Show Notes
Welcome to an unusually brief installment of the Convivial Society. An analogy came to mind, and you can tell me what you think. I vowed to keep it short, under 1,000 words. So this remains suggestive, and I’ll be eager to see if it generates any interesting insights or otherwise proves to be a helpful framing. In 1979, the late sociologist Peter Berger published a book titled, The Heretical Imperative. As the subtitle explained, it was a book about “the contemporary possibilities of religious affirmation.” According to Berger, any form of religious affirmation in modern societies necessarily arises out of a context of pervasive religious pluralism. In such a context, choosing your religion, or choosing to have none, becomes an imperative. You can’t quite escape the awareness of having made a choice, a choice which could have been otherwise. As it turns out, the Greek root of the word heresy can be translated as “to choose for one's self.” Thus Berger’s heretical imperative, or the imperative to choose. Unlike in certain pre-modern settings, where you’d likely be born into a religious tradition and live your life in a rather insulated and homogenous social setting that never gave you much occasion to question it, in the modern world getting religion, even if that means remaining faithful to your parent’s faith, is experienced as a choice you’ve made rather than something that is simply given in the nature of things. So, just as for Berger the sociological structures of modern society generated the heretical imperative, so, too, I would like to propose, the technological structures of digital media generate the hermeneutical imperative. Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. It critically explores the methods we deploy to interpret texts of all sorts. It’s often associated specifically with the interpretation of religious texts or the modern tradition of philosophical hermeneutics. I’m using the term to suggest that the proliferation of media artifacts and the growing colonization of our experience by varieties of digital mediation have generated an imperative to self-consciously interpret. Is that really a new situation, you may ask. Yes and no. It is true, I would grant, that human experience has always been marked by explicit or implicit acts of interpretation. But, three considerations … (1) Acts of interpretation become more explicit when we confront symbolically encoded human artifacts or media objects. In a walk through the woods, I’m engaged in certain kind of mostly pre-conscious interpretative work—reading the landscape, we might say. Walking through a museum, on the other hand, involves interpretative work of a different and more conscious nature. To the degree that our experience is mediated by digital devices, it takes on the quality of a walk through a (very weird) museum full of works of human artifice calling forth our interpretations. (2) Also, if I’m right about our experience of digitization generating a primary experience of the Database rather than the Narrative, then the need to be always interpreting becomes all the more apparent. For one thing, digitally mediated relations themselves become media artifacts and media objects. In the face-to-face company of those we know relatively well, our interpretative labor is less acute. We likely have a repertoire of habitual interpretive paradigms on which we can draw, and the less obviously mediated character of in-person exchanges means that the interpretive work likely remains pre-conscious. However, when the person becomes an avatar communicating through text, image, meme, film, GIF, etc., then the interpretative burden intensifies. And, of course, while most of us know that narratives require interpretation, they also supply interpretations in such a way that it is possible to naively assume that a narrative is simply relaying a transparent account of things. So, when our primary experience is of the Database, then we find ourselves in the positio
More from The Convivial Society
Hello all, The audio version keep coming. Here you have the audio for Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology. Below you’ll find a couple of paintings that I cite in the essay. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoy it. Cheers, Michael
I continue to catch up on supplying audio versions of past essays. Here you have the audio for “Vision Con,” an essay about Apple’s mixed reality headset originally published in early February. The aim is to get caught up and then post the audio version either the same day as or very shortly after I publish new written essays. Thanks for listening!
Just before my unexpected hiatus during the latter part of last year, I had gotten back to the practice of recording audio version of my essays. Now that we’re up and running again, I wanted to get back to these recordings as well, beginning with this recording of the first essay of this year. Others will follow shortly, and as time allows I will record some of the essay from the previous year as well. You can sign up for the audio feed at Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
At long last, the audio version of the Convivial Society returns. It’s been a long time, which I do regret. Going back to 2020, it had been my practice to include an audio version of the essay with the newsletter. The production value left a lot to be desired, unless simplicity is your measure, but I know many of you appreciated the ability to listen to the essays. The practice became a somewhat inconsistent in mid-2022, and then fell off altogether this year. More than a few of you have inquired about the matter over the past few months. Some of you graciously assumed there must have been some kind of technical problem. The truth, however, was simply that this was a ball I could drop without many more things falling apart, so I did. But I was sorry to do so and have always intended to bring the feature back. So, finally, here it is, and I aim to keep it up. I’m sending this one out via email to all of you on the mailing list in order to get us all on the same page, but moving forward I will simply post the the audio to the site, which will also publish the episode to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. So if you’d like to keep up with the audio essays, you can subscribe to the feed at either service to be notified when new audio posts. Otherwise just keep an eye on the newsletter’s website for the audio versions that will accompany the text essays. The main newsletter will, of course, still come straight to your inbox. One last thing. I intend, over the coming weeks, to post audio versions of the past dozen or so essays for which no audio version was ever recorded. If that’s of interest to you, stay tuned. Thanks for reading and now, once again, for listening. Cheers, Michael The newsletter is public and free to all, but sustained by readers who value the writing and have the means to support it.
Welcome back to the Convivial Society. In this installment, you’ll find the audio version of the latest essay, “What You Get Is the World.” I try to record an audio version of most installments, but I send them out separately from the text version for reasons I won’t bore you with here. Incidentally, you can also subscribe to the newsletter’s podcast feed on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Just look up The Convivial Society. Aside from the audio essay, you’ll find an assortment of year-end miscellany below. I trust you are all well as we enter a new year. All the best to you and yours! A Few Notable Posts Here are six installments from this past year that seemed to garner a bit of interest. Especially if you’ve just signed up in recent weeks, you might appreciate some of these earlier posts. Incidentally, if you have appreciated the writing and would like to become a paid supporter at a discounted rate, here’s the last call for this offer. To be clear, the model here is that all the writing is public but I welcome the patronage of those who are able and willing. Cheers! Podcast Appearances I’ve not done the best job of keeping you all in loop on these, but I did show up in a few podcasts this year. Here are some of those: With Sean Illing on attention With Charlie Warzel on how being online traps us in the past With Georgie Powell on reframing our experience Year’s End It is something of a tradition at the end of the year for me to share Richard Wilbur’s poem, “Year’s End.” So, once again I’ll leave you with it. Now winter downs the dying of the year, And night is all a settlement of snow;From the soft street the rooms of houses show A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin And still allows some stirring down within. I’ve known the wind by water banks to shakeThe late leaves down, which frozen where they fell And held in ice as dancers in a spell Fluttered all winter long into a lake; Graved on the dark in gestures of descent, They seemed their own most perfect monument. There was perfection in the death of ferns Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone A million years. Great mammoths overthrown Composedly have made their long sojourns, Like palaces of patience, in the grayAnd changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii The little dog lay curled and did not rise But slept the deeper as the ashes roseAnd found the people incomplete, and froze The random hands, the loose unready eyes Of men expecting yet another sunTo do the shapely thing they had not done. These sudden ends of time must give us pause. We fray into the future, rarely wroughtSave in the tapestries of afterthought.More time, more time. Barrages of applause Come muffled from a buried radio.The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow. Thank you all for reading along in 2022. We survived, and I’m looking forward to another year of the Convivial Society in 2023. Cheers, Michael