Cellphones and the Paranormal January 12, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite , trackback
Beach this last weekend enjoyed re-reading one of the greatest books ever written on the supernatural, Andrew Lang’s Cock Lane and Common-Sense (1894). Lang, an extremely learned Victorian Scot, has a simple position. There are, he believed, a core of paranormal experiences that repeat themselves in every culture at every time: invisible knocking, levitation, throwing stones, strange whirring sounds… Lang discards the filters that different societies use to understand these phenomenon – fairylore, poltergeists, witchcraft, and spiritualism (which Lang despised)… – and concentrates on the phenomena themselves without offering any explanation as to what is behind them. He is also extremely good at showing how we in our descriptions likely just hear about the iceberg tip of cases: for example, he argues, convincingly, that had John and Samuel Wesley not become famous in the eighteenth century we would not have any record of the most famous of all eighteenth-century bogeys, Jeffrey.
Beach, ever a small ‘s’ sceptic, finds all these arguments seductive. He likes Lang’s style, his tone, his lack of certainties: he loved the data collected together and the easy but ultimately convincing coupling of Neo-Platonists with Amerindian shamans. But while reading the books Beach was struck by a problem with the evidence that Lang has amassed, but that Lang had not anticipated and that is the march of modern technology. If you live today in a western country then the majority of your neighbours carry around with them a phone. These phones can record both audio and video and most of the population, practically all of the population between ten and sixty, has them. Lang’s argument that certain paranormal events are found everywhere are convincing: though whether they are paranormal is a nice question. Lang’s argument that this stuff is going on all the time is much more difficult to sustain though given that most of us now carry around the means to record strange events; and then there are the tens of thousands of cc cameras that litter our streets and buildings. Let’s take levitation, a paranormal event that Beach has real problems with. We have witness accounts that Saint Joseph of Cupertino (patron saint of aviators). Here is a description of one of his ecstasies:
When he entered the church, Joseph’s eyes fell on an image of Mary, and he was transported by ecstatic prayer and rose more than ten feet off the ground and flew over the heads of those present to the statue of Mary. After praying there, he flew back to the doors of the church and returned to his cell. This story was captured in depositions from eyewitnesses that were gathered for Joseph’s cause for canonization.
If this happened today, even the priest would be able to snap out his phone and video the event. So why is this not happening? There are few possible answers: (i) they are being recorded, just go to youtube; (ii) these paranormal events do not, in any normal sense, exist; (iii) paranormal events used to happen but have now ceased [see KMH below]; (iv) the presence of recording equipment prevents these events. Beach imagines that the correct answer is (i) or (ii) though watching levitations on youtube is not a very impressive experience. Any other views on this? Drbeachcombing.
The above was written with great modesty: I’m genuinely curious. I imagine that the existence of cellphones must have had a major impact in many ‘Fortean’ areas including cryptozoology and UFO-ology?
23 Jan 2016: KHM writes ‘In explaining the lack of modern levitation episodes you left out one reason: the general decline in religion around the globe. Levitation is, I believe, a religious phenomenon experienced in different religions, but only by the extremely devout. We shouldn’t expect to see it openly today, as with the case of St. Joseph of Cupertino, but there might be more hope for cloistered convents or monasteries inaccessible to the public eye. Any cases of non-religious levitation would be of interest.
Bruce T on a radio show I wish I’d heard: I was up the other morning listening to one of America’s middle of the night radio call in radio shows of the strange. They were talking about the same subject. The guest noted that in the roughly 20 years since phones with cameras had came on the market, photo’s of the strange in fact were going down, and quite sharply. This perplexed both guest and host but only for a moment. Quickly they intuited aliens, ghosts, and otherworldly cryptids had in fact adapted to human high-tech and were taking measures via technical glitches and mind control to make there presence here less detectable. Therefore the fewer aliens you see the more there are. William of Occam would have been proud.
Andrew wrote in 31 Dec 2016, with this for another post but it seemed more at home here?
I just read your post from 2012 about the Leprechauns of Liverpool and it prompted some thoughts about the effect that ubiquitous smartphones will have on the perception of paranormal phenomena. The children of Liverpool who thought they’d seen Leprechauns had no means of recording what they saw. In many countries, it is now odd for someone to not be carrying a mobile phone that is capable of recording pictures and video. The trend is towards everyone everywhere having such a device on their person at all times. This means that any genuine anomalous phenomenon with any physical manifestation, however rare it may be, will eventually be captured on video. It’s a question of “when” not “if”. It also means that anyone who reports an anomalous experience will increasingly be expected to provide evidence. Any explanations for why they didn’t have a phone with them at the time or couldn’t use it for some reason will increasingly be seen as proof that it’s a hoax. As the modern saying goes, pics or it didn’t happen. I suggest that this will have a significant effect on which pieces of folklore continue to be transmitted and which ones are discounted and forgotten. The survivors will be the ones that involve purely mystical experiences that cannot be recorded on camera. Any anomalous phenomena that are reliably recorded will pass out of the realm of folklore and into the realm of natural science.
