How Not to be an Atheist. By Ben Pritchett
Ben Pritchett dives into the alphabet soup of Brian Rotman's Becoming Beside Ourselves and Joanna Zylinska's Bioethics in the Age of New Media and picks apart the jumbled relations between ethics, new media and subjectivity. These books share a concern with the way that ‘new media' are changing what it means to be human. For Brian Rotman, monotheism, and the belief in the soul, are ‘media effects', a result of the forcing of human nature to conform to the technology of alphabetic writing (a nature subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand). God and the soul, ‘ghosts', in Rotman's terminology, are the ideal users which the alphabet seems to presuppose, the kind of agent to which it appears perfectly adapted: but in fact human beings have had to adapt their bodies (even mortify or mutilate themselves) in order to become users of the medium. The ideal user is thus an imaginary projection of the medium, an impossible aspiration given our irreducible materiality. The attempt to transform ourselves into such ghosts causes a great deal of suffering. Now the alphabetic epoch is coming to an end. The rise of new media – particularly motion capture technology – will allow us to express ourselves in new and exciting ways, and the alphabet's decline will also lead to the extinction of God and soul. The ‘distributed human being' is the new kind of subjectivity that new media might give rise to. However, in a surprise twist, Rotman proposes that this will not result in an end to supernatural beliefs, but that we will find new, more benevolent ghosts to believe in, more appropriate to the world of new media. http://www.metamute.org/en/content/how_not_to_be_an_atheist _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
