Modern Reading

Modern reading, especially of the academic and professional type, is an activity performed by commuters or tourists; it is no longer that of pedestrians and pilgrims. The speed of the car and the dullness of the road and the distraction of billboards put the driver into a state of sensory deprivation that continues when he hurries through manuals and journals once he arrives at his desk. Like the tourist equipped with a camera, so today's student reaches for the photocopy to keep a souvenir snapshot. He is in a world of photographs, illustrations, and graphs which put the memory of illuminated letter-landscapes beyond his reach.


Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 1993

The Poetry of Life

Recently seen on the Media Ecology Association listserv:

 

They are giving out these for free over at http://burningbooksposters.blogspot.com/, or you can buy one of their other interesting posters.

via: Read Schuchardt

The Humiliation of the Word

Culturally, then, we are no longer careful, close readers of texts, sacred or secular. We scan for information, but we do not appreciate literary craftsmanship. Exposition is therefore virtually a lost art. We don't really read texts to enter the world of the author and perceive reality through his vantage point; we read texts to see how they confirm what we already believe about reality. Texts are mirrors that reflect ourselves; they are not pictures that are appreciated in themselves. This explains, in part, the phenomenon that many Christians will read their Bibles daily for fifty years, and not have one opinion that changes for the entire fifty-year span. Texts do not change or alter or skew their perspective; texts do not move them or shape them; they merely use them as mnemonic devices to recall what they already know.

--T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach: 

The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, 2009

via: Read Schuchardt

The Dark Night of the Soul

You're bored? That's because you keep your senses awake and your soul asleep.

-- St. Josemaría Escrivá, The Way, 1939
Via: Ruth Miller

Required Reading

Excellent essay in the NY Times this weekend. I'd quote it, but it should be read in its entirety.

Only Disconnect

By GARY SHTEYNGART

The Heresy(?) of Digital Media

In her book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Maggie Jackson eloquently, methodically, and compellingly explains the pitfalls of electronic and digital technologies as they become mass media in our society. Her study specifically focuses on the human sense of attention; consisting of awareness, focus, and judgment (215). She proposes that as a result of our often thoughtless acceptance of new media, we have culturally rewired our brains from once was once a print culture to what we may now designate a digital culture (167). Tracing technological artifacts such as the telegraph, the book, surveillance systems, and the fork as well as their place in history, Jackson discusses how their prevalence or decline helps us to understand the organization and values of our society.

In short, her book is a summary of how “the virtual shatters our conceptions of space…simultaneity redefines our notions of time” and “a life of perpetual movement reshapes our relationship to place and what it means to be in the world” (99). Interestingly, Jackson’s survey seems to also describe the development of certain dualistic and docetist tendencies within an American digital society. What does the internet have to do with docetism? What does the history of the fork have to do Cartesian dualism? Through Jackson’s review of our loss of attention, we can see the rise of these cultural commonplaces and their threat to the Church in our changing senses of space, time, and place.

First, let us look at Jackson’s history of our relation to space, time, and place. One of her most provocative assertions within the book is the idea borrowed from Darra Goldstein that “the progress of the fork traces nothing less than the development of Western civilization” (105). The fork did not enter Western life until around the 1600s, and Jackson posits that its “slow infiltration…mirrors Western society’s increasing valuation of the self-conscious individual” (106). Previously, meals in the medieval era as well as life in general were characterized by “an earthy, sensual communality” (106). The introduction of the fork marked a shift from closeness to our earthly surroundings, and Jackson documents our current move away from the fork towards “clean, processed, and unobtrusive foods” that resemble astronaut food (107).

Jackson looks specifically at eating in the medieval era, Victorian era, and the 21^st century, and these divisions show interesting parallels to media history, as the author would like us to realize. Marshall McLuhan, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, notes the difference between manuscript culture and print culture, in that print gave man “an eye for an ear” (27). In this concept, we see how the dominant medium of the age can reorient our relation to space, time, or place. With the introduction of print as a mass medium, “the fission of the senses occurred, and the visual dimension broke away from the other senses” (54). Accordingly, the printed book allows for a different view of the world, on that thoroughly shocks “oral cultures based on memory, discourse, and the interpretation of symbols, such as landmarks” (Jackson 157). Additionally, print culture creates the possibility of relating to the natural environment mediated through road signs, as we do today on our highway system. When print, as with any medium, becomes the mass medium of a society, it truly does create a new environment, a phenomenon that McLuhan explains in Understanding Media (13). Thus, when print became the new environment following the Middle Ages, new values arose, such as individualism and the acceptable use of the fork.

In the same way, Jackson shows that our leaving behind the fork is a sign of leaving behind print culture. Jackson characterizes the readers of today as people who “dance on the surface of a thousand texts, skimming over billions of words in books and magazines, myriad flashing ads, and across the mesmerizing web” (161). This is only possible through our information-wealthy digital technology, and our multi-tasking between e-mail, Twitter, blogs, e-books, and cell phones leads to a “head-down, tunnel vision way of life that values materialism over happiness, productivity over insight and compassion” (95). Moreover, just as print created a new environment and a new way of relating to the natural environment, digital technology as mass media has created the phenomena of “real virtuality,” wherein we experience the virtual world as real (47). While it is intuitive why our new environments become real to us, their effects in relation to our old environments remain significant.

