Shamanism Enjoys Revival in Techno-Savvy South Korea

This article is about the sudden boom in popularity of Korean folk religion in modern day South Korea. One particularly amazing statistic they mention is that there is around one shaman for every 160 people in South Korea. The modern boom seems to have come because after years of being suppressed by Christian missionaries and millitary governments, the shamans are finally accepted by the establishment. This combined with the very materialistic, the here-and-now mindset of South Korea has led to shamans becoming a massively important part of many Koreans’ lives.

This relates to community, especially the internet community, because the shamans seem very much part of the internet mold of religion. First there is no singular scripture and everyone has their own gods they placate or spirtual specialities. This is like a religious version of the splintering of larger groups into tiny sub-sub-cultures that the internet has produced. Despite their ancient practices such as sacrifice they were some of the first religious groups to get on the internet and offer bookings and fortunes online. What this has to say about religion, technology, and community is that more fractured, fluid, and less dogmatic religions may have a surge in popularity as they are more suited to the virtual environment.

“Cybertheater, Postmodernism and Virtual Reality: An Interview with Toni Dove and Michael Mackenzie.”

First of all this piece attempted to explain what the performance piece that Toni Dove worked on in detail yet I cannot visualize it all. It involved linked monitors connected by fiberoptics that were displaying…different images of things that the performers were interacting with in someway. Honestly the description is one of the most baffling parts of the article and I still can’t understand quite what the performance actually looked like.

One interesting theory the interviewees put forth is that technology collapses in the sense that after a breakthrough of sorts that multiple ways of doing the same thing exist for a while before collapsing back into a single unified format. That in itself isn’t very revolutionary but they go on to say that artists and others have a window of opportunity in between the burst and the collapse to really experiment with a breadth of things before the technology unifies and mainstream culture is that much harder to crack into.

When the conversation turns to VR the interviewees conjecture that all this bro-ha-ha around VR, in 1995, is partially due to William Gibson’s very fantastic vision of the future where VR was so realistic people could become junkies and eschew reality for VR. Of course William Gibson also thought data was going to be stored on crystals in the future so his predictions are faulty at best.  It is interesting to see just how excited about VR helmets and everything people were ten years ago and how wrong they were that it was going to really take off.

They also agree that people are beginning to view stories and narratives in a non-linear way. Helped in part by things like hypertext a narrative can be linear, symbolic, and imaginary all at the same time. They mention a very avant-garde performance a friend put on as an example where “two people on a Venetian table-top, which is also a Chopinesque-piano going around in circles, and a woman talking about a drug experience at the same time as she is a 19th-century ballet dancer at the same time as there is a relationship between her and someone else, which is a remembrance of another relationship. There’s a certain kind of density, like the way in which the convergence and divergence of different elements happens in novels.” And with technology stories like this are more possible as different mediums can convey different layers of the story.

The rest of the article concerns neither virtual reality, religion, or technology in significant way and just veers off into more art-theory talk.

Essentially I had very little idea what they were talking about the entire time. I could decipher a few interesting points on narrativity that seem relevant to our discussion of religion and virtual reality such as the potential for things like The Bible to be digitized and then have multiple layers of meaning thrown at the consumer simultaneously instead of piece by piece which it is now.

Reading Response Numero Three, I believe

I will preface this response by saying I still haven’t recieved my First Person book. I now have a sneaking suspicion I forgot to order it, which would be quite negligent of me. But alas I just don’t have a copy to read, but I did finally get my Reader for Ritual Studies.

This reading didn’t really bring up a point so much as rail against some views held by a wide number of people. In fact that view that Greek theater arose from Dionysian rituals and that tragoidia comes from “goat song” and all the things he complained about are things I learned in Intro to Theater. So evidently this debate is alive today, or no one’s telling the drama professors. The key component the author emphasized is that rituals are about community, there is a social structure in place that helps empower to the ritual. Just because a play like King Lear enacts symbol-laden actions in a fashion which might superficially resemble a ritual, that doesn’t mean it IS a ritual without the communal backing.

How this relates to our discussion might be how a lot of virtual reality is actually focused on community.  Things like message boards, online gaming, and play in virtual worlds involves a lot of community. Clubs, “clans”, virtual churches, all of these communities might according to the author allow many things occurring in virtual reality to move to that realm of ritual in ways a play or I assume by extension a film never could.

Public Can Check Halal Status Via SMS To Jakim – Post

This news article demonstrates a real practical application of technology to real-life problems that religious folks face. In this case it is the ever present question to Muslims of if a certain food product is halal or not. From a Jewish background I can understand that confusion because a lot of foods claim to kosher by putting a k or a p on the product but since letters cannot be trademarked, these products are not actually investigated by rabbis. Some products that are widely understood to not be kosher like Jello still try to pass themselves off as kosher, adding to confusion.

