Now we weave in and out of a vast array of relationships, dancing across multiple spaces of connection, seemingly freed from the limits of body and earth. Attention becomes ethereal in a world of multiplicity. No longer do boundaries matter.
Along with simultaneity, cyberspace’s precursor was the realm of spiritualism, the nineteenth-century movement to communicate with the dead…
Now exploratory forays into unseen worlds are burgeoning into a determined desire to increasingly inhabit new dimensions…We spend increasing portions of our lives in alluring netherworlds that we have constructed ourselves…Are we perfecting ‘wired love,’ upgrading ourselves, grasping for transcendence on earth through our screens?…
Whether via mediums or cyber-games, past and current technologies share a stubborn certainty that utopian ideals of connection are within reach of explorers of these other realms.
-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, pp. 35-36
These quotes are basically a snippet. She fills in the argument with several examples to try to prove the point.
Those familiar with C.S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man is a good example) will have seen this point before – the connection of technology and ‘applied science’ to magic or spiritualism. Usually when I have thought of technology as a ‘medium,’ I have had Marshall McLuhan’s idea of ‘medium’ in mind. Maggie Jackson loads up the word with even more meaning. She has the same type of medium in mind as King Saul when he visited the witch at Endor (1 Sam. 28).
The issue here, as with most of what I’ve found so far in Jackson’s book, is that we need to wake up and open our eyes. It is not that technology is inherently evil; rather, the issue is that we need to realize that there are subtle, tacit elements at work that we tend to be unconscious of. A good illustration of that is a stanza from The Lonely Island’s song I Threw It On the Ground:
At the farmer’s market with my so called girlfriend
She hands me her cell phone, says it’s my dad
Man, this ain’t my dad!
This is a cell phone!I threw it on the ground!
What, you think I’m stupid?
I’m not a part of your system
My dad’s not a phone!
DUH!
It’s common sense, but we do tend to forget about mediation, we really do pick up a phone and think it somehow has become the actual person that we are talking to.
