Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age

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SUNY Press, Jul 23, 1999 - Religion - 309 pages
By uniquely using Buddhist teachings, Reinventing the Wheel assesses the personal and communal costs of our global economic and technological commitments. Hershock urges reinvention of the technological wheel, and, at the same time, acknowledges the need for new forms of practice suited to our rapidly evolving social, political, and economic circumstances. His persuasive presentation urges the skillful spinning of a new wheel of the dharma.
 

Contents

Technology and the Biasing of Conduct Establishing the Grammar of Our Narrative
3
Primordial Technology in the Drama of Childhood
4
Freedom as a Dialectic of Projecting Self and Objecting World
8
The Canons of Freedom and Moral Transparency In Technology and the Media We Trust
19
The Imagined Neutrality of Technology
20
Individual Freedom and the Obdurate Objecting World
27
Just Saying No to the Logic of Choice
32
Technology as Savior Its Getting Better Better All the Time
35
The Meaningless Politics of Generic Democracy
156
Narcissism and Nihilism The Atrophy of Dramatic Attention and the End of Authentic Materialism
161
The Imperative Splitting of the Nuclear Self
162
Nothing Really Matters Anymore Not Even Matter
165
Iconography and the End of Materialism
166
The Iconic Roots of Boredom
169
Deepening the New Lock Groove
176
The CommodityDriven Translation of Desiring into Wanting
181

The Original Broken Promise
39
Toward an Ethics of Resistance
52
The Direction of Technical Evolution A Different Kind of Caveat
55
Advantaging ExistenceLiving Apart and at a Distance
56
The Corporation as Technology
61
The New Colonialism From an Ignoble Past to an Invisible Future
67
The Colonial Method
68
The Evolution of Colonial Intent into the Development Objective and Beyond
73
The Colonization of Consciousness
79
Pluralism versus the Commodification of Values
87
Is There a Universal Technological Path?
94
Independent Values the Value of Independence and the Erosion of Traditions
99
Appreciative Virtuosity The Buddhist Alternative to Control and Independence
105
A New Copernican Revolution
106
The Character of Buddhist Technologies
111
The Case of Healing
116
A Matter of Will or the Fruit of Offering?
125
Practicing the Dissolution of Wanting
129
Concentrating Power Are Technologies of Control Ever Truly Democratic?
137
Control and the Conflicts of Advantage
138
Mediated Control and the Democratic Process
142
The Societal Nature of a Controlling Advantage
146
A Case History of Technical Dilemma
150
The New Meaning of Biography The Efficient Self in Calculated Crisis
187
The New Grammar and Vocabulary of I Am
189
Controlling Time and Misguiding Attention
192
The Infertility of Expert Mind
195
An Expert Inversion
198
The Commodification of Dramatic Meaning
204
The Law of the Postmodern Jungle
209
Consuming Self Consumed Community
213
Changing Minds in an Age of Lifestyle Choices
222
The Digital Age and the Defeat of Chaos Attentive Modality the Media and the Loss of Narrative Wilderness
229
Disparities in the Metaphysics of Meaning
231
Disparate Modes of WorldMaking
235
The Numerology of Rational Values
238
Suffering Alone Together
245
Mediation and Mediocrity
248
Media and the Declining Narrativity of Popular Culture
255
The Mediated Wilderness
258
The Density of Postmodern Time and Space and the Craving for Volume
265
So What?
271
Bibliography
289
Index
295
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About the author (1999)

Peter D. Hershock is a Fellow of the Asian Studies Development Program at the East-West Center in Honolulu. He is the author of Liberating Intimacy: Enlightenment and Social Virtuosity in Ch an Buddhism, also published by SUNY Press.

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