In the Flow of Information, Lose Yourself

Prosumers, a neologism created by combining the words consumer and producer by New Media scholars, reflects the nature of social networking, an activity that could not be described as passive because the very act of consuming social media is predicated on a person's production of social media (eg, you can't be on facebook unless you facebook).  Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss comments on the coming to fruition of Ascott’s predictions about the future of what he called “cybernetics”:

A new species, the social networker, has come into being.  He/she is a multi-tasking information producer and manager, a multimedia artist and a homepage designer, an actor and a director of self-made videos, and editor and an author of his/her blog, a moderator and an administrator of a forum, to name only a few of the aforementioned characteristics.  Social networker select and publish their own information and put it straight from other networkers’ flows directly into their own communities.  These forms of interaction require personal communication skills and competences to judge information for its relevance and added value by sharing it with others. 

Brooks, David.  “Social Animal: How the New Sciences of Human Nature Can Help Make Sense of a Life.”  The New Yorker.  17 Jan. 2011.  Web.  20 Jan. 2011.

When asked how his findings about the nature of human nature— the ways in which it is informed by and constructed by genetics, neural pathways formed as consequences of environment, and brain chemistry—changed the way he live, a neuroscientist comments:  

'I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain alliances with colleagues and friends,’ he said. ‘Now, though, I see things differently, I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources.  The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics.  The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture.  The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education.  But it is all information that flows through us.  The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river.  Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exist, self-made, in isolation from it.’ 

Further, he goes on to say that happiness is, in part, constituted by how fully we become immersed in the ubiquitous river of information, to the point that we lose consciousness in the process of activity or creation:

‘And though history has made us self-conscious in order to enhance our survival prospects, we still have deep impulses to erase the skull lines in our head and become immersed directly in the river.  I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situation in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks.  It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool.  It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love.  And it happens most when we connect with other people.  I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments.  Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities.  Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.

How much does this sound like the shift from the old concepts of invention to descriptions of remix?
Note especially the ecstatic descriptions of what Eminem has described in the song “Lose Yourself,” what Keats called negative capability, and then there’s Emerson’s transparent eyeball ("Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.  I am part and particle of God").  Compare a passage of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own:

What is meant by “reality”?  It would seem to be some thing very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun.  It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying.  It overwhelms one walking beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly.  Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is.  But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent.  That is what remains when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.  Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. (114)

How certainly does Walter’s Bates’s description of Keat’s negative capability come to mind as a gloss to Woolf’ reality?  “In our life of uncertainties, where no one system or formula can explain everything—where even a word is at best, in Bacon’s phrase, a “wager of thought”—what is needed is an imaginative openness of mind and heightened receptivity to reality in its full and diverse concreteness.  This, however, involves negating one’s own ego” (332).