Graduate Studies Office Deadlines

Just ran across this as I was finalizing dates for my timeline and it was helpful. Here's all the dates for the 2007-2008 year for submitting your Thesis (not project) to the Graduate Studies Office and formatting stuff: http://www.du.edu/grad/gradinfo/graduation.html

Forgot to post my blog

Here's where I keep track of academic type inquiries. I'd really love to subscribe to the RSS feed of your blog if you keep something similar! Please post!

Also, there's a call for submissions to a project Josh Fishburn and I have started, so please consider participating!

Thesis Proposal

Dani Ellen Day
University of Denver
Graduate Studies
Digital Media Studies
Thesis Proposal
DMST 4850


Digital Divine: Exploring spirituality in an expanding infoverse


Abstract

The search for God in the digital age is as liquid as the Infoverse, constantly expanding and contracting as various pieces of information flow from person to person via digital media. The experience is determined by the viewer along with the path chosen and the filters inherent in the individual. The proliferation of mobile media and digital connectivity is expanding our understanding and access to spiritual experience through mobile technologies and new forms of anonymous worship and meditation. This expanded spirituality delivered in waves of electromagnetic frequencies circumvents dogmatic constructs and can induce a meditative transcendence into various states of consciousness. Through exploration and understanding of diverse theories and established technology, this study will share insights into the human desire for divine connection and the project will create an experience to enhance the states of consciousness requisite for spiritual connectedness establishing a foundation for the Digital Divine.



Overview

Digital Divine is the term I use to define the state of consciousness achieved by using digital media to enhance the search for “God.” It is derived from the term digital divide meaning the gap between those with digital technologies and those without, mostly based on access to information due to location and economics. In the context of this study, this gap is the same between humans and the divine in the sense of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In that, the gap between physiological and self actualizing needs is divided by economics much like the division between those with access to technology and those without. The difference being with Maslow’s findings in that the spiritual element of development is not linked to the economic status of an individual and seems locked in the human psyche at all levels of hierarchic needs.
This need for spiritual connectedness crosses all economic boundaries and is inherent in the collective psyche and through technology can be enhance by digital media.

So, are we driven up the ladder of hierarchic needs by our spiritual connection? And, can a potential lessening of these gaps in human spiritual development due to cross economic proliferation of mobile technologies like cell phones and personal media devices decrease the divide both digital and spiritual to grant access to digital, divine experiences to reach a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential in regards to spirituality? I think the answer is yes and the psychological atmosphere created by the need for this connection and the potential applications for digital passageways to divine experiences are the realm of the Digital Divine.

My understanding of what this potential digital connection is comes from an eclectic and somewhat eccentric collection of media ranging from psychological, theological and philosophical scholarship to a personal interest in metaphysics, quantum theory and astrophysics. And despite its seemingly unrelated significance, another influencing factor is income mobility and its relative stagnation in that a person of low income is as likely today to become rich as they were 35 years ago despite a widening gap between the rich and poor. This is directly related to the concept of the digital divide from the view of access to technology based on income in that the proliferation of mobile media and cell phone sales in particular to lower income populations is possibly contributing to the relatively unchanging statistics of income mobility. In other terms, poor people have as much access to mobile media as the rich creating an avenue for divine expression and experience and potentially an opportunity to advance in the hierarchy of needs. So, the gap for connectivity is being reduced via mobile technologies. When looking at this from the standpoint of Maslow and other theories of how spirituality fits in the mix of personal growth, there is a recipe for a bridge connecting people to their higher selves and spirituality via digital enhancements much like the ability of lower income people to gain financial wealth because they have a cell phone and a large network of contacts.

It may seem a bit much on the surface to add anything else to this recipe for divine experience, but even the sweetest of cakes needs a little frosting. With that said, I also find the electromagnetic spectrum and all it encompasses fascinating. In the grand scheme of things, and from a more philosophical point of view, the spectrum could potentially be “God” and our personal vibrations or spectrum filters, what I like to call our “frequency print,” (like a finger print without the friction ridge…or, a more appropriate name could be ‘latent frequency’ meaning the frequency not yet discovered) could be the determining factor in what we believe.

