundreds of casual photos and videos online from around the world, all the underground bands and artists I follow around the world all at once. The Social Singularity? The Coming One World Culture? Or just the sad result of too much Flickr, 420, and time alone? Hmm.