Re-Enchantment
The cultural
technology of the World Wide Web is invested with all sorts of
utopian and dystopian mythic narratives, from those which project
a
future of a
revitalized, Web-based, public sphere and civil society to those
which imagine the catastrophic implosion of the social into the
simulated virtuality of
the Web.
But whether such imaginings are optimistic or foreboding, they
are indications of what Robert Romanyshyn has termed the "re-enchantment
of the
world"
through the magic of technology. Magic, therefore, pervades
the World Wide Web as a material and symbolic practice of identity
transformation as well
as the mythic
representation of this transformative capacity. It is the
magic of the dreams
of sorcerers and beasts they conjure.