These many influences from Maslow to my idea of “frequency prints” are not necessarily more than influence in the scheme of this study, but are the underlying catalysts for the processes that led to this point in time and power my desire to establish the concept of Digital Divine. Due to many other factors and influences, I also find myself drawn toward the idea of manipulating visible and audible portions of the spectrum using particular vibrations to enhance the spiritual experience and through some sort of biofeedback, this could become reciprocal. In other words, I want to directly affect brain function using sound and color frequencies to help the audience have a meditative or spiritual experience and record their responses. This desire to create a spiritual tool using sound and color to augment the spiritual growth process could have potential benefits in many areas of study including behavior therapies.

The concept of brain wave manipulation is becoming a booming enterprise from companies wanting to sell a physical sensation created with binaural beats which are brainstem responses to the interaction of two different frequencies heard in either ear. Also, neurological apparatuses like transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) used to stimulate neurons in the brain with electric currents. As for recording brain function, there are a number of means including electroencephalography (EEG) structured to identify variances in brain function or voltage regulation for use in anger management and depression treatments along with many other neurological anomalies.

There are free downloads of brainwave generators that use binaural beats to induce various states of consciousness with minimal artistic influences as well as full scale sleep sounds and meditation tools for sale that use the same technology as the freeware with a better ambient sounds package and marketing campaign that includes nifty cover art. Most of these software sensations are for use by one person with the aid of headphones or electrodes to track the effects of the mind altering tools.

I would like to create a consciousness enhancing experience that can be accessed via mobile devices and internet with stereo headphones for individual mediation and for a group of people in an auditorium setting using these same technologies and ideas but incorporating the brain’s response to color and eliminating the need for extra hardware. I would also like to find a way to capture the response of the audience without the use of wired electrodes. The tools for transmitting information wirelessly are becoming more and more available, but it is a matter of finding the technology to scan an audience without the use of hardware that attaches to the person. If the idea of “frequency prints” is viable, there must be some way to receive the potential broadcast from an individual, but the current information does not acknowledge such a broadcast. But, it may just be undiscovered at this point in time.

Omnispectravision using infrared as a means for full color biological imaging and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) seems to come close to what I am thinking, but is too expensive and not appropriate for scanning large groups of people at one time. However, there is some information on radio telescopes as an imaging tool and extremely low frequency (ELF) antennas and how they work that seems to have some application toward this idea of scanning brain waves, but turning the earth into an antenna and the amplifiers needed to filter out the noise of the planet could cause potential hazards to human molecular structures limiting the ability to utilize this technology even on a “dumbed down” scale. Even if this technology could be converted into a human friendly antenna, it would take too long to create it in the time for this project. With that said, I will have to skip the idea of capturing actual brain responses via frequency receivers for this phase of this quest to connect digitally to the divine. For the purpose of this project the focus will be on the experience itself and will gather anecdotal responses via mobile communications and internet survey at the end of the participant’s experience.


To create the meditation tool for both handheld device and auditorium distribution, I would use simple sine waves created in a program like Sound Forge to make different frequencies. By placing one frequency on the left and one on the right at a difference between 0.5Hz and 20Hz, a binaural beat could be made to play as a background track for a more artistic composition in Acid Pro. The predominant frequency would be in the delta range between 1Hz and 4Hz to maintain a frequency similar to that of deep meditation. To this sound art an added experiment in color theory creating similar vibrations with colors using video and Flash animations would add an extra layer of vibratory texture and involve another of the senses for a more fulfilling experience.

The biggest challenge to bringing color into this equation is the ability to reproduce the same quality of color based on the difference in screen and projector resolutions and intensities among a diverse potential audience. The sound system for an auditorium setting would have to be adjusted so the speakers are on either side of the audience to give a similar effect as wearing headphones and the projector would have to be calibrated and color balanced to guarantee color accuracy. There would also be a need to keep the pitch values within the range of most generic speakers so as not to run into problems with response bandwidth causing sound distortion. In addition the project would have to sustain a frequency or binaural beat long enough to entrain the audience brainwaves to match in order to enable a meditative state of mind potentially creating a spiritual experience for at least some members of the audience. The expectation would be to produce an altered state of consciousness likened to meditation or the deep sense of focus attained while watching an engrossing movie.

