Book: Techgnosis by Erik Davis
Jan. 11th, 2006 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
badstarAnyone heard of it?
From the author's website:
"Ranging from the printing press to the telegraph, from radio to the Internet, TechGnosis peels away the utilitarian shell of technology to reveal the mystical and millennialist expectations that permeate the history of technology, and especially information technology. The book shows how the religious imagination, far from disappearing in our supposedly secular age, continues to feed the utopian dreams, apocalyptic visions, digital phantasms, and alien obsessions that populate today's "technological unconscious." In turn, TechGnosis also shows how the language and ideas of the information society have shaped and even transformed many aspects of contemporary spirituality. In the end, the book gestures towards a vision of "the network path": a global, pluralistic perspective capable of grappling with some of the forces that are currently tearing us apart: spirit and science, modernity and nihilism, technology and the human."
I'm on page 21, anf it's already spun my brain off into the stratoshphere...and all he's done is talk about mythologies of Hephaestus, Hermes and Thoth and culture in ancient Greece and Alexandria. I can't wait to get further into it. The writing is amazingly poetic.
Techgnosis
From the author's website:
"Ranging from the printing press to the telegraph, from radio to the Internet, TechGnosis peels away the utilitarian shell of technology to reveal the mystical and millennialist expectations that permeate the history of technology, and especially information technology. The book shows how the religious imagination, far from disappearing in our supposedly secular age, continues to feed the utopian dreams, apocalyptic visions, digital phantasms, and alien obsessions that populate today's "technological unconscious." In turn, TechGnosis also shows how the language and ideas of the information society have shaped and even transformed many aspects of contemporary spirituality. In the end, the book gestures towards a vision of "the network path": a global, pluralistic perspective capable of grappling with some of the forces that are currently tearing us apart: spirit and science, modernity and nihilism, technology and the human."
I'm on page 21, anf it's already spun my brain off into the stratoshphere...and all he's done is talk about mythologies of Hephaestus, Hermes and Thoth and culture in ancient Greece and Alexandria. I can't wait to get further into it. The writing is amazingly poetic.
Techgnosis
