I’ve had all things cyber on the brain since finishing Erik Davis’ Techgnosis:  myth, magic + mysticism in the age of information.  Davis’ work sprawls with examples of the interpenetration of technology and spirituality, from antiquity up to the bleeding edge (you can check out his web site here).  It’s worth a read for nothing else than to learn about groups like the extropians, some of whom hope to download their minds onto computers and live forever.

Although Techgnosis provides a thorough look at the spiritualities that have emerged in and around the computer, I found myself a bit bored.  No, I had not heard of half of the groups listed in Davis’ tome, but I already had the general idea:  neo-gostic/pagan-cyber mysticism (or something like that).  As I did some blog searching I found out that I wasn’t the only jaded kid with a Mac.  The anarchistnews has a nice survey of techies saying that people just don’t get hot and bothered anymore with visions of cyber utopia or apocalypse.  Robots will take over the world . . . we will all become cybergods . . . yeah we get it.  Can I get a little help with my mortgage?

This is not to say that the melding of wo/man and machine has stopped its steady advance.  No, but  it has lost its hold over many people’s imaginations.  Maybe that “new myth” smell has worn off.  I think we see a symptom of this in the rise of auto-tuned vocals in popular music, from Kanye to Bon Iver (on Woods).  While I personally don’t heart it, auto-tuning is a sign of our increased comfort with a cyborg aesthetic (PS you HAVE to see Bjork’s music vid, All Is Full of Love, for its cyborg aesthetic).  Think of it as a spellcheck for your pipes.  Now all we need is a robotic paparazzi (CCTV?).

What about you?  Still excited/terrified by computer technologies increasing hegemony?  Or is it all old news?

I’m no diehard technophile.  My relationship with technology is rather more ambivalent.  But, of course, by saying this I am basically saying that my relationship with myself is ambivalent.  Like it or not, I am plugged in.  From the electric light to the internets, “I” exist as part of techno-matrix.  As media theorist Marshall Mcluhan would have it, technology is any extension of ourselves.  And it is Mcluhan that I would like to marshall.  Because I am fed up with a broken record that has been playing in my Culture class for the past two weeks.

It goes a little something like this: 1) the prof brings up the pervasiveness of the internet; 2) one of several students raises his-her hand and whines about how facebook and paypal destroy relationships because they take away “face-to-face” interaction and replace it with selfishness and isolation; 3) Another student retorts that we can’t judge a technology as inherently good or evil, but we must instead evaluate how people use technology.

I would deploy Mcluhan’s thought against both positions.  To the technophobes:

The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense rations or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance (Understanding Media, 33).

It doesn’t matter if you don’t join facebook.  The medium of the internet has already altered our patterns of perception whether you like it or not.  The information superhighway exists and it has radically transformed the texture of society.  You will have to find another response besides “head in the sand.”

To the technophiles:

Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference.  It could be argued that these activities are in some way the ‘content’ of the electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light.  This fact merely underlines the point that ‘the medium is the message’ because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action (Understanding Media 24).

Yes, what you do with a technology matters.  But technologies can and must be judged in and of themselves, as each directly and uniquely effects human relations.  This does not mean that we make blanket statements about a certain technology (e.g. “roombas are pure evil”).  But it does mean that we evaluate the effects of a technology itself on the structure of human relations, instead of focusing solely on the human agents using (being used by) the technology.

I just had to throw this all out into the ether.  And thanks to medium of the internet this is something that I know I can do.  Are there any thoughts that will come back through the ether in response?