Wonderosity

“As the servants of the machines are becoming a privileged
class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful.
What’s their next move?”
–J.R.R. Tolkien (in a letter to his son, at the close of WWII)

Have you ever had the odd experience of re-reading a paper you’ve written, even just a few years back, and feeling like it must have been written by someone else far more knowledgeable or far more idiotic than yourself? I tend to feel one of those two extremes when I re-read my papers (which is probably why I do it so rarely). While a good portion of those papers now feel like they were a waste of time, a few of the ones I wrote in grad school still have tremendous importance and relevance to me and, I’ve been told, for society in general.

One of the two papers most requested from me I’ve decided to take material from and re-post in blog format, for a) I’ve recently received some national press about a workshop we’re doing related to this topic, b)I’ve always wanted to edit and update this paper, c) Excerpts from the paper are much easier to digest than a 50 page paper and, d) My paper was written from a particular ‘theological’ context that could distract some folks from the heart of the issue. If you want to read the full paper with all its foot notes (there are some good juicy ones), feel free to go ahead but, without further adieu: “The Ring, The Stone, & The Pool: Exploring the Nature of Technology through the Magic within Tolkien’s Myth, Part I, An Introduction”

“…Technology is playing more and more of a role in our daily lives and we are doing more and more of our playing through technology. However, the question that gets closer to the point of this paper is this: is technology actually playing more and more with us? Some of us are concerned that this might be the case; that as we increasingly use technologies, we are actually increasingly being used by them as well.

If the connections between an increase in technological dependency and many of the problems facing our modern society are not already obvious to the reader, I hope that by the end of this paper they will be. Yet not only do I hope to heighten your awareness of the seriousness of the situation at hand, I also aim to help you better understand the very nature of technology, and in time, to be more thoughtful about intentional about which technologies to embrace and in what manner their powers can best be used. Lastly, I will point towards another type of power, an alternative ‘magic’, that I believe can better meet many of the needs and desires which we have tried mostly in vain to meet through technological means.

In order to accomplish these goals we will need to traverse what may seem strange or unrelated territory; for what do technology, magic, myth, and art have to do with each other? By drawing upon the mythic literature of J.R.R. Tolkien, the relationship of these subjects will become clearer as we examine the nature of three magical artifacts found in Tolkien’s trilogy: the One Ring, the Palantiri stones, and Galadriel’s Pool.

After briefly telling a story about my relationship with technology, and after briefly summarizing the core plot of Tolkien’s trilogy, I will use each of these magical artifacts to provide the basic structure of this paper. In looking at ‘the One ring’, I will be critiquing various myths of modernity and exploring the nature of technology in general. Next, the Palantiri stones will provide for us a helpful analogy to our modern technologies, and so here I will also propose a more holistic approach to technological assessment. Finally, by looking into the pool of Galadriel, I will conclude by examining the nature of another kind of more creative magic that exists in both our own world and Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. But first I would like to share with the reader why this topic is so important to me…”

More coming soon…

Tags: Tolkien, Technology, Skeptech, magic, theonering, leifhansen, sparknw, wonderosity