If you (like I) grew up in the United States, or if you have lived a somewhat “mediated” life, then you are probably familiar with the chant “The Whole World is Watching”. You may not know that this chant is older than the popularized Internet, which only really took off once Tim Berners-Lee more or less invented the World-Wide Web (which is also commonly referred to as the “www”).
The germ of many of my posts here are simple ideas like this one, but then I do something a friend of mine once referred to as “pushing the envelope” — in other words, I play with these simple ideas and see how they interact with other ideas. That is what the title of this post is about. It is very easy to disprove that “the whole world is watching”. Rocks and dirt are parts of the world, and as far as I know they aren’t watching. And while they also might not be sleeping, they seem to be more asleep than they might be considered to be awake, let alone woke.
Many if not most life forms seem to practice sleeping regularly. Some philosophers consider sleep to be an almost ideal state of happiness and contentment. Being asleep seems to be quite unproblematical — yet at the same time, it sometimes seems to be somewhat of an insult to be asleep (for example in the face of the so-called “Protestant Work Ethic”).
Awareness and watching are closely related to concepts like being awake. Anti-capitalist movements like the Luddite movement were strongly opposed to machines which seem to not require regular sleep (yet which do indeed require some maintenance — and a WHOLE LOT of energy [1]).
Sleep is of course not simply an inactive activity. In recent decades, it has been discovered that sleep is a crucial activity which allows a lot of reflection to take place, providing a space for a wide variety of observations and ideas to be “sorted out”.
Let me also add that last week’s emphasis on publicity, public knowledge, etc. definitely also plays a role in my thinking about the aforementioned well-known chant (see “What is Publicacy + Why does it Matter?“). For example, I considered whether people lacking publicacy and / or literacy skills might be considered something more like comatose or perhaps suffering from something like “brain fog” or dementia. Images of zombies with eyes in fact open yet awareness (or perhaps “sentience”?) not obviously present went through my mind.
I have but one conclusion: People chanting “the whole world is watching” are definitely not telling something true, truthful, let alone the truth. This chant is much more dishonest than it is honest — if honesty can even considered to be a factor worth considering at all.
Socio Business blog 
3 comments