It’s time to revisit what the Tech & Mythology project means for me. There were previous snapshots in July and October 2020, and most recently February 2021.
I’m exploring tech x myth because I think technology is a greater-than-human force that is powerful, pervasive, and mysterious (or at least opaque). In this sense technologies, and many other social phenomena, function as I imagine gods do in mythological/religious traditions.
Myth is an overloaded term; in this context I see myths as collections of ideas that people use to make sense of large and complicated phenomena. Myths can be used both to tame terrifying phenomena by bringing them down to human scale (economic models function in a similar way) or to invoke a sense of awe.
Our culture – particularly the managerial elite – works hard to particularize and objectify complex processes, including through the scientific method and the positive value placed on rationality. The subjective and emotional side of sense-making can’t be suppressed, though; it comes to the surface in enthralling entertainment and disruptive social movements.
Taming the greater-than-human forces is the converse of inspiring awe: the mundane and the sublime. I suspect it’s this sublime surplus that sets myths apart from ordinary ways of sense-making like news stories and scientific models.
I hope that mythology might help me understand how digital technologies affect individuals and society. I construe mythology broadly as the ways we grasp and explain greater-than-human forces (loosely, “gods”) in narrative, emotional, subjective ways. The approach examines both narrative (like stories about tech gods) and character (like tech archetypes).
I hope that this can make tech emotionally accessible without taming it through over-analysis. Admittedly I do want to control digital technologies to the extent of being able to think about them – but I want to retain some sense of their alienness and power, and not just rely on statistics, factoids and stories about business executives.
Some questions that puzzle me at the moment:
- Why do I perceive so little awe about technology in contemporary culture? Perhaps we’ve over-domesticated it.
- If mythic narratives are so important to understanding things, why are they so hard to find for technology?
- What can be gained by treating technologies as entities composed of humans, in the same way humans are composed of cells? News coverage of technologies in terms of personalities and products is like treating people purely in terms of cellular biology and physiology; it’s informative, but not the whole story. What’s the psychology and sociology of technologies?
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