Hyperlink Report: Tech as Religion

The best way to summarize White Noise by Don DeLillo is it is a book that discusses the fear of death in a modern technological world. The man character is a man named Jack, who is a professor of Hitler studies at the local university. The novel begins with the beginning of the semester and follows Jack in various instances of his everyday life. These chapters are very brief and feel like snapshots into the life of Jack more then they feel like a coherent narrative. One of the minor detail in these snapshots that becomes a major plot point further along in the novel is the discussions that Jack has with his Wife, Babette, about there fear of death and who they would prefer dies first. One of the more significant instances where death and technology are confronted in this first fragmented section of the book is when Jack sees his wife Babette teaching a class on the television. When he first sees the image of his wife he begins to ask himself “What was she doing there?...Was she dead, missing disembodied? Was this her spirit, her secret self, some two dimensional facsimile released by the power of technology, set free to glide through wavebands…?” (page 102). This internal dialogue that Jack has with himself over the true nature of his wife’s presence on the screen presents the larger dialogue that he continuously has in his mind. The question of how much of a person can technology actually capture and how much of it is really real and will be able to stand in place of someone when they do eventually die? Is an important question that this small moment in the novel really makes Jack take a step back and contemplate death and its physical imprint on modern day life. Every other small snapshot before this moment almost seems random, or could be ordered in a different way without effecting the narrative of the story, however, it is significant that this event takes place when it does in the novel because immediately following it is the Airborne Toxic Event.

The Airborne Toxic Event changes the format of the novel, no loner is it quick snapshots into the life of jack but it is now a more cohesive story that clearly has a cause and effect relationship. The Airborne Toxic Event changes Jacks life from merely speculating death, to coming in direct contact with it since because he had prolonged exposure to the billowing black cloud while pumping gas was put at risk for death, since it was unknown the exact effect of the chemical that was what the cloud was comprised of.

The rest of the novel deals more overtly with his fear of death and his various attempts to conquer this fear. In the end he decides that having authority over the life of another human is the way in which to finally conquer this fear and he goes to kill the man his wife had an affair with, however his plan changes and he doesn’t not kill the man only shoots him and then drives him to a hospital. The knowledge that he could have killed the man was enough for him to feel that he had the ultimate control of that man’s mortality. Yet despite Jack’s ultimate decision of how to conquer his fear, the novel presents other situations for dealing with ones fear of death, one being the over saturation of technology in ones life.

This novel presents technology as a way of escapism and a way of losing oneself and outing complete control in the technology. The children are shown as the model of who to follow when trying to escape ones fear of death, yet the children and entirely consumed in technology of every sort. When the Toxic event occurs the children listen to the radio to find out what is going on and learn some of the various side effects, soon after they begin to develop the side effects not because they were exposed but because that is what the radio said they were suppose to have. As one conversation Jack has with one of his scholarly coworkers puts it “This is the whole point of technology. It creates, an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature…Give yourself up to it Jack. Believe in it” (page 272). In this sense technology has become a new religion a new way of putting ones faith in something as a way to subside the fear. This message of complete faith in technology comes are a warning to future generation to not become so blindly attached to technology that they develop a cult like reliance on it, yet it also offers hope to the older generations that even if religion seems to be dying out, technology will replace religion with a new place to place ones beliefs so that the fear of death can be dealt with and subsided.