Psyberspace

Joseph Campbell Foundation Website

I have been side-tracked from my writing again, making computer images using ”paint”. This is one of three that I quite like.

This weblog needs a reference to this guy, and this looks like a good summary: Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) One of the most thoughtful philosophers to approach technology from a deterministic, and some have even argued fatalistic [23], position is Jacques Ellul. Professor at the University of Bordeaux, Ellul authored some 40 books and hundreds of articles over his lifetime [24], the dominant theme of which has been, according to Fasching (1981), “the threat to human freedom and Christian faith created by modern technology” (p. 1). Ellul’s constant theme has been one of technological tyranny over humanity. As a philosopher and theologian [25], Ellul explored the religiosity of the technological society. Ellul became a Marxist at age 19, and a Christian at 22 (Fasching, p. 2). His religious faith evolved out of the Death of God movement and the response of the neo-orthodox theologians Bultmann, Barth, Niebuhr and Tillich. According to Fasching, the Barthian dialectic, in which the gospel both judges and renews the world, helped to shape Ellul’s theological perspective (p. 7). For Ellul, “that which desacralizes a given reality, itself in turn becomes the new sacred reality” (p. 35). The sacred is then, as classically defined, the object of both hope and fear, both fascination and dread. Once nature was the all-encompassing environment and power upon which human beings were dependent in life and death and so was experienced as sacred. (Fasching, p. 34).

Some light in an essay by Michael Shumate ©1996

In earlier cultures, before writing had been “taken in and become a habit of mind” (Bolter 1991, 36), considering it a technology was not so difficult. The Greek root techne included not only crafts we would immediately see as technological–masonry, carpentry, pottery–but also art, epic poetry, sports and other fields requiring specialized, developed skills (cf. Bolter 1991, 35-7, and Mitcham and Casey, 36-7). It should come as no surprise, then, that tracing techne back to its Indo-European root, tekth–variously defined as to put in hand, to weave, to build (of wood)–reveals that technology springs from the same source as words for not only such tangible things as textile and texture, but also such seeming abstractions as text and technique (Cf. both Barnhart and Partridge). Both halves of the vague, airy “creative writing” have settled back to earth so that some actual work can begin. As I said above, to write is not to create ex nihilo, but to form and shape materials at hand, to make texts with technology and technique. Mark L. Greenberg and Lance Schachterle, in a discussion of the etymology of technology as developed by Eric Partridge, state it thus:

“Literature conveys not concepts existing in a void, but concepts worked over to present a richness of felt experience. As Partridge’s Origins suggest, ‘texts’ in literature ‘put’ ideas ‘in hand,’ as it were, to frame knowledge within the dramatic fabric of experience, even as the technology of books and book production literally brings ideas ‘to hand'” (Greenberg and Schachterle, 16).

From Heidegger: introductory notes for the class

techne “The word stems from the Greek. Technikon means that which belongs to techne. We must observe two things with respect to the meaning of this word. One is that techne is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poesis; it is something created.

Brian Lake discusses the origins of the term thoroughly in Defining Technology Thesis available here Defining Technology (note, I saved the Word version). As it happens he also has a review of Castells there.

Review on Amazon Before closing the review, I should warn you that if you expect the firm theoretical founding, you should read first Castells?¯ ?®Information City?¯, as I mentioned in the review of the author?¯s another book, ?®The Internet Galaxy?¯. For example, Castells coined the term of ?®the mode of development?¯ to periodize the informational age. It?¯s not a new mode of production like the capitalism, but a new mode of development which is different from industrialism or Fordism. But anywhere is the trilogy, you can?¯t find such a theorizing. Without that kind of founding, the trilogy can?¯t avoid being read as interesting but bulky sketching out the current affairs. I find the notions here about “periodising” interesting. (The strange formatting is present in the review.) Note earlier link I made to Interview

Table of Contents the online version of Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community, now in its second edition.

This page is one of several on the site that offer a good reference to aspects of the digital environmnet. This page looks at questions of time, space and place in the digital era.

Good Stuff