The information gathered from this project will be added to a supporting base of research including a look at spirituality and practice from a rituals point of view including a personal, comprehensive definition of spirituality and spiritual experience, current trends for the digital connection to mysticism, and future projections for where we may be heading, both from the stand point of technology and the role it may play in the quest for connectedness to the greater whole.


Spirituality and practice from a ritual and historic perspective

Within the framework of historical reference I will briefly examine various world practices and beliefs including the major monotheistic religions and the ritual of prayer along with eastern practices of meditation and fasting for heightened spirituality. There are also countless rituals within Native American tribes that use consciousness altering substances to achieve higher states of spiritual connection. In contrast to direct spirituality or faith, but within the context of practice is Aristotle’s Metaphysics which outlines a practice of intellectual progression and tends to eliminate the need for faith or spirituality while maintaining a stance on the need for connection to “God” as a defining factor in the sensation of the power of the soul. With this in mind and looking back to Abraham Maslow, the process of achieving a state of higher being is in itself a state of spiritual development.

By examining the various rituals within each of these systems of thought and evaluating their potential contributions to the overall human experience as deriving connectivity thru progressive introspection I propose to show how they relate to each other and translate into digital media and the idea of Digital Divine.

What are Spirituality and/or spiritual experiences and how does the term “God” fit in as a defining entity?

My definition of spirituality is a state of consciousness beyond the confines of one’s own physical being relating to the mind as separate from the body and connected to a greater whole affecting one’s current physical circumstances as well as the collective experience of what it is to be in harmony with a divine energy on a global and possibly universal level. This state of consciousness is an experience of the individual and can manifest as a deep consciousness of self in relation to the world or as what some people would call a religious experience such as “seeing God” or receiving “messages” in daily life that lead the person down a particular path in life. The “experience” can be as simple as the pleasure derived from watching a favorite movie or listening to a favorite song. It can also manifest as a state of being like when someone achieves a high state of mind when doing good deeds for others or the sensation of “stopping to smell the roses.” Sometimes the simple pleasures in life are the most profound spiritual experiences and have nothing to do with the religion or dogmatic ritual. These spiritual experiences are based on the individual’s belief system and subject to the dogma of the governing structure and can be experienced by multiple people in the same organization in different ways. One person can smell a rose and think of “God” while another smells the same rose and thinks of their deceased spouse and the day they walked through the garden holding hands. Both experiences are spiritual, yet they are individual and unpredictable.

Although these experiences are based on individual beliefs and circumstances, they are still susceptible to external exploitation via spectral manipulation. This manipulation can come from a variety of places. A good marketing campaign feeds off this spectral manipulation by producing ads that will affect the audience knowing that each person will experience a feeling or thought based on the sounds and images. Those thoughts do not all have to say the exact same thing, but as long as they are within a range of “good” or “bad” the product will benefit from the campaign. Another example of this spectral manipulation includes the “vibe” of a charismatic leader. The energy emitted by a strong personality can sway the audience to believe just about anything. If this were not true we wouldn’t have an issue with cults and mass suicide. This potential manipulation can also come in the form of resonant media in relation to tuning and filtering of electromagnetic frequencies. By removing the noise, the message or experience is enabled and flows freely from transmitter to receiver allowing for the individual to have their own experience.

I use the term “God” to express an entity that is often the subject of religious belief or worship and is the entity many people wish to reach and seek approval from via spiritual practice. It is also used as a universal term to describe a variety of monotheistic entities including Judeo/Christian and Islamic religions. I prefer to use the term “Aka” (also known as… pronounced Ah-Kah) but for the purposes of this paper will continue to use the term “God” for broader acceptance and understanding of the concepts herein.

Current Trends
As I explore current trends and digital connectivity or spiritual enhancement, I will look at the idea of divine experiences through mobile technologies including fun and games like The Journey to Wild Divine which uses biofeedback as an interface for navigation through a mystical world to gain insight and self control for a spiritually enhancing experience. I will also investigate the quality of consciousness accessible via mobile music, literature and other forms of digital art like video podcasts. Furthermore, I will address the influx of commercial enterprises capitalizing on the desire for spiritual connection such as divination sites like Tarot.com where a person can ask questions of the Oracle and for a price gain wisdom and answers to their deepest, most personal issues. Brain Sync is also selling enhanced mental, physical and spiritual health via brainwave therapies to an increasing number of individuals seeking ways to augment their personal growth and spiritual superiority.

