Page - 45 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01
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“This Voice Has Come for Your Sake” |
45www.jrfm.eu
2016, 2/1, 35–47
standing of human beings as they take in the world, as adaptable and given to neural
plasticity. His example of a person running to catch a fly ball shows that sensing is not
a simple interaction but “opening a channel” to the world, where information keeps
flowing in and the person keeps adapting to it.21
Voice and hearing, so essential to the biblical worldview, are apt symbols of the hu-
man condition of contingency. Voice reveals age, illness, and mortality. If one speaks
to elderly or sick people on the phone, their voices reveal their condition. A person
near death often cannot speak. A large part of our grief at the loss of a loved one is
our inability to hear that person’s voice.
Our selfhood is bound to voice. This article began during a period when I was recov-
ering my voice after a long viral illness. My experience had been severely diminished
by the weakness of my voice, affecting daily relationships, expression of emotions,
participation in my communities, and potentially, my livelihood as a professor. With-
out my voice I could not be my real self. For good reason the metaphor of “finding
one’s voice” appears in feminism, the arts, and psychology, implying an expression of
the true and vibrant self.
Enhancement of hearing and speaking can go small, as individuals use constantly
improving wireless technology to replace or improve hearing, speech-generating de-
vices to replace voices that have been lost, or amplifiers to improve audibility. All such
enhancements require a period of incorporation until, as Clark notes, “our best tools
and technologies literally become us”.22 Anyone who sees using progressive lenses
can likely remember the first day wearing them, when simply walking down stairs was
difficult.
Enhancing the voice can go large via communications technology, and social media
can help bridge the gulf of place and time, even language. Consider the little question
at top of the computer screen “Want me to translate?” or Skype, which reduces sepa-
ration by making it possible to see and hear loved ones and enter into their daily lives.
When enhancement goes large, social media allows one to hear large numbers of
voices and ideas and to present oneself to the world. One can invent oneself on social
media, raise money for charity, campaign for a candidate, publish an essay, advertise
one’s skills, and more.
Transhumanism looks to enlarge on both scales. This movement to enhance hu-
man life via science and technology ranges from improving health, perception, and
cognition to uploading the brain of an individual as a way of surviving death and
even, according to Ray Kurzweil, resurrecting a loved one.23 While some, like Hans
21 Clark 2013, 115.
22 Clark 2013, 124.
23 In an interview, Kurzweil predicted that by extracting DNA from his father’s grave, adding memories
of him from Kurzweil and others, information one day will be coordinated to reconstruct the man,
Kushner 2009, 61.
JRFM
Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01
- Title
- JRFM
- Subtitle
- Journal Religion Film Media
- Volume
- 02/01
- Authors
- Christian Wessely
- Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati
- Editor
- Uni-Graz
- Publisher
- SchĂĽren Verlag GmbH
- Location
- Graz
- Date
- 2016
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY-NC 4.0
- Size
- 14.8 x 21.0 cm
- Pages
- 132
- Categories
- Zeitschriften JRFM