Turn on, tune in, and...... 'like' on Facebook
Over time, we create a mental model of the real world that is strongly influenced by our beliefs, prejudices and experiences, and our model will differ from that of other people in far greater ways than is usually accepted. The world that we consciously inhabit increasingly resembles our own 'world view'. Should an optimistic person walk down a street, for example, they would be inclined to register happy couples, pleasant weather or playing children. A cynical person walking down exactly the same street might completely miss those details, and see instead the homeless population and the graffiti. Of course, the street itself hasn't changed between the two observations, but this is almost irrelevant, as no one is aware of the 'true' street in its entirety. The same principle applies to every aspect of life, from the mechanism that decides which news stories grab your attention, to the personal qualities in others that you respond to or overlook. The result of this is that the 'world' in which we live is not an objective, distinct environment, but a model constructed in our own image. In the words of Alan Watts, the influential writer on Eastern religions, 'Reality is only a Rorsach ink-blot'. Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, 'People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is a confession of character'.That account of Timothy Leary's foretelling of social media with its reality tunnels, filter bubbles, selective algorithms and multiple realities comes from I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary by John Higgs. Leary, who immortalised the phrase 'Turn on, tune in, drop out', went on to write Chaos and Cyberculture which predicted that 'The PC is the LSD of the Nineties'. Many of us who came of age in the 1960s were influenced by the Moody Blues' In Search of the Lost Chord album with its track Legend of a Mind eulogising Timothy Leary. In 1972 Leary recorded the space rock album Seven Up with 'krautrock' band Ash Ra Tempel and also discussed working with the Moody Blues. But extradition back to America and a subsequent jail term intervened. In his biography John Higgs recounts how, while Leary was in solitary confinement in Sandstone Federal prison in Minnesota, he could hear someone walking up and down outside his window all night repeatedly singing Legend of a Mind with its refrain 'Timothy Leary's dead/No, no, no, no, He's outside looking in'.
[Timothy] Leary called these personal mental models 'reality tunnels'. Each person lives in a different reality tunnel from everyone else, and is personally responsible for constructing their own existential reality. To be truly 'free' it is necessary to recognise this for, in the words of the Discordians, 'Whatever you believe imprisons you. Convictions create convicts'. This is a difficult concept to grasp, but it is profoundly important in understanding both Leary and his influence. It is the concept that explains the post-modern move away from the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, which viewed reality as an absolute that could be understood through rational inquiry. Enlightenment thinkers assumed that everyone operates in the same reality, but that, Leary believed, was just not true on a practical level. Concepts, relationships and events were now relative, and could only really be understood when analyzed alongside the reality tunnels that created them.
No review samples used. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter.
Comments
RE social media, oh, there I'm an outsider right enough. I totally ignore Twitter, WhatsApp, etc. Einstein said in a lecture, possibly, that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Well, social media chucks that dictum out the window. With now, I understand, a limit of 280 characters, almost all is simplification in the worst sense. From social media, most people now get the 'news'. A suggested dinner recipe to start, and then a reference to Trump's tweets of Britain First videos. No mention, however, of the fact that Trump thus, more so with his tweet to May, ended the 'Special Relationship'. Enough to say of Facebook that it is, in large part, a bedlam that its executives created and then lost control of, a tower of babel, all speech confounded. I except, of course, the pictures of the grandchildren.
Music journalism -- is there any? The prime example of a pretense to it is Lebrecht's farrago of errors, clickbait, gossip, and trolling in comments, a textbook case of rampant egotism. Interesting, I thought, that some time ago there was a concerted attack on Musicology. I've certainly noticed the pernicious influence of Post-modernism in that discipline, but so too have I in History -- my field. But there is still much of value published in both, and some musicological writing reminds me of the best of music journalists past. After all, many of those were musicologists, though not academics. And so it to Musicology that I now turn entirely for deeply knowledgeable writing. I don't even look at the music journalists in the newspapers -- I'm not an outsider where they are concerned -- they have alienated me. My true involvement now, what I am decidedly inside, is the very large number of fine organizations that seek to disseminate the approximation of truth we should fight for, and to battle the plethora of global evils we need to fight against. I leave Facebook and Twitter to those with nothing better to do -- except that Facebook is now one of the menaces we need to engage in combat.