Timeline of Ideas or Incarnation of Meanings of Technology
From Noble's The Religion of Technology to Heidegger, we travel through the landscape of ideas on technology. WHat is technology in relation to one's being, in relation to humans quest for knowledge? How do those ideas manifest themselves within the cultural discourse?
Noble illustrates a historical analysis of ideas, or rather ideological history of technology. Quest for knowledge to transcend the reality has been manifested by the means of technology. Religious underlying basis for this quest is a some sort of justification for technological development. Humans have been given this divine role to dominate nature in order to gain true knowledge of its laws to attain transcendence. As we can see they have been truly successful in its endeavor...windmills construction incarnated into aviation machinery, alchemy has been turned into chemistry, taxonomies into human genome project...secrets of the heart of matter into nuclear engineering..and the list goes on and on as we keep living on the planet, the global sacred.
As life changes with new technological tools, so does the culture and society. Once sacred becomes profane in this dynamic universe of meaning. But sacred attains new meanings. And these new meanings constitute new type of relationships. We move from spheres to globes as it says in Global Sacred, from reciprocal relations to abstracted communications. Digitization of human consciousness has occurred. The image of the globe as an object in empty space gives us a new meaning of life.Now we can look upon as opposed to look from within. Boundaries have been re-shaped and re-defined. We are now in,on, and above this new global sacred. Image of the planet is like a vaccine for altered states of mind and imagination. It is open for interpretation. Whatever we think life is, or life is about, we impose upon this image to gain entry into this global sacred. For example, corporations took this vaccine, Now they are able to move their commodities all over the world to gain efficiency and profit. Global Sacred is now a global sacred economical premise that rules globalization. Environmental movement has also taken this vaccine. Now we all care (or at least pretend to care) about global warming because we all share this global space and each of us is responsible for life per se. Global sacred has been put into a global agenda of environmental management, politics, education, economics...'modern consumer culture exploits the ambiguity of global images,completing the sign with its own, brand-specific signifers" (Szerszynski, 167).
Sacred is what defines boundaries of unknown, mysterious, and yet, familiar and domestic..It is not transcendence but empirical reality that needs to be taken into the account.
Indeed, global sacred is a new leap forward towards new consciousness. Harraway would call it an expansion of cybernetic, a hybrid of human and machine, nature and culture...Agamben would probably call it closed openness, where humans are faced with the reality of probability, yet, uncertain and finite. Noble would probably point out that the image of the globe does represent american missionary ideology, puts them in a position of a provider of meaning...a control base for justice...Nevertheless, it is sacred...Technology has brought sacred meaning to the whole notion of life.
We as members of a society also contribute to this meaning-making process, to the whole of cultural machine (or anthropoligcal machine). We participate in it, we get influenced by its constructed reality; we take part of its constructive processes, we become a part of it..we are it..I would like to end this blog with Donna Harraway's quote:
"The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate us or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries, we are they"..(in Cyborg Manifesto..)