Pixilated Practices: Media, Ritual, and Identity

Media is a big part of our lives. We see and hear it everywhere. In this book Miller demonstrates how media has taken the place of ritual(s). Our everyday lives are constantly facilitated by media rituals. This media ritual process exists regardless of its content and is a phenomenon that overcomes our subjective experience with a constant flux of representations and seduction. Memory and mind are in a perpetual process of re-imaging, distortion, and violence. Human relationships can be comprised of sheer information sharing from any distance around the globe. The objective world around us is experienced and interpreted through the virtual worlds we are forced to participate in. The dialectic is barred and the flood of media images captures us in the univocal. Persons then understand that truth comes from their singular, isolated, and violated self. Therefore, the body in the real world feels foreign and we feel dissociated and anxious, reaching in a vain attempt for more media to fill and restore our bodily and spiritual needs. Our personhood and everything that we are lie under the influence of this media ritual process.

Christopher Peyton Miller has advanced degrees in biblical studies, humanities and culture, religion, and interdisciplinary studies. His particular areas of interest include psychoanalytic theory, linguistics, East/West studies, and continental philosophy. He has been published in The Family Journal, The International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Creative Transformation, and the International Journal of Complexity and Leadership Management. His most important role and greatest joy is spending time with his loving wife and three young children.