Mediacology

When I was running amok in LA as a punk rock teenager, the feeling at the time was to respond to the general condition of our society as a kind if mirror. Through our dress we would expose the hypocrisy of our repressed tendencies by adorning bondage and military clothes, and ornamented with scornful iconography. Our sonic response was of noise: pure, unadulterated feedback, distortion and wickedly fast rhythms that mimicked the ever-increasing speed of the technological world. Sadly, punk mirrored one other dysfunctional by-product of the world we rebelled against: substance abuse. I have long felt that punk—in its southern California incarnation at least—had become a surrogate family for the various broken homes many from that tribe had come from. By 1980, divorce was common and the psychoanalytical hangover of alternative therapies and cults had not cured the abuse manifested in drugs, alcohol and sex so openly celebrated in the wake of the ’60s counterculture. Unfortunately the family of punk had succumbed to social demons, and was never able to transcend its nihilistic tendencies.

Having been nurtured by such an in-your-face cultural rebellion, I find it strangely odd that I’ve come to realize that in our current mental, spiritual and media environment, the most radical act of our age would be one of silence. That is, unplugging and sitting quietly in reflection without various gadgetry wired to our minds. This should not be mistaken as a neo-Luddite call to disengage from technology. I feel that is impractical and counterproductive. However, it is possible to balance our addiction to media, entertainment and information with walks through the desert and contemplative meditation. Rather than create a false dichotomy between nature and technology, it’s better to mindfully >engage the process, and utilize it as a kind of fulcrum that enables us understand how our minds work. As we externalize our brains, as I think our current trend in networked computing is doing on many levels (not replacing our minds, but rather enhancing and mirroring them), let’s use this datafog as an object of meditation.

Reflecting on sound during insight meditation is an excellent technique for understanding how sensory input is merely phenomena. It comes at us, and we reconstruct it through memory pattern into some kind of structure that makes sense to our minds. Likewise, we could encounter the torrent of infotainment similarly. Hard to do, considering that on many levels devices like television are ultimately “asleep machine,” yet we engage it fully with our sensorium. Multimedia is tactile: it touches our eyes, our ears, our nervous system. It is a stimulus probing the pleasure centers of our brains.

Contrary to the practice of meditation, which is designed to wake us up, the fact that corporate coffee joints are popping up like opportunistic molds on every urban street corner points to our cultural sleepiness, Dunken Donuts’ ad campaign, “Bring yourself back,” being the most pointed mantra of our caffeinated condition. And indeed, we do want to “bring ourselves back.” Hotel beds have more and more pillows, and fluffier comforters to envelop us into a sleepy cocoon for television. Our street clothes are reduced to pajamas. We threaten to become a world of sleepwalkers.

I feel every species on earth is praying for us to return to a unity between our hearts and minds. We are so focused on nervous systems that we forget that ultimately as humans we simply want to love and be loved. Although our conditioning restricts us from achieving that simple goal, I do believe the average person wants to live in peace and end their personal suffering. My goal is not to prescribe but to diagnose the situation. I’ve learned through personal experience that each person has a unique path, and as an educator one learns very quickly that students only truly understand things through direct experience. Thus one of the dangers of getting information in the mediated world is that it’s all second hand. With media technology, the only direct experience is that of physically engaging the form of media. Thus I doubt anyone has true, soul-shaking “ah-ha” style epiphanies while watching television; however, I do recall seeing certain works of art that have blown me away and changed my view of the world.

My theory is that the moment that we discover our hearts shapes our path. It could be through yoga, an ecstatic Jesus ho-down, a drum circle, bonding with an ancient redwood, or through Buddhist meditation. Who knows how and why the conditions of a specific moment become the can opener that pries the heart’s shield open. But it can and does happen often. It’s quintessentially human.

What I believe as ultimately true is how human aspiration is described in a certain Hindu tale. To paraphrase, in it Vishnu, who dreams our universe into existence, confronts his wife Maya with a problem. He is “bored.” Vishnu asks his wife to make a game for him. He wants to be entertained. So she chops him up into billions of little pieces and scatters them across the universe. Then she says: “OK, now go find yourself.”

So here we are playing what often feels to me a kind of galactic video game. The game is to find ourselves, and there are so many creative ways to do so. What interests me is how media and technology contribute to this process. In what respect are we “emerging”? To what affect are all the little pieces scattered about by Maya being self-organized? This, I believe, is fun. Let the games begin.