Undressing Brains

Ok, get ready, this is going to be an extremely weird, not to say ’whacky’, post (well, what else would you expect from the so-called president of the association of ’whacky economists’: at least nothing dismal I hope).

The idea started to form in my mind as I was writing a mail earlier this morning to a fellow blogger. As the ’correspondent’ (this term is, please note, also used to describe one of the parties in adultery-based divorce proceedings ) was young and female I felt the unusual need to hedge what I was saying with all kinds of qualifiers to avoid the wrong kind of interpretation. Since the ’undressing’ thing is a metaphor which I would like to continue to use I thought it might be better to come out of the closet now and declare my secret ’peeping tom like’ proclivity for this bizarre practice.

Full disclosure: I enjoy watching other people ’undress their brains’, I have even what may be described as an ’un-natural’ interest in the topic.

Now if you are over 18, and willing to risk your luck, please press continue reading.

well if the efficient cause of all this rambling was an earlier mail, the final cause was most certainly a conversation I held earlier this year with Dina Mehta (Conversations With Dina). We were chatting about differences between Chinese and Indian blogging when I asked her whether she new about Muzimei (and here) and Hard Candy. Since she didn’t I gave her the URL’s and sent her over to take a look.

(Interlude: since not enough attention is paid in blogging to the new structure of narrative discourse that is arising in the wake of the new technologies, I will take the liberty of pointing this out here. Shouldn’t we be talking about ’internet time’. I can’t remember when I last heard the expression multi-tasking, like so many novelties it is one of those things which we now simply take for granted. But using IM, and the difference between IM and the mobile phone, this I rarely see commented on. I well remember my first ’initiation’ with the messenger: it was of course a woman who ’initiated me’ - my Bulgarian friend Margy the anthropologist (again IM is arguably the closest form of ’cold communication’ to the ’rather hotter’ oral mode in both its structure and its directness). Anyway, as I was saying IM implies a whole different idea of ’lived time’. I remember my first ’novice’ experiences, eagerly awaiting my interlocutor’s reply. Now I can have a couple of IM windows open and be writing a blog post, at the same time as going off and reading a link that someone has just sent me over one of the messenger conversations. Of course the ’going over’ here is in no way physical, this is simply a convenient physical fiction to enable us to structure how we think about the net: yet another hangover from the ’theatre of memory’.)

Ok so Dina then came back, just like the rest of you now are, and it was what she said next that has stuck in my mind to this day. “You know”, she said, “its as if Chinese women bloggers were obsessed with undressing their bodies, while the Indian ones are busy undressing their brains”.

Now behind this apparently glib comment lies an enormous cultural agenda, on which I could (and will I hope) expound in a later post (as i will with that other pre-post I have floating round my head ’Bangalore vs Chennai). To begin to grasp the dimensions of the backdrop maybe the stereotypical ’did you know that China invented the wheelbarrow, and India the zero’ would help. In fact most Indian villages still don’t have wheelbarrows, and they will probably have a computer before they have a wheelbarrow. But streotypes aside, this is not my subject today.

Now, if you are sufficiently ’horny’ to want to go off now and cast your eyes upon some female Indian bloggers getting their minds ’undressed’ for you, you could try, apart from Dina of course, Priya-B , Priya-L , Nancy, Divya, or Charu (who, appropriately enough as you will see from the URL, encourages you to ’peek into her mind’).

It is not however the pseudo-erotica of cerebral voyeurism that interests me here, but the process of mind-body dissociation/distanciation/dismemberment which seems to be taking place here.

Ok now things get even weirder, lets introduce a topic which certainly few would consider erotic: RSS feed technology. You see all this stream of madness took form when the idea of ’brain undressing’ collided with another: that of a website as a concrete physical entity, with its own spatial location (in cyber space, of course).

My ’co-respondent’ was asking a question about an idea we are working on called ’Living in Delhi’, she wanted to know how this would fit in with Living in India. Would it be a separate site she asked. So I started to ask myself: what does this mean? You see, with RSS technology my experience is that our whole conception of what a site is is changing. Really now a site is just a ’skin’ where you group together material you feel it interesting to bring together. This is what makes the Living ’sites’ possible and easy to do.

Given how easy it is, this should send shudders down the spines of everyone in big media.

At the present time it seems the attention of most of those who are interested in RSS is directed towards individualised ’news readers’, or towards how to bang the biggest possible information stream into a mobile phone. Relatively few people are really into thinking about the Aesthetics of the reading experience, and the non-tech internet user population. So relatively little attention is being given to the ’website as skin’ idea. I don’t know if this obsession with the individual reader is a reflection on the highly individualised US consumption experience, rather like we in Europe rather favour public transport, and in the US people seem to favour the individual car. I don’t know, but this would be worth investigating.

Eventually I imagine there will be RSS aggregators everywhere, in all shapes and sizes, to cater for every taste.

Now this is not a promo, but if you have got this far I imagine you are interested in the topic so why don’t you now go to the Living on the Planet page, where you will see that Michael Darragh (who is the creative genius behind the Living design concept) has been busy playing with RSS from all over the Living net (including posts here at Fistful), so you can get an idea of how powerful all this is. ’Site’ as such doesn’t mean too much these days. We are all just ’brains’ under ’skins’.

So this is why the ’undressing brains’ bit has really stuck with me: it even seems to me that the biggest thing that most of the people who “don’t understand the internet” don’t understand is this. That at the end of the day it is far more interesting to watch someone ’undressing their brains’ than it is to watch them ’undressing their bodies’ (I warned you, this would be whacky).

Now if I can dive off at another tangent to clarify a bit more. Those who study the topic suggest that one of the characteristics of oral cultures is that each word tends to have a mental image (a picture) attached to it (this could be one of the reasons that the earliest forms of script have a pictographic quality). As a society becomes more and more literate this property seems to gradually disappear. Think table, and you don’t have to call to mind any particular table image.

Well now lets transfer this idea to the transition from a world dominated by virtual as opposed to physical contact. When we first enter this world, my (anecdotal) experience is that we tend to imagine a person with defined characteristics (listening to the radio would be the first thing that comes to mind). When I first ’met’ Michael Darragh I somehow imagined him wearing a Chairman Mao type cap. There is a simple reason for this: Michael worked under the pseudonym Chairman Meow, which is in fact the name of his cat.

I was soon thoroughly disillusioned in my naieve fantasising since he set up a thing called Chairma Meow TV, and we were soon chatting away to his live onscreen images. But this is not a typical experience for me.

And in fact the more I think about it, the more I tend to feel that I am not sure I want to keep repeating it. The more virtual people I ’meet’ the less I feel I either need or want the prop of the ’physical image’. I simple want to eat your brains (shades and images of Hannibal Lector at this stage please).

This raises of course a hell of a lot of age old mind body questions (also the question of Freud and neurasthenia comes rapidly to mind). OTOH it does get us away from another bag of age old questions about prejudice based on appearance, and physical identity, and this would have to be something positive.

So at the end of the day there you have it, this is what we are, ’brains’ under ’skins’. And in the internet we get to ’take off’ our skins, and long let it be. So off you go, start undressing right now. Naked brains, wow!

BTW this seems to be forming part of a trilogy of posts. The first of these would be the Warehouses of Brains post I did with Marcello Rinesi, and the last one will be the Triremes of Brains one (somehow I can’t get away from the idea of thousands of bloggers out there rowing away) which will appear when I get the time and the inspriation to write it.