more about media

You see I rant and rave against "the electronic media blitz of the 20th century", implicating the internet in the insanity but I don't really see it as so good vs. evil.  It is what it is, which is an extension of the printing press which is an extension of alphabets…. after all, are books evil?

Of course, I say that as if I'm obviously retracting my venom against media because obviously books are good, right?  Hey, there's lots of books on the internet.  But you know, half the time I do feel that books are not good at all, that ALL mediated experience is keeping us in a kind of virtual prison that's been going on for thousands of years, constructed out of alphabets and linear thinking and symbol systems.  But of course there's no limit once you start trying to look at the situation that way because ALL culture is a virtual reality and in fact ALL experience is mediated experience.  The only direct experience is death, and we don't know a damn thing about that.  

So if mediated experience is alright, then why not sail off into a virtual headspace in the vast halls of the future internet?  Somehow we have to reach a decision about the monkey body.  Is it the neglected shadow that haunts civilized history to which we must return via feral society?  Or is it a troublesome vestige of animal evolution that brought us to the point of imagination and that we've been struggling to shed since civilization began?  I honestly find these two viewpoints to coincide so maddeningly and so often that I don't even know what to say about it at all.  

Of course I tend to vote for the body… just not without my suspicions.  I assume though that these suspicions are the result of being born into a worldview that descended from Christianity.  Suppose I should strip and go live off of wild rabbits for a while.  But you know, we've been there before, for thousands of years before civilization.  I'm not sure it was entirely pleasant; there must have been a reason to want to engineer ourselves into civilization.  I suppose we will return to that feral state but with some value system and/or techological artifact that will make human society less animalistic and more angelic.