With digital communication, “we can connect with almost anyone and at any time, but the connection is to the person and not to the place” (Jackson 54). As a result, our connection to place is weakened, as is our connection to time and space, since in “a boundaryless world … coming home doesn’t signal the end of the workday” (63). Though physically present at home, we may be working on our Blackberries or connecting with friends on Facebook, remaining emotionally and psychically absent. Accordingly, our idea of the virtual world as real makes sense, as it can easily become the primary way in which we relate to others. Yet, not only is it real; when it is the primary way we interact with others, it becomes more real than physical, face-to-face interaction.

Interestingly, Jackson makes the connection between virtual reality and spirituality, in that cyberspace is “a new, spiritual heaven” (51, see also: Is there a digital afterlife?). Just as mystical religions became popular towards the end of the Roman Empire, decline in Western civilization has sparked a “deep desire to find spiritual meaning in cyberspace” (51). Jackson goes on to consider the idea of virtual cemeteries and video games, but this connection between the virtual and the spiritual is quite significant in regards to digital technology and dualistic tendencies. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, dualism refers to the idea that the mind and body are radically different, and that “the mind cannot be treated as simply part of that world.” Characteristic of this way of thinking is Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, in which he defines himself as most essentially a thinking thing, but doubts all else. This kind of doubt betrays a lower value of the material world, and our digital technologies seem to be an extension of this philosophy.

Though Descartes did not explicitly think less of the material world (his meditations attempted to provide certainty for their existence), his assertion of cognition as the essential human quality is obvious in our digital technology. We neglect face-to-face relationships in place of mediated relationships, because relationships are a cognitive, psychological, and emotional phenomenon, having little to do with our bodies. Jackson notes by devaluing unmediated relations, “we are turning away from the messy, unpredictable, and real in life,” as “the virtual becomes the preferred reality” (66).

As our uncritical understanding of the world becomes more dualistic in nature, it would be foolish to think that our faith would remain unaffected. Particularly, the dualistic influence of digital technology evokes memories of gnosticism within the early church. Docetism is the idea “that the one (indivisible) Jesus Christ was completely and absolutely divine, and for that reason was not a real flesh and blood human being” (Ehrman 181). The heresy denies the human incarnation of Christ, positing instead that he merely appeared to be human. A failure to understand the reality of Christ’s incarnation has vast implications for the Church in the world, and Jackson’s advice is especially relevant to Christians unaware of the dualistic tendencies within digital technology.

As we have seen, our relationships to the earth, our food, and even each other are increasingly experienced in less inclusively sensorial ways, as our digital media habituate us to detachment. In response, Jackson promotes “a way to counter our detachment from the world, recover the strength of deep connections, [and] salvage wholeness in perception and thinking” (123). The way to achieve these ends is in recovering our declining skills of attention. For Jackson, attention makes us human, as it is the means by which we are embodied and made aware of our real circumstances (94). Attention is the key to learning, critical thinking, and self-control, and without any of these, we risk losing our ability to effectively and mindfully shape our lives (232-3). It is imperative that as Christians, we hear the urgency of Jackson’s argument, as our lack of understanding the formative effects of digital technology on our ways of thinking about the world is dangerous to our faith. We must reclaim our attention in order to become embodied followers of an incarnational God.

Works Cited

Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. Ed. John Cottingham. Cambridge: University Press, 1996.

Ehrman, Bart D. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament. Oxford: University Press, 1993.

Jackson, Maggie. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Ed. W. Terrence Gordon. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1994.

---. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.

Robinson, Howard, "Dualism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), .

The Specter of the Spectacle: Guy Debord’s Neo-Marxist Media Theory

What do we really mean when we call something “spectacular"? Was Avatar spectacular because of the morals one might take from the story or because of the best special effects ever to be featured in a movie? The dictionary says that spectacular means “beautiful in a dramatic or eye-catching way,” and Avatar certainly was! Guy Debord, however, in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, discusses what it really means for something to be spectacular, providing a much more penetrating significance. His incisive social critique surrounds what he sees as the defining characteristic of modern-day society: the spectacle. Similar to McLuhan’s focus on the transforming effects of media and Ellul’s all-encompassing view of the technological society, Debord’s spectacle reaches into all aspects of life and transforms them, acting as “a world view transformed into an objective force” (Debord 13). Debord’s concept of the spectacle is wide-ranging, and he explains how even in his time (before blogs, twitter, the internet, or even the personal computer) the spectacle has transformed society.