With these technologies are expanded passageways for anonymous worship and experiences of the divine via mobile technologies and Internet. This can also encompass a wide variety of outlets including blogs like Coffee House Christianity and other non-identifying means of readership and worship like Beliefnet’s daily horoscope and religious wisdoms via cell phone that create non-threatening, private access to devotion and meditative practice through interactive, non-personal means.

I will also contemplate the closing of the digital divide (at least on a local level) due to mobile technologies making Internet contact more affordable to a broader audience. This is evident in the increasing number of individuals in the United States owning cell phones in all income brackets including poverty level. This proliferation of digital access also creates an environment for spiritual connectedness in terms of Digital Divine.

Future Projections
Cell phones with biofeedback sensors in the casing to track heart rate and oxygen levels for use with meditation programs and for remote tracking systems are just around the corner. Soon, a person will be able to hike to the top of a mountain, watch and listen to a meditation tool on the screen of their pocket PC and track their real time responses via satellite. In the more distant future I will consider the possibilities of brainwave manipulation and the divine connection using advancements in technologies like electroencephalography, binaural beats, ELF antennae, modified versions of radio telescopes as a way to see yourself having a spiritual experience, satellite transmission and receivers and the continuing proliferation of mobile devices and potentials for their mutation into radio receiver/transmitters implanted directly into the brain enabling visual and auditory experiences without the need for external apparatus as well as body function monitoring as a reciprocal tool in consciousness management.

Looking at this from a standpoint of using mobile technologies as a conduit for this digital, divine connection and incorporating a way to track a person’s physical response to the experience could have beneficial effects for the participant and a potential for commercial use in various therapeutic environments.

The search begins… Literature and media review
What is God, where can I find it, and why am I here? These are all questions that have plagued the minds and souls of humans throughout history. I’m not talking about the dogmatic search for a church or the religious containment of belief and behavior. This is more about the collective tendency for humans to seek out and establish a relationship with a higher power or entity. Whether for salvation or enlightenment, the quest crosses geographical, racial, and economic boundaries and in the age of computers, Internet and mobile forms of digital media, the expansion of passageways to the divine has increased creating new ways to worship and made accessible a personal and individual digital connection with “God” no matter what religion encompasses the believer.

This quest for connection is being fed by the technological advances in mobile and other media making access to information and ideas readily available to a cross cultural/ economic audience of inquisitive people searching for an explanation for how things work, and multilevel information processing such as described in the term infoverse as both an idea of a universe of expanding information as established by Argy Krikelis from Brunel University and new technology for liquid browsing developed by Carsten Waldeck from Darmstadt University for Media System Design. Conceptually, these two systems of thought, one spawned from the other, support the framework for my concept of Digital Divine. In other terms, this quest for “God” is continually expanding our understanding and making way for more need to sift through the plethora of information to see what we want and not lose what we had. This information storage and retrieval system is at least in terms of spiritual quest in need of a system to manage the immense database and filter out the junk and viral propagation of useless information.

A neutral gateway to meditation and spiritual connection is the needed interface to filter out the noise of so many ideas and allow the individual to experience their own spirituality without outside agendas and propaganda interfering with the process. Sound and color theory may have the answers when used in conjunction with mobile technologies. The study of binaural beats and other theories of sound coupled with the energy experienced when applied color theory is added to the experience could potentially change a person’s state of consciousness, ultimately leading to the answer to closing the divide between people and the digital, divine experience.

In Jennifer Cobb’s CyberGrace: The Search for God in the Digital World, the link between god’s creation of us and our creation of machines like computers are one in the same and thus the connection between cyberspace and God are inherent.

"Living a life informed by the sacred amid a technological world poses our
greatest spiritual challenge. As we begin to actively engage this challenge, we
often come to believe that we must make a choice — spirit or machines. But as
computers…have shown us, distinctions such as this are becoming increasingly
difficult to make. Nature has spawned us. We have spawned machines. Any line
drawn between these realms quickly becomes arbitrary, a realization that seems
to generate a great deal of confusion and fear. But this does not have to be the
case. As we reach into the future in search of the age-old spiritual values of
truth, beauty, goodness, and love, cyberspace can be a powerful ally. Through
the medium of computation, our spiritual experience can be extended in profound
ways. We can choose to embrace our cohabitation with computers as a moment of
vast evolutionary potential, guided by sacred experience and ethical
reflection."

