Jack Trembath Davis Ch VII and VIII


Chapter VII “cyberspace: the virtual craft” in Davis’ TechGnosis, plays with the idea of virtual reality and how cyberspace and the World Wide Web provide a place in which humans can return to their wired way of processing information.  This process has to do with a more physical field of understanding rather than the disconnected way of numbers and algorithms that the human mind was not programmed to fully understand.  By making information a 3d space, which Mark Pesce began to work with through VRML, humans can and maybe to a more efficient degree navigate the internet and the web of information as if it were a map or an actual physical space making it easier to literally explore a world of data.  This whole idea of navigating and essentially strapping into a web and then physically exploring information is fascinating.  I think an explorative web of knowledge, which the World Wide Web embodies, makes and with more advancement will make abstract information that seems so distant to the human mind, far more tangible and easier to connect.  (arational thinking in The Axemaker’s Gift) 
Davis makes this connection of virtual reality to the tactics of ancient Greek and Roman orators: ars memoria.  These ancient intellects would envision their mind as an architectural location and walk through it as a means of accessing information and memories.  The web serves a similar purpose.  Davis writes, “the icons and hyperlinks of the Web thus simulate the associational habits of memory, habits that lend the imagination its intuitive capacity for leaps and analogies” (199).  I think this idea especially ties in to the self-reflecting and inwardly nature of technology beginning with writing.  By placing ourselves unto these technologies, there is a mirror of information, but the mirror has a mind of its own and takes everything to a new level, leaving us to explore and make meaning amongst the chaotic web.
Link to Ted Talk by Josh Foer who won the memory championship.  He touches on the power of memory and ars memoria as a means of memorization.
https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone_can_do?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare
In chapter VIII, “the alien call”, Davis writes about the world of UFO’s and dives further in to the information or misinformation that surrounds the extraterrestrial world.  Davis begins by pointing out the information conflict that UFO’s present.  There is an intersection between what appears to be surreal evidence (the UFO sightings) and a deeper ideal or fear at hand.  One explanation for the UFO phenomena is a nuclear anxiety rising in the post-World War II America.  With the cold war as a fueling service for information technologies as well as disinformation technologies, a government that appears partly real and partly imagined (deemed America’s Stealth Government by Davis) gains power through the crossroads of its real and imaginative nature.  Through this confusion and lack of ability to define the line between reality and imagination, conspiracy and paranoia also arise.  Davis argues that conspiracy theories are a lost place somewhere along the highways of the information age.  He goes on further stating that paranoia feeds into misinformation and a negative feedback loop in which the individual is stuck only being reassured by a lack of information.  Davis writes, “The paranoid knows that everything fits together, but unlike the mystic, this knowledge only confirms him in his separate anxious selfhood” (231).  Anton Wilson, author of Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, searches for a crossroad of skepticism and imagination in between yes and no to combat paranoia and conspiracy.  This ties in to one of Davis’ larger themes: the idea that the evil, the monsters, and even the paranoia comes from the liminal zones of mass information and not just a lack of information but also information that takes place instead of the truth.                     

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