Center for the Study of Digital Life
= "CSDL is a not-for-profit strategic research group dedicated to understanding the effects of digital technologies on civilizations -- both East and West".
URL = http://www.digitallife.center/
Contextual Quote
1.
"We believe that DIGITAL *retrieves* aspects of a "medieval" SCRIBAL sensibility – radically different from what happened under PRINT conditions (which opposed SCRIBAL) or in the following ELECTRIC environment (which opposed PRINT). In fact, humanity is now in uncharted waters – threatened with a maelstrom that attempts to pull us downward. Whether humanity survives this threat has now become a vital issue. The impulse to turn us into machines began with the effects of the Printing Press and ELECTRIC has been relentlessly submerging humanity into "nature" for most of our lives. The Center is committed to discovering whether a new SCRIBAL sensibility can reverse these trends. We are discarding Ong's "Secondary Orality" in favor of a "Secondary Literacy." The Word has never been so important for human survival."
2.
"In recent years, the Center for the Study of Digital Life has stepped up and taken a more public posture. We are now a sizable cohort. We've published articles, given interviews, taught summer schools, and, it seems, attracted some attention. Timing has a lot to do with this. That said, however sharp one's observations might be, for them to have an audience, the preparations must be laid. The popular subconsciousness has to be ready to consider "outlying" thinkers. Technology has to do its destabilizing work. New paradigms must be welcomed (or feared). Shocks can then turn into heightened efforts at awareness.
- Mark Stahlman [1]
Description
Mark Stahlman:
"Throughout the 20th century, many considered the relationships between our use of language and our behaviors and attitudes. New languages were invented -- such as Esperanto and Basic English -- in the hopes that they would become "universal" and, as a result, bring about a more harmonious world. Others, such as Alfred Korzybski with his General Semantics, proposed that by changing our use of language, we could become "sane" -- individually and collectively. Still others, including the celebrated Noam Chomsky, searched (in vain) for a Universal Grammar, with which a far more active intervention into "controlling" human behaviors might be mounted. Some even devised schemes for "self-brainwashing," such as the celebrated Neuro-Linquistic Programming.
However, with the crucial exception of Marshall McLuhan and his colleagues at University of Toronto, these efforts were uniformly ignorant about the effects of technological environments -- typically presuming that "language" is simply a matter of written/spoken symbols. At the Center, we believe that this entire field of inquiry needs to be fundamentally re-examined in the light of digital technology and its effects on humanity.
Walter Ong, at one time a graduate student of McLuhan's, proposed that electronic media produced a state of "secondary orality" in those habituated to it use -- effectively recalling the mental state of humanity before the invention of writing/literacy (circa 500BC) in what some have called the Axial Age. We are convinced that digital technology does something different and suspect that this might be understood as "secondary literacy" -- recalling the sensibility which developed in the "middle ages" as learning shifted from oral to become literate under manuscript conditions.
These considerations open a vast array of research opportunities with fundamental consequences. The Center intends to vigorously explore these areas of research."
(http://www.digitallife.center/index.php/projects/tech-language)
Discussion
Mark Stahlman:
"We believe that
- DIGITAL *retrieves* aspects of a "medieval" SCRIBAL sensibility –
- radically different from what happened under PRINT conditions (which opposed SCRIBAL) or in the following
- ELECTRIC environment (which opposed PRINT).
In fact, humanity is now in uncharted waters – threatened with a maelstrom that attempts to pull us downward. Whether humanity survives this threat has now become a vital issue. The impulse to turn us into machines began with the effects of the Printing Press and ELECTRIC has been relentlessly submerging humanity into "nature" for most of our lives. The Center is committed to discovering whether a new SCRIBAL sensibility can reverse these trends. We are discarding Ong's "Secondary Orality" in favor of a "Secondary Literacy." The Word has never been so important for human survival.
The previous ELECTRIC environment generated a bias towards "globalism," as reflected in the institutional structures of the United Nations, WTO &c – ultimately based on the geostationary satellites with which we communicate. Futher examples falling under the 1950s heading of "Family of Man" have led to global wars and widespread economc dislocations. Those institutional structures are no longer driving world affairs and globalism has already collapsed, as events in Afghanistan &c illustrate.
Under DIGITAL conditions, new structures have developed which we call Three Spheres: East, West and Digital. These spheres all have global reach and correspond roughly to those whose literacy is organized around three different forms of writing:
- Logographic
- Alphabetic
- Code
The combination of a new set of values and a new global organizing principle appears to many as a surrender to sweeping chaos. Current elites have been violently cut adrift. Some even hope that "Complexity Theory" will help us to plan a new course. "World Order" has become a Humpty Dumpty that has fallen off the wall, with all the king's horses and all the king's men unable to put it back together again. The generation now in its 20s is the first to have been shaped by these new technologies and their drive to has become a quest little understood by their parents.
Each of the Spheres has a different set of values it is retrieving, since a unified ELECTRIC global trajectory is no longer in place.
- The East Sphere is seeking a recovery of "The Way" – as reflected in the upsurge of interest in Daoist principles &c.
- The West Sphere is struggling to return to a public embrace of "The Virtues" – as reflected in the wide-spread employment of "virtue-signaling" and what some call the "New Puritans."
- The Digital Sphere is hunting for "The Spark" of divinity which they hope can be transfered to cyborgs/robots resulting in immortality – popularly summarized as the "Singularity" and the pursuit of a "Transhuman" rationalization.
All three of these new value-sets now must be understood to avoid the dangers of a "three-body problem."
(https://www.digitallife.center/index.php/digital-life)
Spiritual Strife in the Digital Age
Mark Stahlman:
"Two men who never met, yet had remarkably common views about the world and massive impact in their own realms are finally being brought together -- in their own words. The Center for the Study of Digital Life (CSDL) has mined the works of both men to shine light on their answers to three fundamental questions:
- 1) Q: Do we still live in the Modern World?
A: No, we are already in a radically new paradigm.
- 2) Q: What caused that to happen without us noticing?
A: New technologies bring new sensibilities and new sciences.
- 3) Q: What do we do about it?
A: This is spiritual warfare; form a Spiritual Council.
"Marshall McLuhan and Fr. Romano Guardini ... saw this coming!
McLuhan called himself an "apocalypsist" -- meaning that he was "revealing" what we need to know about media environments. Romano has been called the "Prophet of Lake Como" and also anticipated the dramatic effects of technology on society. Both had radical insights that we now need to understand, as we navigate our new Digital landscape."