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Because
many of the narrating technologies in modern industrial
culture are complex technologies that often conceal
the machinery of this process (in an attempt to make
the mediation as “seamless” as possible),
the average user often begins to imagine a certain degree
of cognition is present in the mediating device, thereby
inhabiting the storytelling “device” with
a spirit or a sense
of awareness (Carey, Norman).
This effect can be traced back to tablets that “speak”
to us with the voice of God, books endowed with evil
spirits, and to the television in the movie Poltergeist
that served as a technological medium to the spirit
world. And we all know people who believe that their
computers don’t “like” them or have
to take extra time to “think” their way
through a particularly complex project (Gaggi).
In courses that deal with computing
and communication, students are very aware of the cross-cultural
fascination with technologies that contain spirits or
ghosts, and we therefore spend some time tracing this
obsession as it travels from culture to culture, from
technology to technology, from medium to medium. For
example, my students and I recently looked at a recent
Japanese horror film, the movie Ringu, as a
recent compendium of cross-cultural references to the
idea of spirit-endowed technology
(Lau). |
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