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Technological Mysticism and Mediation

But what is this omnipresent space we increasingly inhabit?…What is not always apparent is how our time in this disembodied, alluring, liberating world changes us and especially influences our relations with each other…Cyberspace, in science fiction writer Williams Gibson’s words, is a ‘consensual hallucination,’ more so than any of the alternative worlds man has ever created – from Greek mythology to the layered slices of the medieval heavens to film or theater. We aren’t just mulling and imagining our new realms. We live in them.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, p. 48

I once heard a comedian (I can’t remember who) begin his set with a joke that goes like this: Anybody here believe in telepathy? Raise my hand.

I think the term ‘telekinesis’ would actually be more fitting. But we’ll run with it.

At one time the idea of controlling other people or objects from a distance was sheer telepathic spiritism. Now we can unlock our front door or adjust our thermostat from another continent. Anybody believe in telekinesis? Turn the heat up from across town.

The idea of reading someone else’s thoughts was mystic nonsense. Now it is an online reality. How many websites exist today that allow us to read the random and quasi-private thoughts of others. Anybody believe in telepathy? Interpret my secret emoticon 🙂

The idea that we can have certain knowledge of the future was once wrapped up in divination. Now we have meteorologists who go to school for that sort of thing, and the certainty of science about the destinies of far off glaciers. Anyone believe in divination? Predict a hurricane.

Once the idea of locking people into image induced trances was mesmerism. Now it’s simply entertainment. Anyone believe in mesmerism? Get me to sit in front of your TV screen for three hours without getting up.

A big takeaway from the first two chapters of this book (for me) is the picture Maggie Jackson paints of the fantasy, spirituality, and ethereal nature of our technology. If you follow that line of thought you will come to the conclusion that we live in an age of mysticism and plasma mediation. It is mystic in the sense that we experience the presence of others who are separated by distance without giving thought to the mediation that makes the experience possible. It is mediated by plasma in the sense that screens become the gateway to other worlds – she calls this omnipresent space.

We like to think that our species is evolving and becoming more rational and scientific. In reality we are just using different forms of mysticism and different means of mediation. I am not knocking it wholesale. The issue is that folks need to wake up to the fact that there’s more going on here than plastic, plasma, and science. I find that more and more people are interested in mysticism these days. But it seems that few are giving attention to how ‘media ecology’ if involved in such a trend.

One plus of this line of thought is that, I think, it can be helpful in teaching the importance of mediation; or, at least, it could serve as an illustration of the need for mediation. Eastern religions and Catholic Mysticism have tended to lead to the idea that we can have direct, unmediated experiences of the presence of God. But, as my former pastor used to say, heaven is the presence of God with a Mediator. Hell is the presence of God without one. God has chosen to reveal himself and allow us to experience his grace and love and presence through means and mediation.

Technology and the Loss of Depth

Maggie Jackson quotes Sven Birkerts:

Inundated by perspectives, by lateral vistas of information that stretch endlessly in every direction, we no longer accept the possibility of assembling a complete picture…We are experiencing in our time a loss of depth – a loss, that is, of the very paradigm of depth.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, p. 42

If you stretch the ocean out far enough it eventually becomes shallow. If that is what we are doing via technology, it should be no surprise that our thinking should follow suit. Cue Portlandia’s portrayal of the Hipster version of depth HERE.

Technology as Spiritual Medium

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.

“The Glittering Screen of the Night Sky”

I want to begin a series of posts on this book (linked below) with one of my favorite quotes so far:

Networks. Think of them as the ever-shifting constellations of relationships we inhabit on earth and in the ‘glittering screen of the night sky.’

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, p. 53

The picture of a black computer screen as ‘the night sky’ struck me. Let me rip it out of context and follow a rabbit-trail.

Indeed, for many, a black screen is the closest one will get to looking at a night sky; and the flickering pixels serve as substitutes for the stars. There is a new astronomy for laypeople: the planets are websites, the constellations are networks. What is the sun? You tell me.

Some might say that this is a wonderful development. We don’t even have to go outside.

I do believe I feel a poem coming on this one.