Fear and/or Fun

Link to my post for graduate seminar Questioning New Media at UCB: http://cnm201.blogspot.com/2011/10/fear-andor-fun.html

Ritual Objects and Mediated Selves

Burning Man

Hope is such a fleeting emotional category; have I found a way forward, or am I deluding myself?  I already feel as though this post might be more confessional than normal, so for the 2 people reading it, I apologize (and you're welcome) for that.  I was accepted as a PhD student at Graduate Theological Union about a year ago, an exciting prospect because it allows me cross registration privileges at UC Berkeley. And while I didn't start until this August, I've been in a sort of existential crisis since that moment. For those who don't know, my background was in religious studies, and theology and culture, and yet here I stand (sit) trying to find a way to study what I'm actually interested in: new media and game theory. My major: interdisciplinary studies allows me flexibility to transverse multiple fields, and yet I haven't found a way to connect it to religion. Until now.  I think. Maybe.
I've been thinking about the concept of ritual, the ways in which we perform the meanings that inscribe/describe our lives. Sort of a phenomenology over ontology if I may. I've been caught so long in the colonial category/fallacy of theology first, praxis second, that I missed that meaning always comes with (if not after) the object, practice, or space. So until next week, when hope is in short supply, and the hoops of a doctoral program overwhelm the telos, I've decided to try to build bridges between new media and ritual studies. A couple of initial thoughts are: 1. In what ways do we ritualize our media, connecting it to our identity, a la Jason Travis's Persona series? 2. How do social media sites like Facebook and Youtube provide us with ways to mark/make rites of passage? Is timeline a significant way to collect and display defining moments in our lives, or is it an intricate performance of self in a world that devalues corporeal interaction? 3. How do alternative communities (e.g. gaming communities or Second Life) create rituals and ritual-like environments that can both intersect and transcend "real life?" I haven't figured out much, but it seems that starting with the ritual, the performance, or the phenomenon is a more helpful way to begin.  I find the image of the burning man to be particularly insightful as I have burned down my religious expertise, and yet must perform/construct it anew and re-inscribe it with meaning. To be honest, I've had enough of deconstruction for a while, it's time to do a bit of building/assembling. Adios.

Distributed Infrastructures

New post for one of my classes:
http://cnm201.blogspot.com/2011/09/distributed-infrastructures.html

Link to a BlogPost in my "Questioning New Media" course at UC Berkeley

http://cnm201.blogspot.com/2011/09/to-support-or-not-to-support.html

Taking a Break

If it wasn't apparent from my last update, I've been up to other things the past few months - fatherhood, moving, background reading for grad. school, etc. I'm having a hard time finding the purpose in the seemingly selfish act of blogging - I don't find myself that interesting for starters - and I would love to continue in some communal version if anyone is interested. Until then, or some bhodi-tree moment where I find my opinion worth airing, I'll be silent for a while. Later,
Johnson

Roots and Limbs

So I've been meaning to write a review of Radiohead's new album The King of Limbs for almost a week now, and now any thing original I could have said has been written.  I used to rush to buy new albums of my favorite bands after school on tuesdays when i was in high school, yet very few bands still ellicit the kind of excitement in me that these elf-helmed spinsters of aural webs do.  My first impression of the album was that I was missing a piece, the 8 songs being only a chunk of a larger whole.  Theories have already popped up that the rest of the album will be released in May (for those of us that bought the box set, this would explain the fact that we will be receiving 2 vinyl records), and that the last track Separator alludes to this in the last lines where Yorke repeats, "If you think this is over then you're wrong."  Or perhaps my boyish fantasies have allowed me to get swept up in hopes for more of Radiohead's material than any 1 person should digest at a time.  A friend said that the album is a sort of combination of Thom Yorke's solo material and Jonny Greenwood's sountrack to There Will Be Blood, betraying the reality that Limbs is not the immediately accessible album that In Rainbows had been for the uninitiated listener.  Drums, percussion, and beats cycle into and over one another, horns (that were tuned only slightly since Life in a Glass House) layer under and around Yorke's wafting vocals, and emotional landscapes that somehow bridge despair and climax remind the listener of a time both past and future where we required more from songwriters than formulaic progressions and bombastic choruses.  The depth of Limbs requires work on the part of the audience, and many will give up before they find the inherent pleasure in uncovering layer after layer of sonic emotions that defy easy description.  Perhaps that says something about our culture's need for immediate gratification and accessibility... or perhaps I'm pretentious.  But it's most likely some combination of the two.

The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention

I finished chewing through "The Religion of Technology" today, a surprisingly meaty book written by historian David F. Noble.  I don't normally spend this much time enjoying a book, but I felt that Noble's research deserved a slow, methodical read.  His thesis - that scientific enterprises have gained authority and increased dominion through the use of religious mythology - is not a new one.  Yet his thorough study of the history of science and technology, shows a surprisingly apocalyptic tone that has pervaded leading scientists' rhetoric within 1000 years scientific advance.  The myth that we will return "mankind" to a prelapsarian state of perfection, immortality, and dominion through practical science betrays the masculine and monastic roots of the technological arts.  As a student of both the humanities and history of religion, I found the book enlightening in both its thesis and cursory introduction to many fields, but I have read a few reviews that felt as if Noble was wholly critical of the scientific enterprise.  My take is that Noble was criticizing the wedding of science and religion (specifically apocalyptic christianity) that was evident in the work of a many of history's great scientists and explorers, a practice that we could do with a bit less in science and technology.  Much of the modern technological enterprises still betray their Cartesian glorification of the mind at the expense of the body, yet we must remind ourselves that we live in a physical world that offers a potentially holistic existence if we can perhaps sacrifice some of our religious desire for transcendence.  The idea that our technology promises redemption from being human is an idea which smacks of both intellectual hubris and a desire to make prescriptive the objectively descriptive job of scientists.  An friend recently pointed out to me that the peer-reviewed methodology within the sciences tends to limit the amount of storytelling and myth-making that can happen, and Noble likewise cautions us with what has happened when the scientific community has not operated in this manner by buying the stories that they were selling.  Noble is a bit dated (revising last in 1999), and it seems to me that changes in light of the new scientific intelligentsia would probably be warranted.  It seems to this author, that in our current climate (read both weather and culture)it is not the scientists that need to change, but the wider society.  We tend to ignore the sciences unless they can be sensationalized, mythologized and then commodified for our consumption, and all too often it is reason and accountability that suffer.  Explanations like "you can't explain that," despite their hilarity, win out because they are delivered with pageantry, instead of objectivity.  There's more to say, but I'd like to let a few thought simmer for a while.