What does “cyberspace” or “online” mean today? What is your googlability (“googlability”)? (“Googlability” is the ease with which information is located on the Internet, often through the search engine Google.). How much information about you is accessible in the network? Despite cyber-utopian dreams, such as Ray Kurzweil's, you have not yet fully digitized and immortalized yourself (Kurzweil). But society is moving pretty quickly in this direction. Not only does digital information about the physical world grow at exponential rates, but everyday space also intersects more and more with digital information. Objects that are embedded with their own information, that Bruce Sterling calls “spimes”, will soon suck much of this digital information back into the physical world like a sponge (Sterling 76). Whichever direction digital information is flowing, it grows more pervasive.

Our arrangements of media also move closer to our senses. It is a shift from environmental arrangements to more sensory arrangements. Not that humans haven't already buried their senses. Television, for example, does quite a good job of saturating headspace, even if you don't have a Phillips, widescreen TV with ambient lighting and digital surround-sound. There are many examples of media that engulf our access to the world, and they are even moving steadily into the body, turning us into cyborgs. Increasingly, medical devices like pacemakers and robotic prosthetics replace the mechanics of the nervous system (Haraway 153). I bring these changes to your attention, not to frighten, but to consider their relevance to our understanding of the mind.

It may appear that humans know more and more (i.e. progress), but what if media and culture are simply creating an equally stifling buffer to the evolutionary system that shaped the mind? Media can be seen as reality delivery systems that define perception in a neurological kind of way. The more this becomes part of everyday life the more we need to be conscious of the arrangement of media. More open and flexible media arrangements leave room for interpretation and exploration, which humans have evolved to do so well. Understandings of how the mind functions will provide the best clues to designing these media arrangements.

In “The Flocking Party” I create just such an arrangement. I do this in a few ways. One, already discussed, is the narrative structure of the story. It is a narrative environment, which does not pump data into the mind. It allows them to consume this data in ways that make it meaningful, useful, and engaging to them. In another way, I refer to the mind as a subject of the story. The narration continues to return focus back on the mind and how it changes when the engineered virus, “Hebbets”, is introduced. It increases the associative capacity of the mind. “Hebbets” is one prop that is used to stimulate consciousness of the arrangement between neurology and media. It stimulates both fear and excitement about the plausibility of such a technology.