Networked Visual Social Realism

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello All,
Socialism supported realism for a long time in art and culture.  The
challenge from modernism everyone knows has brought low 'socialist' realism
that Socialist and Marx and Engels championed.  I've written before for the
Marxism list about Picasso and visual realism.  I've going to take this a
step further and describe some of the aspects of networked computing that
support visual realism and why that matters to the left.

The key distinction as far as seeing is concerned is the structure of a two
pathway system in primate vision.  Roughly corresponding to seeing stillness
and seeing motion.  The importance of this distinction has to do with the
language like aspects of seeing that the two channels compel us to admit to.
The magnocellular and parvo nuclear channels (essentially describing the
size of the ganglion cells carrying the two different nerve impulse streams)
have particular evolutionary histories that contribute to the shaping of
human cultural achievements.  The magnocellular channel carries the
essential information of seeing depth, and motion.  And therefore is where
we 'see' 'wholeness' in external events.  The parvo nuclear channel carries
color information, and ten times the impulse information as the motion
seeing channel, and is the primary conduit of 'consciously' seen
information.

Literate culture historically built the basis for capitalist society.  See
the French and U.S. political revolts against feudal Europe.  But the
clarity of writing is at the expense of understanding what is being felt by
the writer.  What do you think I feel at this moment?  The magnocellular
channel of vision is the more closely tied of the seeing channels to affect
(label meant to supplant the older word, emotion, with a more accurate
description of feeling).  If something moves suddenly that channel of vision
gains our attention much more quickly than does the parvo-nuclear channel.
The combination of seeing motion and feeling sudden anger or sudden fear are
clearly related to the fact that emotions developed in animals long before
the late primate expansion of the neo-cortex.

However, we tend to dismiss emotions as an influence on human thought
because of being a culture that relies upon writing systems to communicate
with.  As long as this communications is not closely linked to the moment
the inability to distinguish clearly what the person producing writing feels
is not a fatal problem.  But when communications get closer and closer to
the real moment it becomes more and more important to understand what each
other feels clearly and succinctly.

Seeing motion and feeling affect are therefore crucial elements of human
groups or networked communication.  We also need to have what is given to us
structured by how much we can absorb.  We need an ability to shift between
intense feelings which narrow the focus of attention to specific concerns in
what we see.  The capacity to present information that fits how well we can
put our attention to it is absolutely critical to any human doing that sort
of work.  It further more is critical to understand attention structure in
order to place any given human being in how they best can do brain work.
There is no absolute attention structure to human beings.  Instead for a
variety of reasons throughout their lives human beings ability to give
attention to something varies and fluctuates.  A great deal of which is
directly related to how we feel about what we see.

We 'share' attention.  In some sense human beings seem to come to a sense
that inside their brains as they think they can say something from the
networks in their minds that happens in someone else's mind.  Hypothetically
describing minds based upon what phenomenally seems to happen with persons
with a stroke, networks of neurons in a given person are roughly aggregated
into groups that describe "modules".  These modules when destroyed seem to
limit certain kinds of brain work tasks.  But they also are the basis for
what language does.  We are saying a word and perhaps a sentence which are
meant by the speaker to share the same general place in someone else's mind.

So language is by its' nature fundamentally a networked affair.  Language
arises in neuron network groups in human minds, and the general consequence
of sharing speech with people is roughly equivalent to how well any given
human being can socialize that information.  So for example, being able to
share information on the internet is far superior in terms of resources than
if we human beings merely shared information with our immediate family.  The
networked structure of pre-historical communications was simply a group of
humans of about 150 or so individuals that one knew one's whole life.  The
words one shared in the pre-history were not shared with other groups in a
general sense therefore the brainwork was limited by the extent of how many
people participated in sharing information or the experience that we call
language.  Whereas now it is clear enough that where a culture shares a
language we have the capacity in some sense to share brain work with anybody
in our language group which may be upwards of a billion plus individuals.

To summarize, if we take for example video games, a visual communication
must reflect the two channel visual system, seeing motion, seeing stillness.
Visual communications must reflect how we feel affect because once seeing
approaches real time and seeing something move in the world our affect
system comes to dominate how we see.  The structure of how we can see is
limited and we call the boundaries of seeing, or the capacity to see so much
in any given moment as 'attention' structure each person carries with them.
A woman being berated by a bullying male, a child being praised by a
teacher, see very different worlds depending upon the intensity and source
of their feelings.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor


~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.