John David Ebert
Encyclopedia
John David Ebert is a cultural critic
and philosopher who has made several contributions to the study of mythology
and popular culture
.
, Rupert Sheldrake
, Deepak Chopra
, William Irwin Thompson
, Lynn Margulis
, Stanislav Grof
, Terence McKenna
and Ralph Abraham
. Each of these interviews is preceded by an essay-length introduction and the interviews themselves are sandwiched in between two long essays that are meditations upon the fate of the sciences in an age in which the Newtonian
world view is disintegrating.
as the Mythology
of Electronic Society is an examination of the last three decades of film, and in particular, it looks at the influence of mythology upon the cinema. Beginning with Stanley Kubrick
's 2001: A Space Odyssey
in 1968, the book walks the reader through a labyrinth of celluloid ideas.
He attempts to show how the movie theater emerged out of the camera obscura
, which in turn was bequeathed to the West by the Arabs, who had carried on and miniaturized Plato
's cavern cosmology, confining it to their theory of optics. Thus, in Ebert's view, the movie theater is a vestigial survival of the ancient Paleolithic
cosmology of the telling of stories before flickering firelight inside of a cave. The Arabs, in preserving an optical theory which, in contrast to the Greeks
, viewed the eye as a sort of miniature cavern, eventually led, by way of a long story, to the camera obscura and hence, to the blowing up of the movie theater as a sort of large Arabic vision of the eyeball-as-cave. As Ebert writes:
Cultural critic
A cultural critic is a critic of a given culture, usually as a whole and typically on a radical basis. There is significant overlap with social and cultural theory.-Terminology:...
and philosopher who has made several contributions to the study of mythology
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
and popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
.
Twilight of the Clockwork God
Ebert's first book is composed of a series of interviews with seminal New Age thinkers whose work interfaces with the sciences in one way or another. These thinkers include Brian SwimmeBrian Swimme
Brian Thomas Swimme is on the faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies, in San Francisco, where he teaches evolutionary cosmology to graduate students in the humanities. He received his Ph.D. from the department of mathematics at the University of Oregon for work in singularity...
, Rupert Sheldrake
Rupert Sheldrake
Rupert Sheldrake is an English scientist. He is known for having proposed an unorthodox account of morphogenesis and for his research into parapsychology. His books and papers stem from his theory of morphic resonance, and cover topics such as animal and plant development and behaviour, memory,...
, Deepak Chopra
Deepak Chopra
Deepak Chopra is an Indian medical doctor, public speaker, and writer on subjects such as spirituality, Ayurveda and mind-body medicine. Chopra began his career as an endocrinologist and later shifted his focus to alternative medicine. Chopra now runs his own medical center, with a focus on...
, William Irwin Thompson
William Irwin Thompson
William Irwin Thompson is known primarily as a social philosopher and cultural critic, but he has also been writing and publishing poetry throughout his career and received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He describes his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient...
, Lynn Margulis
Lynn Margulis
Lynn Margulis was an American biologist and University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is best known for her theory on the origin of eukaryotic organelles, and her contributions to the endosymbiotic theory, which is now generally accepted...
, Stanislav Grof
Stanislav Grof
Stanislav Grof is a psychiatrist, one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology and a pioneering researcher into the use of non-ordinary states of consciousness for purposes of analyzing, healing, and obtaining growth and insight into the human psyche...
, Terence McKenna
Terence McKenna
Terence Kemp McKenna was an Irish-American philosopher, psychonaut, researcher, teacher, lecturer and writer on many subjects, such as human consciousness, language, psychedelic drugs, the evolution of civilizations, the origin and end of the universe, alchemy, and extraterrestrial beings.-Early...
and Ralph Abraham
Ralph Abraham
Ralph H. Abraham is an American mathematician. He has been a member of the mathematics department at the University of California, Santa Cruz since 1968.- Life and work :...
. Each of these interviews is preceded by an essay-length introduction and the interviews themselves are sandwiched in between two long essays that are meditations upon the fate of the sciences in an age in which the Newtonian
Newtonian
Newtonian refers to the work of Isaac Newton, in particular:* Newtonian mechanics, also known as classical mechanics* Newtonian telescope, a type of reflecting telescope* Newtonian cosmology* Newtonian dynamics...
world view is disintegrating.
Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons
Ebert's second book Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: FilmFilm
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
as the Mythology
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
of Electronic Society is an examination of the last three decades of film, and in particular, it looks at the influence of mythology upon the cinema. Beginning with Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
's 2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel...
in 1968, the book walks the reader through a labyrinth of celluloid ideas.
He attempts to show how the movie theater emerged out of the camera obscura
Camera obscura
The camera obscura is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side...
