Magic vs. the Imagination - 1

Part 1
We are inundated with information, the pundits say. As if we couldn't turn it off when we wanted. As if all the information came flooding past our perceptual filters all at once. As if we didn't like it and didn't make things this way.


Over the past 3 decades the emergence of computers & networks created a unification and a separation of what we call us. We chose the unification and once we experienced it, we chose the separation. As a result, now we are all connected to each other possibly, but are only really connected to those within the all-connect we choose. That's how things are. We know it. We made it that way, whether by making it or experiencing it and letting it wash over us and not moving to a limestone cave. So, that's the end of that part of the story.


There are other, similar parts of the story we won't cover here.


Another part of the story is the growth of reality modeling & CGI to make magic special effects more and more cheaply. Steve Jobs loves to tell this story because he had money to buy Renderman (Pixar) when George Lucas sold it to finance his divorce. (No, he didn't invent Pixar.) The resulting blend of digital reality capture and its increasingly similar-colored simulacrum is the pulpy mesh we now bathe in when looking at screens. This, we're told, is magic. And not just magical magic, but Disney magic, Dreamworks magic, (and now) Comcast magic. Und so weiter.


So we see very real looking dinosaurs (once real), whose software foundation is used to develop very real dragons (never real). And the software is also used to create very real looking monsters, such as liquid androids, armies of robots, giant towers topped by eyes, and weather such as earthquakes, & tsunamis (tragically real. Much cheaper to simulate). We now see these things on a screen & thus have a picture of these things defined in our mind. So we no longer have to work ourselves to picture these things. Part of what our imagination once did, now automated by human artists and technology to allow faster pixel rendering.


This material, is our pulpy mesh, is called "entertainment." To entertain also means "to consider," as in "I will entertain your idea." But here it communicates "that which is defined on a screen."  That entertainment refers to both consideration of a thought and the sensual elaboration and definition of thought could be a somewhat diverting conflation. 


So we entertain moving pictures from our myths, from our storehouses of our adventure and surprise (populated as they are by dragons, talking animal spirits, gods, and images of the future). While these images are fresh, they entertain us. But eventually we habituate to them, and in that habituation we kill our sense of adventure and surprise.


In that way we are robbed of ownership of the pictures to our myths.


End of Part 1.
In Part 2 we'll describe a way to get our myths back from screens.


Lastly, speaking of earthquakes & tsunamis, if you can, please help the Japanese.