Where Soul Meets Technology

Abstract

The chapter examines how the visionary dream of connecting people’s minds wavered between religious cosmologies, media theories, and researches into human–computer interaction. It focuses on a series of historical case studies: the writings of Ramon Llull, a fourteenth-century Catholic lay missionary from Spain; the concept of noosphere as described by the Jesuit anthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; Marshall McLuhan’s characterization of media as “extensions of man”; and research on telepathy or clairvoyance conducted at the Stanford Research Institute, a center where pioneering research into interactive computing led to the invention of the computer mouse in 1968. The authors argue that the beliefs, expressions, discourse, and spiritual framework that supported the development of digital media and the internet have been and still are largely religious, mythological, and enchanted.