, which in turn was bequeathed to the West by the Arabs, who had carried on and miniaturized Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
's cavern cosmology, confining it to their theory of optics. Thus, in Ebert's view, the movie theater is a vestigial survival of the ancient Paleolithic
Paleolithic
The Paleolithic Age, Era or Period, is a prehistoric period of human history distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools discovered , and covers roughly 99% of human technological prehistory...
cosmology of the telling of stories before flickering firelight inside of a cave. The Arabs, in preserving an optical theory which, in contrast to the Greeks
Greeks
The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world....
, viewed the eye as a sort of miniature cavern, eventually led, by way of a long story, to the camera obscura and hence, to the blowing up of the movie theater as a sort of large Arabic vision of the eyeball-as-cave. As Ebert writes:
- At this point in our cultural historyCultural historyThe term cultural history refers both to an academic discipline and to its subject matter.Cultural history, as a discipline, at least in its common definition since the 1970s, often combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at popular cultural traditions and cultural...
of the world as cavern, we arrive at a nexus where opticsOpticsOptics is the branch of physics which involves the behavior and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behavior of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light...
, cosmologyCosmologyCosmology is the discipline that deals with the nature of the Universe as a whole. Cosmologists seek to understand the origin, evolution, structure, and ultimate fate of the Universe at large, as well as the natural laws that keep it in order...
and the origins of cinema converge, for the principle of the camera obscuraCamera obscuraThe camera obscura is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side...
was indeed the ancestor of the movie theater. "Camera obscura" is LatinLatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
for "dark room," and if you miniaturize a room so that it becomes portable, then you're got a "camera." If you then line up a series of cameras, as Muybridge did, in order to capture the motion of a galloping horse through a sequence of still photographs, then your portable "room" is on the way to becoming enlarged again, but this time into the size of a public cavern with which to encompass the illusion of motion you have captured with the help of the little djinn of your technology. In fact, the entire world of the cinema may be regarded, a la McLuhan, as an extension of the human eye, for the movie theater is itself a kind of magic eye shared by the public, like the GraeaGraeaGraea or Graia is a region,or a city of ancient Greece that is placed under Boeotia in Homer's Catalogue of Ships; it seems to have included the city of Oropos, though by the fifth century BC it was probably a kome of that city...
, the three blind witches of Greek mythologyGreek mythologyGreek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks, concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece...
, who could see only by sharing one eye.
Dead Celebrities, Living Icons
Ebert's third book "Dead Celebrities, Living Icons: Tragedy and Fame in the Age of the Multimedia Superstar" examines the popular mythology of the dying and reviving celebrity. It maintains that the current adulation of mega-famous celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and James Dean corresponds to a modern myth formation in the contemporary psyche that is analogous to the role of the Catholic saints in the Middle Ages. Certain celebrities, such as Princess Diana or Michael Jackson, generate a near-religious aura because they activate fairy tale-like archetypes in the collective psyche, especially as the result of a tragic death, which casts a mythic aura about such personages. As Ebert writes:- The fatal quality shared by these particular celebrities was an effect of accelerating their personae to light speed via the electronic media of their day. For the process of exposing the personality to electronic replication and duplication tends to have a disintegrative effect upon it by splitting it asunder into multiple egos--like the thousand-fold Malkoviches in Being John Malkovich. These egos can proliferate with such bewildering speed that the accelerated individual soon finds himself thrust into playing roles--and donning masks--that he had no idea would be required of him. These clones and doppelgangers are like golems, for they are nearly impossible to kill once awakened to the light of day. Their originators tend, more often than not, to become unwitting victims in a war of images and icons that often require them to sacrifice their lives.
The New Media Invasion
Ebert's fourth book "The New Media Invasion: Digital Technologies and the World They Unmake" is a series of essays recording the devastating effects of the so-called Digital Revolution, beginning with the turning over of the Internet to the private sector in 1995, upon traditional printed media. The book discusses the traumatic effects of the New Media Invasion upon the media of the Gutenberg Galaxy, noting the disappearance of record stores, the near disappearance of book stores, and the folding up of magazines and newspapers with the rise of new media such as the Internet, cell phones, the Kindle, the iPad, the iPod, etc. The book's chapter on Wikipedia, interestingly, frames the advent of this particular website as a "knowledge catastrophe." As Ebert writes:- With Wikipedia, furthermore, 'knowledge' is never complete. It never even attains the status of knowledge, for the information that appears on Wikipedia may disappear within minutes. A knowledge base which appears and disappears without warning cannot be regarded in any way, shape or form as an encyclopedia of any kind. If what I just read a few minutes ago may disappear since I read it, and thus no longer has the status of being 'true,' then what I have read cannot be regarded as knowledge at all, but rather something more akin to the status of rumor, which is information that may or may not be true and may even change its status in the very process of its utterance.
Works
- Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science & Spirituality at the End of an Age (Council Oak Books, 1999)
- Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society (Cybereditions, 2005)
- Dead Celebrities, Living Icons: Tragedy and Fame in the Age of the Multimedia Superstar (Praeger - Greenwood, 2010)
- The New Media Invasion: Digital Technologies and the World They Unmake (McFarland Books, 2011)