Saturday, September 27, 2003

On Media, Mediums, and the Ultimate Transformers..

"If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spirittual form of information seem to make the entire globe, and of the human family, a single conscious?" ...from "Understanding Media", pg. 61.

These words of McLuhan might help answer the unspoken question that I feel is floating around out there under the currents of our class blogs, "Where is it all leading towards"?

"A single conscious", he says. That was mind boggling for me when I first considered that idea. What would that imply? No individuality? No privacy? Determined by the masses? My deep sense of self-indpendence suddenly felt threatened. So I dug into the reading, or maybe readings. As you can see from the introduction of my blog page, it led me into the exploration of the cocepts of language, philosophy, history, mythology, and eventually into... quantum physics (that took a couple of years to digest), holographic principes, Chaos, fractals, and now "blogs"!!

After considerable time (like some 5 years), it didn't scare me so much anymore. What I discovered was that - hey, there're all saying the same thing! Only with different vocabularies.

It was all about "making whole", like in "healing", "single consciousness", "holograms", "all-in-one, one-in-all", "the undifferentiated ground of being", "the implicate order"... I'm sure all of you have your own words to add to this list!

Now if electricity is the medium, therefore "the message" - the transforming agent, as McLuhan says...how is it transforming us? That's being discussed in class: blogs and attoseconds (was that the correct word?).

I go back and forth between re-reading McLuhan's words, to the internet, to my musings on the blogs...and suddenly, it dawned onto me...Well, aren't we, human beings, the ultimate media, the constant transforming agent in all of this? We've transformed our environment through the different medias we've created. Whether it was language, philosophy, science, wheels, cities, the printing press, the horrifying inhuman factories, machines and electriciy, megabytes and blogs....it transformed us in return. So we come back to the question again. What are we transforming into?

We transform our environment, our environment transforms us...It goes on and on, looping and re-looping into itself. Doesn't that ring a bell somewhere? Anybody "see" the symbol of the Tao here, that half black, half white within the circle with the opposite colored dots within it?...The dancing Kali who tramples on the dead as she dances the dance that creates life? The hermaphrodite surrounded by a wreath in the "World" card of the Tarot?...The non-ending dance of creation?

Listening to myself preparing the composition of my blogs, I am suddenly attacked by a feeling of depression, of inertia. It does seem to be futile... (Bernard, I love this word you dropped in our class blog) ...in the sense that it all goes round and round in a circle and comes back again to the beginning. What is the point of effort if it all goes round and round and you are stuck at the beginning again? If we are all going to be a single consciousness, why try to be different or the same? Makes me not want to do anything, which would eventually defeat the purpose of taking the course. So I came back to finish this 2nd blog.

I took the course to get out of myself, to meet people whom I could share my ideas with. But if everybody is more or less saying the same things, just in their own unique different ways, am I learning anything new? I have to confess. It seems to be the hope of hearing something new that lures me on. Well, it did lead me to the class. And now I have the blogs... lots of opportunities to share my ideas. Therapy, Bernard? It seems so. But what is the difference between putting yourself out there in cyberspace so you can see yourself better, and trying to find the 'ideal relationship' through exchange of ideas - which is also a projection of yourself in the other? Anybody want to make a psychological assessement of that?

Discuss

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