Digital Scrapbooking: Subverting American Hegemony?

Digital scrapbooking reduces the past to its disjunct elements, omitting the unrecorded, or the unworthy, and what is left behind is organized in a precise arrangement so as to appeal to the senses. It mimics social interactions in this way, shaped by it, but there is a reciprocal effect; our environment is shaped, molded by our desires, and our desires are molded by our environment. Our activities stem from our desires, and our activities serve to strengthen our desires, a cycle of mutual support.

The danger lies in how we let it shape us, without even being aware of the process. Human beings are very suggestible creatures. So little of our decisions result from critical thinking and conscious analysis, so much is susceptible to subconscious manipulation. Through such techniques, these scrapbooks become our digital overlords and we don't even realize it. Allow me to explain.

The past is an elegant bundle of thick woven tapestry, rich with meaning that is inherent in the fabric, it relies only on a thinking being to experience it, and it is filled with their own experiences. The scrapbook takes the implicit process and constructs from it a shallow re-appropriation. It takes such rich fabric, and cuts it down, bleaches away the beauty and meaning, machine stitches it all back together and stamps out a design of a cartoon character and puts it on sale at Wal-mart.

Reviewing the past in such a revisionist manner breeds a mindset that only understands a sort of reversed causality. The present is no longer a product of the past, but rather it is the present that shapes the past. It is within our power to reach backwards, and change things, but by doing so we give up our ability to connect the present and past in a meaningful way. This disconnect has a snowballing effect, much like Darwin's theory of evolution. Small genetic alterations over thousands of generations begin to have a substantial effect, until suddenly elephants and zebras are no longer the same thing.

What does this have to do with America's position as a world power? As you are already aware, Digital Scrapbooking has been rapidly increasing in popularity, recently overtaking the Soap Opera, and showing no sign of stopping. The deep chasm it cuts between past and present will affect the coming generations with a multiplicative effect, until eventually we as a nation no longer have a working definition of causality, the world will plunge into chaos with such an irrational nation at the helm and after a period of darkness, some new people will rise to lead the world down the right path.