Drawing Connections between Naked Cartoons & Religion
So, my immediate reaction to my classmates after exiting our viewing of Ghost in the Shell was simple. “What the fuck just happened?” I’ve never even considered watching anime before. Cartoons, dubbed soundtracks, and foreign cultural ideas never seemed to appeal to me.
Honestly, naked drawings still don’t do it for me. But, I did get something out of the experience. And, in good reflection of the nature of our class, that something was a message about religion, popular culture, and media.
Ghost in the Shell is about the ghost, or soul, and technology developing its own soul - in Grant’s words, “the mystification of technology”. But what does that mean? And does it have any application to the actual, current world we live in, rather than some cyber future?
We spend hours a day in front of computers. We play with their programs. We scream at them to work. We cry when they crash. I relate more with my computer than with most people in my life, and I promise I do have a social life. This makes the computer, at the very least, a personality – at the very most, a being with a soul.
The people who believe the ‘being with a soul’ theory are those who don’t know any better, those who think of technology as a mystery. People worship mysteries. They spiritualize them, religion-ize them, make them understandable. This is exactly what people do to technology. They don’t understand how pieces of metal can allow them to talk on AIM across continents or attach documents to e-mail. So they “mystify”. The creators of Ghost in the Shell must just worship the mystery, or even broader, the possibility, of technology. And it comes out, in what some, not quite me, might consider beautiful, anime.
Honestly, naked drawings still don’t do it for me. But, I did get something out of the experience. And, in good reflection of the nature of our class, that something was a message about religion, popular culture, and media.
Ghost in the Shell is about the ghost, or soul, and technology developing its own soul - in Grant’s words, “the mystification of technology”. But what does that mean? And does it have any application to the actual, current world we live in, rather than some cyber future?
We spend hours a day in front of computers. We play with their programs. We scream at them to work. We cry when they crash. I relate more with my computer than with most people in my life, and I promise I do have a social life. This makes the computer, at the very least, a personality – at the very most, a being with a soul.
The people who believe the ‘being with a soul’ theory are those who don’t know any better, those who think of technology as a mystery. People worship mysteries. They spiritualize them, religion-ize them, make them understandable. This is exactly what people do to technology. They don’t understand how pieces of metal can allow them to talk on AIM across continents or attach documents to e-mail. So they “mystify”. The creators of Ghost in the Shell must just worship the mystery, or even broader, the possibility, of technology. And it comes out, in what some, not quite me, might consider beautiful, anime.
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