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| By Umberto Salvagnin, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 |
fted in one direction or another. My original stance was one highly critical of digital media, and though I felt it was representative of what I had actually experienced myself and witnessed in the lives of others, I didn't feel like it was the whole story. My most recent shift in thinking, which came about thanks to some really savvy feedback from +Eileen and Dr. Burton, has helped me to look at the Internet in a much more balanced light, seeing the good and the bad and recognizing the Internet more so as a tool than an influence--as something that cultures whatever we put into it. The problem is, that has brought me to a new impasse, in that such a stance paints societal "progress" as the source of modernity's awe deficiencies.
I guess the unhappy conclusion that I've come to is that creativity (my previous solution to Internet-induced awe deficiency) is now a symptom of the secularization, urbanization, and desocialization of modern society as a whole, and unfortunately, that model holds true (at least to a degree) for past historical periods (with the Renaissance, for example, came the dissolution of Catholic authoritative control, of traditional marital law, etc.). Artistic creativity, then, seems to be a sort of attempt at replacing the awe that is lost in deconstructing traditional social orders.
So, where to go? I have no idea. The notion itself is kind of crippling. I'm still trying to figure out a solution, but this is definitely changing the way that I'm thinking about the topic. In any case, I would really love to hear your take on all of this, because maybe there's just something that I'm just missing entirely that somehow makes all this right (or at least not terribly depressing). First 6 pages of the paper-in-progress is in the link.
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