"Excerpts From a Social Seismograph" - Editorial Contribution

Ever Increasing volumes of information are confronted by insufficient attention spans. A civilization built upon eggshells cracks beneath the tiptoe steps of the slightest change. The foundation breaks, and the vibration overwhelms any chance you have of hearing the air escaping from your lungs. Time and resources dry in the palm of your hand, and what can you do?

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
Th blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

- W. B. Yeats
”The Second Coming” 1921

The more that gets made, the more resources necessary. But before you go grabbing things for yourself, relax, there is no shortage, it’s just that resources need to change. We don’t live flat, no matter how big or how small you look at it. The mathematics an geometry we learned in school no longer help up make sense of our environment, when things like simultaneous thought are so prominent that one can longer accept coincidence and probability as sufficient explanation. Music sharing, although almost shut-down by personal greed and a claim to intellectual property, increased music sales for the very same people that tried to shut them down, and more.

Open-minded, open access, open source, is accountable, reliable, honest, and anyone can verify that. Sure we all want credit for our work, but greed has turned it into an infringement, rather than a building block for a new type of invention. In an ownership container, there is no room to expand.

If there was more to hear, would there be more attention to hear it? The intensity of our listening fluctuates with the desire for knowledge, and adapts with the ability to comprehend. More and more the sound of bi-polar ideologies snowball themselves into spending forces, as if in battle… to move the wreckage.

There is life in something that breathes. The rhythm of the Earth reverberates through the rocks of history, and the rhythms of history vibrate through the chords of men and women. We create from an uncountable, limitless number of voices, and formless songs; it makes compiled foundations of ourselves, make before the eyes of the world.

Written by Julianne Claire Chladny, for the April/May issue of WOO Magazine, 2005, as the Editor-in-Chief