UBUNTU: A South African word meaning “I am because of who we all are.”
There are many various rites of passage, of transcendence, by which an individual may pass from one virtual realm of being into another. Is “virtual” synonymous with “ spiritual”? Not always, but in a large sense…yes. There are many times within a person’s life in which he or she may feel entranced, locked, within a realm of being, and bound to it, as if it simply “ must be” and there is no other way.
Such is the nature of being human, one of the many great paradoxes of being human. We can imagine and dream, yet oftentimes we are compelled to stay within a frame of reference, to maintain a sort of equalibrium, and lock ourselves into habitual ways of being. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. It is not. Many of our daily habits and rituals, our systemic status quos, are structures for sustainance and order in our lives. Yet, sometimes, elements of these reliant systems take on negative connotations, preventing us from being more than we can, be, perhaps preventing us from realizing our hopes and dreams, or to just see things from a new and different perspective. Our daily structures and regularities, if they sustain us into the next day, stave off any fears of the new and untried, even if they are painful structures or regularities. It is what we are accustomed to, it is what we are used to. Nothing is neither wholly good nor wholly bad, and we balance the assets and debits of the structures of our lives perpetually, without giving much of them up, without standing back from the whole of our lives to pause, to reflect, to examine new alternative possibilities for being, for experiencing this amazing human life.
Even when we stay within the sameness of our day-to-day lives, we find novelties, experiences which alter our comfort zone and give us pause to reflect, to wonder, and to make a small change in our ways of thinking, of being, and behaving. The religious structures of human life which sustain so many billions of people for their daily lives provide a sense of being, a sense of belonging, a sense of meaning and order, even when tragedy and peril befall us.
In our virtual lives we step into the realm of expressions through a computer screen, which seems to magically express billions of yes/no, on/off electronic switches into mega-logrythms of software codes, elevated into programmable text, which is then designed and formed into programs and operating systems. These magical formulas are then implanted into the memory banks of microchips onto silicone circuit boards, “A million angels dancing on the head of a pin,” as the late Joseph Campbell once described the awe of a central processing unit, the main brain of a computer motherboard. In this day and age, there are literally hundreds of millions of data bits, orderly processing data through a computer’s central processing unit, often with dual, triple or quad cores of being. How all of these formulas can then be translated into text, images, sound and video is astonishing, yet the collective minds of many human beings have found the means to do so through thousands of years of scientifici and technological progress, kept alive and evolving through the work of millions of scientists, technologists, developers and programmers.
Let me digress for a couple of paragraphs into an extremely brief history of computers and software before coming back to the very humanness of our virtual rituals and behaviors, as we use them each day.
Bill Gates, once a very young man in the early nineteen-eighties, bought a patent from IBM for a “Disk Operating System”, or IBM DOS. IBM DOS had been the main operating system for the IBM Personal Computer or, PC. The first PC was built around a 64ghz central processing unit, had only 64 kilobytes of RAM memory, compared to several gigabytes in present-day computers. There was no hard drive in that first computer. Only a dual “floppy disk” system that would hold two portable floppy disks of 360 kilobytes each. Compare this with today’s new computers, that have a “terabyte” or more of storage space on modern hard drives. At the same time that Bill Gates bought the seed to his Microsoft fortunes, IBM also relinquished its patent on the hardware systems of the first personal computer. Thus, the explosive computer industry was born as tens of thousands of companies, developres, programmers and inventors begin to devise their own computer systems, “IBM clones” as the first few generations of personal computers, following IBM, were known. The size of processing and memory chips would jump a generation by months, not years. So quickly would the abilities and uses of computers and computer chips advance over the next few decades. Now, we have operating systems developed for smart phones held in the palms of our hands, each of which can hundreds, if not thousands, of more operations than the first IBM PC. We now have laptops, netbooks, tablets, smart phones, and many of our home systems are integrating computers with multi-media and Internet access into a massive singular system with unlimited capabilities for business, home use, entertainment, education and many other operations.
To explain sizes of computer memory: BYTE: Abbreviation for binary term, a unit of storage capable of holding a single character . On almost all modern computers , a byte is equal to 8 bits . Large amounts of memory are indicated in terms of kilobytes (1,024 bytes ), megabytes (1,048,576 bytes), and gigabytes (1,073,741,824 bytes). A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes. – from www.WEBOPEDIA.com So, a character would be a letter or number expression, composed of eight bits of memory.
These are now very real and intricate threads of the fabric of being human. We humans network together through Internet-based social networks and email. We perform many of our communication tasks, thought-processing tasks, business and personal tasks, through the operating systems and software of our computers. Indeed, these are now very human elements of our lives, and we perform ritual acts each day with them, as part of the structure of our lives. Much of what we do with our computers is formulated into our thinking by the very structure of the operating system itself. This operating system, like many other elements of daily human life, is learned enough for each of us to use for our needs, yet within the limited structure of the operating system format, and the programs that can be run on it. Ninety-nine percent of computers, more or less, come with Bill Gates’ Microsoft Windows operating system installed. Most of us who have been using computers for the past twenty or thirty years have become so accustomed to this Microsoft system, and invested so many years into using it, learning the upgrades and revisions, that we don’t even question whether or not there is another operating system available…other than Apple Computer’s Mac OS which exists only in an Apple computer.
Like most of the other elements of the daily lives of many of us, much of how our computers work is taken for granted. Most of us never consider that there might be other computer operating systems available to us, that might be easier for us to use, cost a fraction of what Microsoft and affiliated software makers charge for their programs, or cost nothing at all, and perform better, more securely, faster, to do what we would like our computers to do. To venture outside of the routines of our lives, to experience the novel and new, is to add to the richness of being, and even to enhance the routines of the familiar by stepping back from them as if we were viewing them for the first time.
To be continued…