Cybergrace has many anecdotal accounts of digital experiences and gives great examples of digital media as a divine or spiritual experience. Along with being a great way to look at human/computer interface Cobb’s almost mystical account of experiences and understanding of the connection between spirituality and digital media is what I wanted to write for my own thesis, but obviously she has already done it, so I will expound on her thoughts and create my own divine experience.

Some of the literature I have found counters my ideas of a divine energy and present information “proving” ideas of spiritual experiences found in the brain as dysfunction and psychological disorder. One article in particular Searching for God in the Brain from Scientific American actually refers to spirituality as “Mystical Misfirings” and relates religious experiences to epileptic seizures.

It is important to keep all sides of the issue of spirituality in consideration when exploring the possibilities for divine connection through digital media. The numbers of believers in some sort of spiritual entity or essence is large, but it is not absolute in all humans. According to The Harris Poll® #90, December 14, 2005, only 82 percent of Americans believe in God. These findings do not necessarily include spirituality in general and some belief systems do not include “God” in the terminology. So, for this study, the term collective will be used to describe the vast numbers of people who believe in something.

Finding literature with information to justify the idea of scanning people’s frequencies in the manner I wish to do it is proving to be a difficult task. The manipulation of brainwaves and the harnessing of them for neurological research is by far the most relative for the topic of inquiry and the easiest to find articles and studies on. There are many articles and existing products that capture brain waves for imaging, but most are done with electrodes that contact the people being scanned. There are some wireless apparatus that are being used for game interface and bio feedback, but the subject still has to mount a headset or put something on their body and the only thing I have found that scans biological organisms from a distance are studies from Harvard University using infrared as a means to detect breast cancer among other things.

The idea of hard-wiring a person to change or enhance the consciousness is a concept that has been researched for years by various individuals and organizations like Cyberkinetics and the BrainGate Neural Interface System, a device being designed to help motor-impaired people control objects like computers, telephones and other machines in their environment. The wired consciousness is also the subject of many science fiction works like William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer and the science fiction thriller The Matrix by Larry and Andy Wachowski. It even finds its way into lyrics and song titles like The Psycho-Social, Chemical, Biological And Electro-Magnetic Manipulation Of Human Consciousness by Jedi Mind Tricks.


There are many articles on radio telescopes and infrared technologies that demonstrate the potential to have a reciprocal engagement with a digital experience in relation to biofeedback but the scope of how to do it is difficult to comprehend. The problem is engineering the system structure so as not to cause major brain damage or cause cancer among the people experiencing or creating the experience of “God.” The idea of scanning an audience to create a two-way audio/visual experience is proving to be a much greater endeavor than originally anticipated. The other potential problem with some of the ideas for reciprocal experience is that they may have an application for military use and could potentially usurp any altruistic qualities of my original intent. Think about it…what if you could identify an individual’s frequency in a crowd? What if we each have a frequency identity like a fingerprint? What started out as a mystical idea for experiencing spirituality in a new way could potentially be used to find Osama in a playground!

The use of color and the science behind it has been explored by artists, scientists, philosophers and many other people throughout time. As explained in Color by Paul Zelanski and Mary Pat Fisher, Aristotle’s recognition of color interactions and relation to light from sun and fire were mere precursors to the further studies of people like Leonardo da Vinci and his observations of simultaneous contrast and the added studies of Sir Isaac Newton and his experiments with light to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s contestation of Newton’s theories taking the process back to a visual phenomenon.

Another resource for experiments and applications in color theory is Professor John J. Stapleton, a contemporary scientist and color theorist from Harvard University exploring non-visible portions of the color spectrum for use in health technologies as well as security and military applications.

The plethora of resources for binaural beat study is phenomenal and the resources for information on how to create them are plenty. Hemi-Sync and Brain Sync are two different companies incorporating the use of binaural beats as a method to entrain the brain to achieve altered states of consciousness for a variety of uses from diet control to relaxation and depression treatments. The Monroe Institute is a non-profit research organization using sound to create altered states of consciousness for what they determine to be altruistic endeavors to help humanity. Using separate sounds to create a unifying frequency, they hope to contribute to the wellness of their consumers.

