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March 28-29, 2003
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March 28-29, 2003
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Media, Attention, and the Colonization of Consciousness: A Buddhist Perspective Peter Hershock
East-West Center
University of Hawaii
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Peter Hershock is Coordinator of Summer and Outreach Programs of the Asian Studies Development Program at the East-West Center. He has earned degrees from Yale University (B.A., Philosophy) and the University of Hawai’i (Ph.D., Asian and Comparative Philosophy). His recent research has focused on applying Buddhist conceptual and critical resources in addressing contemporary issues, including technology and development, human rights, social activism, and the role of normative values in international relations. Dr. Hershock's books include Liberating Intimacy: Enlightenment and Social Virtuosity in Ch’an Buddhism (SUNY Press, 1996); Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age (SUNY Press, 1999); Technology and Cultural Values on the Edge of the Third Millennium (forthcoming, 2003); and Chan Buddhism: A Chinese Transformation of the Middle Way (forthcoming, 2003).
Recent papers include: “From Vulnerability to Virtuosity: Buddhist Reflections on Responding to Terrorism and Tragedy,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Volume 10, 2003; “Buddhist Philosophy as a Buddhist Practice,” in Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, From Africa to Zen: An Invitation to World Philosophy, 2003; “Media, Attention, and the Colonization of Consciousness: A Buddhist Perspective,” inTimothy Shanahan and Robin Wang, Reason and Insight: Western and Eastern Perspectives on the Pursuit of Moral Wisdom, 1995; “Renegade Emotion: Buddhist Precedents for Returning Rationality to the Heart,” Philosophy East and West 53:2, April, 2003; and “Family Matters: Dramatic Interdependence and the Intimate Realization of Buddhist Liberation,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Volume 7, 2000.
-- Abstract --
The moral valence of the media is most often supposed to pivot on the content they convey and on the intentions directing the dissemination of this content. The media themselves—and, more broadly, the technologies they bring into focus—are effectively presumed to be value-neutral or morally transparent. In this chapter, the Buddhist concepts of interdependence, emptiness, and karma will be used to challenge this presupposition. In doing so, a primary aim will be to develop a critical capability for examining how the media—regardless of the content and intentions they convey—affect the quality of our interrelatedness or community as such.
Granted the Buddhist insight that relationships are more basic than individual ‘things being related’, it is possible to demonstrate that all technologies have a threshold of utility beyond which they begin reproducing the conditions of their own necessity, thus institutionalizing their own core values. It follows that no claim for the moral transparency of the media and their associated technologies can be maintained beyond this transition. Indeed, in crossing this threshold, the media can be seen as fostering an export of attention from our immediate situation at a scale sufficient to fully consolidate our already deep technological bias toward the value of control, making possible the global colonization of consciousness as such. Two major consequences of this are: first, an overall increase in the variety of day-to-day experience accompanied by an overall decrease in its relational diversity; and, secondly, the depletion of precisely those attentive resources needed to bring about meaningful—and not merely factual—resolutions of a wide array of relational conflicts and crises of community.
This Buddhist perspective on media ethics will thus suggest both broad revisions of our concept of freedom and the purported consonance between the value of cultural diversity and the so-called communication revolution, as well as the need for considerable skepticism about mass-mediated social activist movements and their technological dependency in expressing dissent regarding the broad phenomenon of globalization.
Website constructed and maintained by Douglas Shrader / Department Chair Philosc@Oneonta.edu March 24, 2003