So in Malaysia they came up with a brilliant idea of having a central government agency investigate all food products in the country and check if they are halal. Then by simply texting the barcode of the product to a certain number, one can get an answer if that food is halal or not. This is being combined with a central agency standardizing halal food labels and conducting audits.

Something like this is a great example of how technology can help believers in their everyday lives. Previously one would have to check with an imam or other trusted source to see what was halal and what was not and then remember or write them down and then shop for them. Now using the cellphone networks and the generally convenient nature of cellphones, answers to persistent but important questions are at believers fingertips.

Reading Response Numbero Dos

I still have not received the Ritual Readings book or the First Person one, meaning I only have the Bogost to read. It was interesting to see him go from a seemingly pretty objective scholarly type in his earlier chapters to having a clear bias in this one. Most of the chapter seemed to be not about procedural rhetoric, video games, or anything of the sort at all but instead a critique of consumerism, capitalism, jobs, schools, and anything else he labels “institutions”. This personally threw me off and served as a bit of a barrier for my engagement the text.

What I could draw forth was that it seems impossible for video games to EDUCATE people, in that it teaches them to sort of critically approach problems because they all have limitations and biases built in due to their coded nature. I counter that notion with the video game Hitman: Blood Money. Essentially every level is a mission where you are just loosely given the task “Kill this person” and the rest is utterly open. There are of course hard-coded limitations due to constraints such as having to stay in a certain area and the limited AI and the lack of any true social interraction. Despite all of this I believe the game still proceduraly teaches problem solving/critical thinking, which is an important component of his definition of education. There is always an obvious way to do every mission which is shoot and run, but exploration of the environment leads to a plethora of things, places, and people to interact with in the eventual goal of the assassination.

Which leads me to his next topic which was about how video games relate to morality and procedural rhetoric’s place in that. I believe a good way of looking at how video games can teach skills and knowledge sets procedurally and yet don’t teach “killer instinct” or anything like that when violent games are played is what I outlined above. When I play a violent game such as Hitman, my core thought process is less about killing and more about problem solving. I know that I have a goal and I have to explore the environment, see how things interact which each other, and eventually discover an efficient way to accomplish my goal. I am not procedurally learning how to assassinate someone for money or anything of the sort, it’s more of a puzzle or thought game that has the trappings of being assassin because that is visually engaging set-dressing.

Summary of “How Computer Nerds Describe God”

This piece is an interview by Christianity Today with Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired and man who had a tremendously powerful religious experience in Jerusalem that leads him to try and blend religion and technology. The story of how Kevin Kelly found religion is in and of itself quite the tale, he evidently was staying a Jerusalem taking photos of the Easter celebration when he was locked out of his hostel. Broke and with no place to stay he slept in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the next morning he simply had this great conviction that Jesus rose from the dead and began to believe in him. He also felt he was going to die in 6 months and so began reconnecting to family and gave to charity. He did not die but now lives his life trying to figure out the intersection between religion and technology and how they interact. His main points seem to be that sci-fi writers are analogous to modern day theologians because they ask big questions about human existence and the nature of things as well as that God can be easily understood on metaphors based on technology and computing but that’s because it is the metaphorical language easily accessed by the current generation.

Now personally my first thought was a bit of a chuckle because I found it amusing that he was so terribly convinced he was going to die back in 1979 but has survived to at least 2002 when the interview was posted. Less facetious it’s an interesting look at how one might use technology to help one understand God in a sense but it still seemed traditional in a sense. Kelly isn’t trying to re-invent anything here, he’s just trying to explain God with the language that comes most naturally to him as a computer nerd.

His last questions was quite the interesting one though, even if unrelated to technology. If there were other intelligent life-forms out there, would they have a Jesus? It’s terribly interesting because I believe it can be assumed that if there is both A.) A God in the traditional sense and B.) Other sentient life that God is their creator too. So why or why not give them a prophet, or a way to join God in eternal life?

Reading Response Numero Uno

One of the biggest confusions the Bogost reading has provided me with is that fact that in his preface he mentions that he believes that the rhetorical power of video games does not lie in their content as the Serious Games movement says. Then in his next chapter though he goes on the describe things such as visual rhetoric which certainly concerns content. He also uses The McDonald’s Game as an example of procedural rhetoric and it’s content is what is being used rhetorically. In fact, the process he refers to in the playing of the game IS the content of the game.

With all the next games and other things he mentions, the content is what is doing the rhetorical work. Freaky Flakes allows users to create satirically targeted children cereals, the procedure of making a sort of archetypal kid’s cereal box is what is making the creator’s point. But that procedure of making the cereal box IS the content of the game, so either I misread him in the preface, misunderstood what he meant, or he was wrong or miswrote. In retrospect it seems trivial but the preface informs the readers reading of the rest of the material, and so that disunity was jarring.