Hypertrail. Herlander Elias

“’power of community'" (Bauman, 2011, 72). In reality, there is no such thing as “community” in the classical sense of the idea but rather clusters of people enabled by media technology. What we should pursue is real "togetherness" and "community-building" (Jacobs [1993] in Hoepker, 2011, 69). It seems that we have forgotten the real world and how things work since social media came up. We need to be a part of more than just "e-communities" (Lendrevie et al., 2010, 24), and while we as a media-based society evolve we forget that we are becoming glorified technopolites. Author Postman reminds us that "(...) the technopolite stands firm in the belief that what the world needs even more is more information" (1994, 60). Can we be sure about this? Do not we have already too much information? This society of simulations thinks that being hypermodern is a thing on its own. Let us not forget that “Modernity is defined by the power of the simulacrum” (Deleuze, 1989, 370) and this statement means that hypermodern times like ours imply that we live in a society where simulacra have been extrapolated. They are the norm and no longer the exception. So, whenever we look at online media, we should keep in mind that we are on the verge of the end of forgetting (Turkle, 2015, 337). We are all on The Truman Show now. Some of us do not know it yet.

      Another aspect that is part of the on-going revolution is that rather than disappearing screens have become omnipresent everywhere. The generalized Screen-centered State (Lipovetsky & Serroy, 2007, 23) is something we cannot escape. It is curious that McLuhan in the 60s spoke about the “Irresistible revolution” and that “we become what we behold” (1994). As a matter of fact, he noticed the beginning of a new wave of people. Alvin Toffler began where McLuhan left off and presented the theory of The Third Wave [1980], and now like Nicholas Carr sees it: “This new wave, he concluded, ― will be very disruptive” (2008, 40). Disruption is one of those keywords that float in our contemporary times. Some people, like Nunes, say that it is an artistic endeavor or a side effect of information theory, but we are sure that this “poetics of noise” (2011, 16) is getting widespread no matter what. For instance, Lunenfeld is a believer not in hypermodernity governed by speed, screens and brands but in “unimodernity” because everything is being leveled by the playing field of what he calls the “unimedia” (Lunenfeld, 2011, xvi). It means that by using the same media every person stands attached to the same time, the same epoch, the same customs and brands. It is a cyber-system unfolding and reaching out to us when we think that we are the one reaching out for it. We become what Gibson calls “creatures of screens” (2010, 155). Now we cannot live without them. These screens are not just screens. They are computerized devices in our pockets and smartphones are the apex of this reality. Meanwhile, as social media content distract the audiences “data has become more powerful than oil” (Gerd Leonard, 2013). Some vampiric corporations that only want to know everything about us are extracting data from us. These are very different times, indeed. “This is the experience of living full-time on the Net (...). We are all cyborgs now” (Turkle, 2011, 152).