A Brief Hypothetical

Because so much of our understanding of humanity is theoretical, I’d like to begin this entry with a new twist on the very old hypothetical of if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it still make a noise.  If, for whatever reason, all human beings ceased to exist tomorrow, would the world wide web still exist?  Automated bots would still be sending hundreds of millions of spam emails to flood our inboxes daily, Farmville crops would continue to wither away under a virtual sun, and Google’s AdSense would still be trying to define you in the most marketable, mathematically-predicable ways.  And yet, would any of it matter?  As Lanier says, “a computer isn’t even there unless a person experiences it” (26).  Without us there to interpret and make meaning out of the symbols being exchanged and changing, are they still even real?

Even something as simple as black and white together can imply a vast array of meaning depending on our own interpretation, including good and evil, night and day, or east and west, just to name a few.