Saturday, July 12, 2008

Things are Not as they Seem, Part I

I had an idea this morning, and since that is such a rare occurrence I thought I would write it down… (Actually this happens most mornings, and often I do try to write it down, usually in my Journal…).

I have been working with (literally!) thousands of websites lately, and this theory (not yet proven) occurred to me: it seems that the purpose of a website is quite similar to the purpose of religion. The purpose of religion is to provide an obstacle in the way of getting into personal communion with God (and fulfilling our destiny); religions can be evaluated in terms of how well they serve this purpose. It seems to me that websites are created to hide the person of the ‘blogger(s) and protect him/her/them from contact or communion with other living human beings; as with religion, sites and ‘blogs can be evaluated in terms of how well they accomplish this purpose.

For example, Mike Morrell, the guy I am working for at Sites Unseen, has a kind of catch-all category in his site called “Whiz-Bang Cutting-Edge Postmodern ‘Ministries’” http://zoecarnate.com/#whiz. The links there are the ones that (it seems to me) are most effective in screening the real message, the real person, of the ‘blogger from the curious eye of the surfer. The rule seems to be, the slicker the presentation, the greater the distance between seeker and ‘blogger—and therefore the greater the “success” of the site in preventing communication.

Now you might think of this as a bit cynical….

The applications of this method of seeing things can be extended indefinitely—and the intellectual vigor it would take to do it is appealing to me! For example, the purpose of education is to prevent people from learning and developing according to their natural bent and talents; its effectiveness can be judged according to how well it does this. The purpose of the health professions is…well, maybe you can see the way this is going.

I don’t know if this would be called a Deconstructionist perspective, the kind of thing that’s currently popular in the college setting, since I haven’t been actively involved there for a few years now. I have a couple of further thoughts about the origins and implications of this approach, but I’ll save these for the next post.

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