“The sensation of auditory binaural beats occurs when two coherent sounds of
nearly similar frequencies are presented one to each ear with stereo headphones
or speakers. The brain integrates the two signals; producing a sensation of a
third sound called the binaural beat. Binaural beats originate in the
brainstem's superior olivary nucleus, the site of contralateral integration of
auditory input.
The binaural beat is neurologically conveyed to the reticular
formation which uses neurotransmitters to initiate changes in brain-wave
activity”

Conclusion
Spirituality is a requisite for self actualization and through digital technologies humans can evolve on a material and spiritual level. The abundance of mobile communications in the form of cell phones and pocket PCs is making digital connections to divine experiences readily available to a cross section of economic and cultural groups potentially closing the divide between those with technology and digital spiritual experiences and those without. This expanded connectivity is heightening our ability to explore and understand our desire to connect with the greater whole and is ultimately changing the processes for how we communicate with others and our consciousness. This search for God in the digital age is the foundation for the Digital Divine.








Project Goals
Establish a framework within contemporary study to define and justify the idea of Digital Divine.
Articulate the potentials of digital media as a spiritual outlet and/or conduit for greater understanding.
Determine the essence of a spiritual experience.
Create a digital audio/visual project to represent the theory of Digital Divine.
Outline/Timeline
Contact advisor for guidance by mid October 2007- (complete)
Organize initial source materials into past, present and future by end of October 2007 - (complete)
Ready rough draft of proposal by November 2007 for feedback –(complete)
Implement feedback and refine sources by December 2007
Select committee by January 2008
Thesis Proposal submitted by January 2008
Work on Thesis and project January thru April 2008
Refine and submit Thesis and project May 2008

And just in case...

Just in case you felt like reading more: This interesting nugget popped up on Wired about a Gitmo SOP manual that leaked via wiki. Yet another way Digital Media affects politics.

thesis answers from Trace

Hi All.

In response to some of the questions raised last class here are some answers from Trace:

Once they turn their proposal do all of their committee members comment on it?

Project: the sole advisor approves the draft, then sends it along to the graduate committee (Tim, Rafael, and myself -- though not me this year; you (me Adrienne)). All feedback via email.

Thesis: the entire committee needs to review the thesis proposal, and then a meeting with these members is scheduled for feedback.

How long do they have to rewrite the proposal?

As long as they need, but they need to have the proposal approved the quarter before they start work on the thesis or project; or, if they're taking project or thesis hours during winter quarter, then at least approved within the first two weeks of the winter quarter. In the past, students have often spent too long on revising the proposal rather than on the project itself.

Once they turn in the thesis/ project do they usually have to do re-writes before it is approved?

Not usually. Only in a few cases have I seen this: minor revisions for the thesis; projects are just graded after the presentation and very rarely require further revision (in my own experience), but this is between the individual student and the sole project advisor.

And you can take all of your thesis credits in the same quarter.

Hope this helps!

danah boyd notes that hand writing is cumbersome

It's funny that danah boyd has posted today about the annoyances of writing by hand on the same day we discussed it. I'm much more adept at writing by hand in the right physical conditions (soft, sharp-pointed, mechanical pencil or fine point sharpie on smooth, low grit, medium weight paper), and less adept at typing on my Macbook than my old broken iBook (I can't get used to how far apart the keys are - I have tiny hands).

Read, Read!!

Okay so I have lots of choices. You don't have to read them ALL. But please have a decent read of the Jenkins and Postman chapters, skim the first part of the chapter for No Sense Of Place (it's ridic long, and I actually like you people, I don't want to kill you all by reading-death.)

Also please read the Blogosphere chapter -- it really fits in with blogging as a sharing/political tool.

There are also two short articles which are kinda fun and interesting. One of them even mentions Dick Cheney! Everyone likes a murderer!

Please keep in mind future repercussions of these things and what we may learn from them through extension; how they can apply to one another, and how they may (or may not) apply to communication on the campaign trail

Some of these are rather large...sorry :-(

Have Fun!

Citizen 2.0

Social Networked Politics

No Sense Of Place

Jenkins: Photoshop For Democracy

Blogosphere: An American Soldier

Postman: Reach Out And Elect Someone