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Popular Icons and Contemporary Memory: An Apology, Year 2001 Marguerite Helmers continued . . .
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A photograph of Diana with Mother Teresa is centrally placed on Lollie McLain's website, "A Tribute to Honor our Mother Teresa and Princess Diana," posted in 1997 and one of a number of memorial websites to the women that were composed and uploaded to commercial ISPs after the women's deaths. In general, these websites are personal expressions of grief over the loss of the women as humanitarians and public figures (on this subject, see my article "Media, Discourse, and the Public Sphere"). They are also frequently autobiographical, written in the first person, and containing details of the emotional life of the writer. McLain, for example, titles the first section of her webpage "My Own Feelings." The screen of the internet has become a devotional space in contemporary life. Its blue glow is like the glow of an altar fire. Its promise of new stories and transparent images are like the promise of tribal epics and patron spirits of ancient times. As filmmaker Laura Mulvey pointed out in her landmark essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," the contrast between the darkness of the viewing space and the "brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation" (9). Mark Stefik opens his collection of statements on internet culture with the myths of fire and storytelling. Stefik draws attention to the continuity between older modes of dissemination of knowledge and the most modern of information appliances by noting that keepers of knowledge, the storytellers of culture, often engaged their audiences while circling a fire (3-4). Fire, "the most common symbol of knowledge" (Stefik 3), is thus the light by which knowledge is transmitted. Combining the power of the storyteller, the audacity of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods, the sacred space of the altar, the transcendent power of the orthodox icon, and the discursive prayer, the internet offers those caught in the web eternal life, eternal youth, resurrection from the dead. This essay is an experimental exploration of the relationship of the rhetoric of worship to the physical realities of the internet image. The central role of the image in contemporary society is well documented. From advertisements to television to the full media of the internet, images, icons, insignia, corporate messaging abound, proliferate, enlighten, confuse. We confess to cyberspace, ask absolution, post shrines to the dearly departed. The word icon proliferates in this context of contemporary media. We click icons on the screen, we revere icons of sport and celebrity, and in our disposable modern American culture, we are quick to proclaim everything from beer cans to sportscars "iconic." At its most reductive level, the icon is an image. Yet it is a symbol, a metaphor that refers to itself and to another. Icon, deriving from the Greek eikon, "to resemble," has become transmogrified into contemporary understanding as a synonym for "celebrity." A better understanding of icons and their hermeneutic relationship to their orthodox origins of worship and their inextricable link to Continental theory of the late twentieth century should lead toward a deeper understanding of response and interpretation. Accordingly, this essay is divided into three sections, not merely to initiate a Trinitarian response, but to reinscribe the rhetorical triangle of subject, object, and audience. 1 | 2 | Next Node | 4 | 5 | 6 | Notes | Works Cited
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