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Ignoring What You Notice, Noticing What You Ignore

The challenge is a tricky one: We must create an anti-environment so that we can ignore what we notice and notice what we ignore.

-Mark Federman, The Cultural Paradox of the Global Village

So, yesterday I mentioned the idea of purposeful ignore-ance: cultivating a life that intentionally ignores some things so that it can focus its attention on others. This is where the idea leads. We do not want to ignore things to the point that we become completely oblivious to them. Rather, we want to notice what we ignore while being able to ignore what we notice.

Federman makes the point that this demands the creation of an ‘anti-environment.’ If you are submerged in an environment, you will either not ignore what you notice or not notice what you are ignoring. That entails complete assimilation on the one hand or blind acceptance on the other. The one means that you buy in completely to the environment. The other means that the environment smuggles in its trappings right under your nose.

Ignore-ance

…Everyone is vying for the most precious and valuable commodity to be sought – our attention. Think about it: Every advertiser, every potential vendor and company desperately wants your attention, and will go to great, and sometimes outrageous, lengths to obtain it. If attention is the most valuable commodity, our most valued asset, it may be said that the most valuable personal skill to be effective these days is ignorance, literally ignore-ance – the ability to selectively and appropriately ignore that which is irrelevant or merely distracting.

Mark Federman, The Cultural Paradox of the Global Village

Is your attention like a tax automatically deducted? Is it something you spend without thinking? Or do you consciously choose where and how you will spend it?

Are you able to ignore? That’s a great question, and it is certainly a discipline to be cultivated. I’ve never seen ignorance on a list of spiritual disciplines, but…

Does this mean that we will ignore everything? Of course not. But it means that we will be selective in how we distribute it. Everyone is selective with their attention in some ways to be sure. The issue is making a conscious decision about where we will focus it.

More to come in the next post…

Four Questions to Ask of Technologies

Building on the work of Marshall McLuhan, Mark Federman gives us four questions we should ask of any new technology:

The first probe is asked like this: What does the thing – the artefact, the medium – extend, enhance, intensify, accelerate or enable?…

A second probe: When pushed or extended beyond the limits of its potential, the new thing will tend to reverse what had been its original characteristics. Into what does the new medium reverse?…

The third Law of Media Probe: If some aspect of a situation or a thing is enhanced or enlarge, simultaneously, something else is displaced. What is pushed aside or obsolesced…?

And the final Law of Media probe: What does the new medium retrieve from the past that had been formerly obsolesced? This reflects the aphorism that, ‘there’s nothing new under the sun,’ and essentially asks, ‘How did we react as a society the last time we saw a medium with analogous effects?’

-Mark Federman, The Cultural Paradox of the Global Village

So, if you want to ask good questions and really think about a new technology or trend, you ask, What does it extend? What is the opposite it might reverse to? What does it displace? What does it revive from the past?

You can probably remember that with the acronym RODE: Revive, Opposite, Displace, Extend

Of course, McLuhan would probably tell me I know nothing of his work… (If you’ve never seen Annie Hall, please watch the video at this LINK to humor me).

Looking for the Obvious Things that aren’t so Obvious: Smuggling Wheelbarrows

In The Cultural Paradox of the Global Village, Mark Federman tells an interesting little parable. Allow me to paraphrase At some obscure bordertown, for years, a man crosses the border almost daily with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. Each day border security digs through the dirt looking for contraband; and each day it’s the same story – it’s just dirt. He’s filling up a hole. Years later, a retired border patrolman runs into the wheelbarrow man in a social setting. He’s just got to know the real story behind the dirt. “There’s no way you were just bringing dirt across the border; what were you really doing?”

The reply: “I was smuggling wheelbarrows, of course.” ______________________________________

The point of the story is that the obvious isn’t always so obvious. I’ve heard someone say that the Father Brown stories of G.K. Chesterton point out much the same thing. Father Brown is always asking the most basic question that no one else seems to be asking. This is how he solves crimes when others can’t. A Christian critique of our culture, whether it regards social-moral issues or media ecology, is going to have to come to grips with the fact that we are often missing the obvious. We need to train ourselves to look for the obvious things that aren’t so obvious. Often we’re so busy rifling through the dirt that we miss the wheelbarrow. Federman’s solution, based on the work of Marshall McLuhan, is as follows:

The challenge in achieving the awareness to notice the formerly unnoticed – what we call achieving ‘integral awareness’ of our total environment – is to create an appropriate ‘anti-environment.’

The fish in the water doesn’t notice the water. He has to get out of the water. The church should provide the greatest of all anti-environments. Yet, as we engulf ourselves in worldliness, and manage simply to mirror the world, what we are really doing is crippling our ability see the obvious all around us. We cannot critique the music of the world because we are too busy humming along.

The GOODS, the True, and the Lovely

Trade is all very well in its way, but Trade has been put in the place of Truth. Trade, which is in its nature a secondary or dependent thing, has been treated as a primary and independent thing; as an absolute. The moderns, mad upon mere multiplication, have even made a plural out of what is eternally singular, in the sense of single. They have taken what all ancient philosophers called the Good, and translated it as the Goods…

When God looked on created things and saw that they were good, it meant that they were good in themselves and as they stood; but by the modern mercantile idea, God would only have looked at them and seen that they were The Goods.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows

As I am transitioning from pharmacy life into the field of education, I see this more and more. We really are at a point at which we think education is simply about learning a trade in order to ‘contribute’ to society. We are more concerned about the goods than the good.

It is an absolute must in this environment that the church, and individual Christians, strive to be different. We must not look at creation and culture and simply see ‘goods.’

This is one of the reasons why I focus on technology to the extent that I do. Technology can kill the existential. I am not saying that it always does. I am saying that it is capable of doing so. It can rob the beauty of ‘being.’ It can turn a beautiful sunrise into a mere photo op. It can turn friends into icons on a screen. It can turn wonderful things into internet equity – that is, into goods.

It’s not just technology though. We can turn anything into goods. Spouses, kids, art, whatever. As we brush back against this, the idea is to see the innate good of things without seeing them as things to use as a means of gaining equity. Enjoy the world and life without putting it on our socially constructed eBays.

Anyway, it’s a great quote from Chesterton.

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.