Mind is a leaking rainbow

A summary of:
Stenger, N. 1991. Mind is a leaking rainbow. In Cyberspace: First Steps, M. Benedikt, Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 48-57.

Wertheim’s book walked us through the evolution of our concept of ‘space’. Here, Stenger makes a point about the effect that cyberspace has had on our concept of time: “If there is something that computers have forced into our society, it is a different sense of time. We still conceive of time within the mental framework of the eighteenth century: time is what is set by a clock, God as ‘the Great Clockmaker’ (Voltare), and so on. The (re)emergence of different senses of time will not destroy the traditional one, but make it relative” (55). She draws on Eliade, who writes about the sacred nature of time, or perhaps better phrased as the nature of sacred time. He writes: “’Religious man lives in two kinds of time, of which, the more important, sacred time, appears under the paradoxical aspect of a circular time, reversible and recoverable, a sort of eternal present that is periodically reintegrated by means of rites’” (in Stenger, 55). Stenger writes, “Eliade’s sacred time is nonhistorical. It is the time that ‘floweth not,’ that does not participate in the profane duration” (55).

I don’t know how useful this is for my purposes, but there it is anyway.

Stenger concludes with a hyperbolic, utopian paragraph, one that is fairly representative of that breed described by Wertheim as hailing the Internet as an opportunity for almost religious rebirth: “According to Satre, the atomic bomb was what humanity had found to commit collective suicide. It seems, by contrast, that cyberspace, though born of a war technology, opens up a space for collective restoration, and for peace. As screens are dissolving, our future can only take on a luminous dimension! / Welcome to the New World” (58). I think Hawken would agree with this. I, however, find this hopelessly naïve (but a great quote!).