When I open my Microsoft computer, the first thing I see is a screensaver of some beautiful natural landscape or else a beautiful ancient village or ruin. The photography is so good it’s the kind of thing you would like to hang up in your office or your living room. The screensaver is frequently accompanied by some suggestive blurbs describing the place being shown without actually naming it. Some beautiful intriguing picturesque prose to start out a person’s computer experience for that day before he pulls himself away entirely from the sensory external world and enters the world of screen reality.
Now granted there are those like myself who basically use the computer as an old-fashioned typewriter or today what they would call a word processor. After all, columnists have existed since at least the nineteenth century. I know that because I just bought a book that is a compilation of articles and it was published in eighteen forty-three. Of course, lawyers have used typewriters to make contracts.
However, most people using the computer today are not columnists, authors or lawyers. They are not using the computer for any, what we could call, compositional purposes whatsoever. Most people today have other kinds of uses for the computer. These uses frequently relate to the bureaucratic shuffling of data. Data have become the fundamental units of the workings of life in modern technological society. In terms of what we as humans experience, we have increasingly moved away from the flowing blendable continual organic stimuli of traditional natural societies and into the defined discrete mechanical or digital stimuli that are the foundation of modern technological society. Stimuli like data. Rather than being like a series of overlapping paint strokes, life has increasingly become like a series of disconnected points on a line. A series of isolated events rather than a flowing stream of experiences. The shuffling of data is a metaphor for life without grounding. Life where one floats in a vacuum.
This is the exact opposite of life in an exquisite natural landscape or beautiful bonded village. The images, which are the foundation of most Microsoft screensavers, give people a sense of grounding that they are unable to obtain in their everyday lives in external world reality let alone in the screen reality in which they spend so much of their time. So, when their screensavers come up as they turn on their computers, they can spend some time if they wish daydreaming and trying to absorb some organic stimulation from a screen representation of an organic environment. This would be done to help them to brace themselves against the sensory distortion that they are about to experience while performing whatever activities that are on their agenda that day in their world of screen reality.
Of course, within the context of external world reality, these images are a fraud. They are a seductive digital recreation of an organic living environment. But they are exactly that, a recreation, and nothing more. They fool the user of the Microsoft computer into believing he is being given a few moments of organic relief before he charges ahead with the tasks that he has to perform in screen reality. But in effect, to use an oxymoron, he is being given synthetic organic stimulation, that really doesn’t satisfy his physical needs and his psychological needs for organic stimulation at all.
Microsoft senses that people have needs as mammalian human beings that are perforce being neglected in all the many hours that their work, education, or recreation keep them away from external world reality, and, in particular, sources of organic stimulation. So, with screen savers of organic landscapes and charming villages and ruins, it hopes to trick the users of its computers that they are somehow satisfying these fundamental needs before fully transitioning to a screen reality.
Except that these screen savers don’t really satisfy these needs, and so a person unconsciously goes along like a submarine immersing himself for a longer period of time in screen reality than he really should psychologically, and he suffers all the terrible side effects that can occur as a result of an accumulating numbness. It would be better on one level not to have such seductive screen savers so that the user of the computer would be forced to confront his basic need to break away from the computer and to enjoy sources of organic stimulation in the external world.
Of course, one of the problems is that sustained immersion in computer activities over a long period of time makes it increasingly difficult for him to be able to properly absorb the organic stimulation from his living environment that, as a mammalian human being, he so desperately needs. So not only does the computer capture, as it were, the user’s time and energy but it also captures his state of mind. The picturesque screensaver acts as a transition to the screen reality world where a person is made more and more robotic in his state of mind.
© 2023 Laurence Mesirow
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