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I
once told my Japanese students that I thought
American ghosts lived in the blank channels between
television channels as a spur-of-the-moment joke,
but the idea of ghosts in the television is an interesting
and adaptive metaphor that helps us look at how we make
use of our mediating technologies like television, film,
and the web.
As McLuhan predicted, we do indeed
live in an electronic global village, a town that exists
no where in particular and everywhere all at once (McLuhan & Powers).
The one location that we all share, as we move from
town to town, state to state, country to country, is
the virtual meeting place of our electronic
media, our electronic global village inside of which
we appear (even if only for a Warholian fifteen
minutes) as ghostly visions of ourselves.We have created
a shared virtual reality of the world that none of us
live in but that we also can't ignore.
When a culture becomes unstuck
from a solid sense of place, when it frees itself from
the confines of permanence, then that culture's ideas
about persona (the ethos of spirit), about history,
and about community become rootless, shifting, and open
to renegotiation (Chen).
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