The faster the better?

“The speed limit is not within the space, but within the human’s mind. We can shortened the path between one space to another, but we cannot shortened the path inside our mind.”

– Yasraf Amir Piliang (Dunia yang dilipat)

I finally read this precious book, a book recommended by my cousin 2 years ago, to add my knowledge about e-culture, a course I’m going to give this semester.

I have read only the prologue and a couple of pages of the chapter one and this book already gives me lots of thing to ponder, it feeds my curiousity and answers my questions about living in this information era. Where it’s not you who is looking for information but it’s information that is looking for you, a massive being demanding for your attention and requesting you to respond.

I had a blackberry, once upon a time, which I gave up one month later because it made me feel like having a house with people coming in from the door, the windows, the roof, and all other ways possible, forcing me to make a respond to EACH attempts they make to “communicate”.

Yasraf wrote in his book that in this era, people don’t really think about the essence of communication. They don’t care about whether the information is passed over to those who really need it or is the information useful or not. They are just enjoying the process of producing, circulating and consuming the “information””, and just ignore the meaningfulness of what they do.

Now, the question is, do we really need all of those information? With this limited computing resources in our brain, we should carefully filter the useful out of the garbage. Otherwise our braincells will be overwhelmed and suffocated by the information pollution. Are you sure that you are going to waste your time keeping up with the flood of others’ life timeline, or swallowing anything that is on tv? Because keeping and processing this kind of information would not make enough ingredients to create something useful enough to be given back and to make life better.

The second question is, do we really need to be fast? Is being fast really gives us more? Is getting more stuff makes you a better person? Is it true if you are throw more data and information to people then it means that you contribute more to the society? Are you sure that if you respond to chat, email, comments, etc faster than you’ll gain more in your life?

The answers lies on what is the philosophy of your life, if there is any. Or you don’t care, it is also ok. But for me, it is the responsibility of everyone living in this world, to slow down, think over, and decide, do we really want to let the meme taking over our genes, and making the next generations even worse than ours. Because once we let “the grand ideas” about having the most expensive cars, the most fashionable bag and clothes, the latest gadgets, etc, we will moving away from the essence of life and have less meaningful life.

This era, the era of folding the world, force each one of us to live in a rush (without even knowing what it is we are running after). Instead of giving happiness, this kind of life will only produce the neverending  feeling of insufficient (Deleuze & Guattari) or “the unhappiness consciousness” (Hegel or Marx). So it is really our choice, taking control of our own life, or let ourselves being possessed by the devil: the information that is using our energy to feed them and make them relentlessly growing and overwhelming us.

Think.