Reflections on Meyer and Ong

"The sensational form evolving around the icon was to be replaced by a new sensational form evolving around the book" (Meyer 2012, 163)

From Meyer's writing on the evolution of religious sensations, I am following the suggestion that the dominant form of media for mediating the transcendent evolves alongside technology. Where there was no printing press, and no literacy, image (rather than text) was the sacred form that made the transcendental "available to the senses." (ibid, 162) 

Television becomes an ubiquitous media and thus is "called upon to authorise religious sensations as true…the power of God has to appear on TV" (ibid, 164) I follow Meyer in so much as I agree that television (and also the internet, or social media more generally) is a authoritative form for the mediation of religious sensations. But where her article led me was to wonder whether it has become the dominant form -- has it replaced the book? 

Ong claims that "writing was deeply interiorized by print." (97) Has television and computerised media been interiorized in the same way? Have these forms, as Ong claims of writing, "transformed human consciousness" (78)? I would argue not. As important as these technologies have become, and as ubiquitous as they are becoming, they have not existed long enough: they are still highly visible as technologies, they are still exterior. Thus, while they have begun to alter religious practices and the experience of religious sensations, they have not the vatic quality of writing because we are aware of their 'createdness' - their humanness. 

While the book maintains it's dominance, Meyer is right the presence of God on television, or on the internet, authorises religious sensations as true. I would view it as a supplementary authority. A necessary development, a source of supporting evidence. 

But perhaps the speed at which these technologies are interiorized will occur more rapidly than writing. I can not know what it is like to be child in a world where the Ipad/Iphone/laptop computer/personal television has always existed. To me these things still seem a bit like intrusions. But no doubt the process of transforming consciousness has already begun.

References

Meyer, B. 2012. Religious Sensations: Media, Aesthetics, and the Study of Contemporary Religion. In G. Lynch and J. Mitchell with A Strhan. Eds., Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader. Londong and New York: Routledge. Chapter 14: 159 - 170.

Ong, W.J. 1982. Writing Restructures Consciousness. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Methuen. Chapter 4: 78 - 116