Digital technology is constantly changing, but the hopes and fears played upon its promotion are not. Such promotion represents the strategic articulation of two discursive fields, biology and religion, within the dominant framework of technological progress. Early enthusiasts emphasized cyberspaces capacity to enable individuals to transcend their physical bodies in a realm beyond the physical, and to remake themselves in a free, disembodied virtual space. The idea that special knowledge ensures some kind of transcendent salvation connects the Christian with the technological sublime. [C]yberspace was a repackaging of the old idea of Heaven but in a secular, technologically sanctioned format. Digital utopians are not in search of a godlike entity so much as a new self, reborn in a community in which bodies no longer matter, accessible to anyone regardless of earthly conduct or constraints. In the secular version, the seeker bears no responsibility toward the earthly realm he seeks to leave behind. This is a convenient kind of transcendence; the self is made flexible and free, not just from physical location but also from the mundane requirements associated with place or virtue. - Jody Berland (from the essay Cultural Technologies and the Evolution of Technological Cultures in North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space, 2009)
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 06:36:44 +0000
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