Can’t get enough media+religion in your life? It’s OK, neither can I. Luckily, the Center for Media, Religion and Culture has launched a “Third Spaces” blog, investigating timely religious representation in the media. Look for yours truly in a couple posts already. Here’s the link: http://thirdspacesblog.wordpress.com/
Last week, I successfully defended my thesis, titled [see long and winded title of this post]. I think this explains my two-month absence from tumblr. I want to eventually put the entire paper all online, but with its 91-page word count, I’m still considering my options. Hopefully, once I’ve relaxed and stepped away from the paper, I can revisit it with fresh eyes and edit it down to an article-length piece. For now, here’s the first page:
Religion online, one of the newest form of religious expression, provides an open and unlimited arena for information, dialogue and community, for religious practitioners, the spiritually curious, and everyone in between. Alongside other religions, Buddhism has found its place in the virtual world. Digital representations of Buddhism are present in personal blogs, throughout so- cial media sites, and in institutional websites. Anyone can download audio files of dharma talks, view instructional meditation videos, or read illustrated biographies of the Buddha. The site BuddhaNet offers a searchable “World Buddhist Directory,” Tricycle magazine’s website features articles on how to be Buddhist in a business-centric world, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama posts video lectures on transnational compassion. Many of these representations lack an anchor to any specific Buddhist tradition or institutional referent, even material accredited to traditional teachers.
One of the more interesting examples of Buddhism online is the expanding market of smartphone meditation applications (apps). Especially trendy in the West, these mobile apps pack Buddhist practice into the framing of a smartphone. And while this new medium features interactive components that other mediums lack, such as instant, quantitative evaluation and easy mobility, the smartphone medium and the app itself removes institutional framework and ritual elements of traditional Buddhist meditation. The apps offer portable meditation practice, without commitment to a religious organization, adherence to regular practice, or involvement in any religious community. With no institutional framework, the apps transform meditation into a spiritual and psychological self-improvement exercise and transports it indo the middle of daily activities such as the urban commute.
Play + ritual + meditation + modernity + smartphone apps.
“Genuine play possesses besides its formal characteristics and its joyful mood, at least one further very essential feature, namely, the consciousness, however latent, of ‘only pretending.’ The question remains how far such a consciousness is compatible with the ritual act performed in devotion” (Huzinga 1950: 22).
A taste of Part I from my upcoming thesis. I can’t emphasize enough that this is a first draft. Suggestions/comments welcome @jpiacenza.
Looking first at the physical medium of the smartphone, we see the values the medium emphasizes and which it negates. The device values individual audial, visual and touch sensory and disregards permanency and community. Walter J. Ong famously highlighted our cultural tendency to privilege certain communicative elements as our standard mediums for communication change. For example, audial aspects took prominence in our oral storytelling before the invention of the printing press, after which its importance quickly plummeted, only to rise again with the invention of and our habitual use of the radio as a communicative medium. Ong, along with Marshall McLuhan, emphasized this importance of the medium over the message. The switch from oral traditions to writing, for example, not only changed the need for societal literacy, but made “possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the external objective world distinct from itself but also to the interior self whom the objective world is set” (Ong 1982: 105). The change in medium generated a new, interior awareness of the self and a subsequent alienation of this self from the external world (O’Leary 1996: 784). Stephen O’Leary cleverly notes that religions offer solutions to this feeling of alienation, an after-effect of the psychological changes caused by writing and literacy, or a change in the medium.
Very proud of this project, completed this past month: the latest podcast of “Sacred Lines,” a collaboration of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture and KGNU Independent Radio. This episode focuses on Buddhism, Meditation & Technology, and I helped organize, write, produce and was interviewed for the show.
Click here to listen. Our show starts at the 39:35 mark.