Debord’s definition of “spectacle” is peculiar, and he offers many definitions, corresponding to his use of the term as an all-encompassing descriptor of modern day society. Each definition contributes a new aspect or dimension of the spectacle’s existence, qualities, or transformative powers. The most general definition Debord offers we have already mentioned: the spectacle as a “world view transformed into an objective force (13). The world view provided by the spectacle finds its source in Western philosophy, the primary goal of which was “an attempt to understand activity by a means of the categories of vision” (17). As a result of the visual focus of the Enlightenment empiricists and other Western philosophy, modern society is now experiencing all the weaknesses of such an unbalanced understanding of the world.

This misunderstanding of reality has several implications for social relations, and social alienation is key to Debord’s understanding of the spectacle and society. For instance, “the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (12). The mediation of social relationships by the spectacle is a transformation of traditional social relations. As a result of the spectacle’s abundance within society, the world is divided into two parts: reality and the self-representation of reality, which becomes superior to reality (22). The spectacle then functions as “the common language that bridges this division” (22).

Imagine two families, one relaxing around a fire, the other relaxing around a TV. The first family, gathered around the fire, can talk about the fire, but for a more interesting conversation, they must draw from some other source; perhaps the story of the fish that got away or the bear that almost didn’t go away. The second family is provided the bridge of communication by the television. They might watch the fisherman on the Outdoor Channel catch a fish or watch a bear attack on the Discovery Channel, but their social relationship in this setting centers around the television and the stories it provides them. People often view watching television with others as a ‘communal’ act, and don’t mind the use of television unless it becomes isolating. Yet, Debord sees this kind of one-way relationship to each other via the screen as uniting what is separate, though “it unites only in its separateness” (22).

More than just screen technologies demonstrate the spectacle, as isolation underpins all technology: “all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system as it strives to reinforce the isolation of the ‘lonely crowd’” (22). In short, the goal of the spectacular society is “to restructure society without community” (137). This is evident in many different realms, particularly social relations and economics. Much of Debord’s book is a neo-Marxist discussion of the present-day situation of the proletariat, revealing how social isolation via the spectacle has prevented the development of a proletariat class consciousness and an ensuing revolution (89). The overthrow of the society of the spectacle is thus directly related to the proletariat overcoming alienation and revolting against the isolation of technology in a disalienating way (154).

Nevertheless, technology pervades our society, and the rapid increases in technology we have witnessed even in the forty years since Debord’s book have only further ingrained the idea of the spectacle as “the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep” (18). That the spectacle is the guardian of this sleep is evident within Maggie Jackson’s book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Certainly, her title is dramatic enough to compete with the intensity of Debord’s writing, and her writing reveals several phenomenon surrounding the topic of attention that reinforce Debord’s understanding of the spectacle.

A key idea within Jackson’s book that corresponds directly to Debord’s thesis is that “as the virtual shatters our conceptions of space and simultaneity redefines our notions of time, … a life of perpetual movement reshapes our relationship to place and what it means to be in the world” (Jackson 99). Jackson describes how our technologies have shaped us and our environment, and how this environment continues to reshape us. For instance, Jackson notes the very portable and mobile nature of modern-day Americans, quoting various statistics about dramatic increases in average annual number of miles driven and that “at any one time, three hundred thousand people are in flight above the United States” (101). The portability of our technology allows us the luxury of ‘staying in touch’ though we may be travelling across the world. Our social networking technology via the internet and other portable media devices certainly embody Debord’s understanding of isolation underpinning technology (22). Though we say we are staying in touch, touch is in fact completely unavailable via mediated communication.

Nonetheless, some maintain that virtual reality is still a form of reality, and Jackson documents the phenomenon wherein virtual reality is preferred to reality (66). This circumstance was obvious even forty years ago to Debord in his view of the division of the world into two parts: reality and self-representation (22). The young teenager preferring his video games to eating dinner with his family or the businessman preferring his Blackberry to his children both favor their particular virtual world because it is mediated via the spectacle. The teenager playing with his online friends and the businessman e-managing his coworkers are isolated not only from those around them but from those whom they are trying to communicate; they are united only in separateness (Debord 22).

Technology allows us to do more than just telecommunicate, it also allows us to “filter out noise, too-muchness, and others” (Jackson 65). Jackson gives the example of a DVD player in a minivan as a way for parents to ignore their children, and we see similar examples everyday: a wall of music via the iPod, the ability to ignore someone next to you in order to text someone across the room, and cell phone talkers at stores who are blissfully ignorant of anyone around them. What is the result of having so much ‘control’ over who we have to encounter? Jackson says that if we choose to filter out the actual world, “we become attentional wanderers, sated by the mirage” (67, see also Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows). This is not necessarily the only result. Though a constant attunement to the distraction-making technologies that surround us certainly divides our attention, Debord’s assessment of the control that technology gives us is much more incisive: “the closer his life comes to being his own creation, the more drastically is he cut off from that life” (24). For both Debord and Jackson, there is something in the incontrollable, chance encounters in life that are more real and not to be avoided. In fact, these encounters seem to humanize people. Is there really something in a chance encounter that humanizes us, so that when we are caught off-guard we are really more ourselves?

Works Cited

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1995.

Jackson, Maggie. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009.