John David Ebert

John David Ebert (born June 26, 1968) is a cultural critic and philosopher who has made several contributions to the study of mythology and popular culture.

Contents

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 Swimme, 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.

Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons

Ebert's second book Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film 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:

At this point in our cultural history of the world as cavern, we arrive at a nexus where optics, cosmology and the origins of cinema converge, for the principle of the camera obscura was indeed the ancestor of the movie theater. "Camera obscura" is Latin 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 Graea, the three blind witches of Greek mythology, who could see only by sharing one eye.[1]

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. [2]

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. [3]

Works

See also

References

  1. ^ Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons, 213-14
  2. ^ "Dead Celebrities, Living Icons", xv
  3. ^ "The New Media Invasion", 74

External links