My favorite work of fiction, hands down and bar none, is Neil Gaiman’s book, “American Gods.” Like a perfect pop song, Gaiman weaves a perfectly crafted tale that is both full of meaning and incredibly accessible and entertaining. Fans spent years waiting for it to be made into a movie, and when the television show hit cable it was an instant hit, even though it didn’t follow the book with entire faithfulness.
The basic premise of the work remains intact — that the gods of yore, Odin, Anubis, Anansi, Bilquis and others, are being challenged by the “new gods.” These new gods — Media, Technical Boy, Mister Town, among others, represent a potential “new order” in the universe, and the action leads up to a final standoff, in which the main character, Shadow, is being set up by Odin to play a part.
Gaiman’s work mines an interesting idea — gods are who we sacrifice things to, and make the worship bargain with, and it stands to reason then, that that which we give precious things to, like time and attention, can eventually become our deities. So in an age where we offer so much time and attention to things like computers and cellphones and Netflix, and where so much of our human interaction is filtered through social media, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions about technology and its role in our world. Is it tool or taskmaster? Does technology have…
