In his book TechnoGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, cultural critic Erik Davis argues that technology -- no matter how dependent we are on it today -- has not squelched the irrational kind of thoughts we usually relate to myths, magic and mysticism.

When discussing his book with members of the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, one of the world's oldest virtual communities, he said the idea that the dominance of technology signifies the rationality of modern civilization is just "propaganda".

"We have lived in technological cultures for far longer than we have lived in rationalist ones," Davis said.

In the United States, his statement may sound controversial. But in Indonesia, a country formerly known by Western travelers as the exotic "East Indie", whose inhabitants were believed to practice witchcraft, the overlap of mysticism and technology is now the norm.

In May this year, people in Sumatra were haunted by the so-called "SMS santet", a kind of evil sorcery sent via text messages on cell phones.

A rumor quickly spread across the country that a text message received from numbers starting with 0866 and 0666 could turn the color of a cell phone's screen red and kill the person who received it.

The police and religious leaders called on the public to stay calm, saying it was just a hoax -- but at the same time, the media fueled the terror by reporting stories of alleged "victims"; those who were fooled by tricksters.

Heru Sutadi, a member of the Indonesian Telecommunications Regulatory Body (BRTI), said the rumor epitomized the prevailing mystical worldview among many Indonesians.

For that reason, he said, celebrity psychics like Javanese mystic Ki Joko Bodo, gypsy clairvoyant Mama Lauren and illusionist Deddy Corbuzier began to use text message services to advertise their divine abilities.

"People still believe in these kinds of things," Sutadi told The Jakarta Post.

With the number of cell phone users expected to exceed 120 million by the end of this year, and with text message-services accounting for around 25 percent of telecommunication operators' revenue, "digital fortunetelling" is strangely a lucrative, untapped market in the country's IT industry.

Ki Joko Bodo, in cooperation with Xing Mobile, claimed to have received about 70,000 text messages within two weeks of starting up his service. The price of one "mystical" message is Rp 2,000 (2 US cents).

"Our service is available on all operators' networks," Ki Joko, who studied economy at Yogyakarta-based Cokroaminoto University while delving into Javanese mysticism, told the Post.

"People ask me about many things. Some people ask for advice on how to mend their love lives and others want to know when would be a good day to hold an important event.

"I once received a message from someone who had suffered an incurable illness for a long time, and he asked me when he would die. I told him, 'that depends on God'," he laughed.

Gone are the days when Indonesians had to sneak around to meet soothsayers; today they are only a text message away.

The public in general are cynical toward -- and even extremely displeased by -- such a backward phenomenon, as it is against the teachings of established religions, especially Islam, which considers witchcraft another form of idolatry, hence a major sin.

The Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI) restricted the advertisements for Ki Joko's divination text-message service as well as Mama Lauren's and Corbuzier's for "misleading" consumers and "ignoring religious values".

"The BRTI and KPI members are now still evaluating such businesses," Sutadi said, hinting at the possibility his agency would put an end to the whole practice as it violated an article in the 1999 Telecommunication Law, which prohibits the exploitation of IT that causes civic unrest.

He said the clairvoyants' TV advertisements misled people by saying that a text message could "change people's lives" or, quoting Corbuzier, that "a phone number chooses people, not the other way around".

"It does not make any sense. How does it relate to our lives? It is definitely misleading and disadvantageous to gullible consumers," he said.

Tito Imanda, an anthropologist from the University of Indonesia, said there was a missing process in cultural evolution in Indonesian society.

Quoting Marshall McLuhan's notion that the mode of communication affects the cognition and cultural institutions of a society, he said many Indonesians had leaped from an oral, pre-alphabetic, tribal culture to an electronic culture, without first passing the visual, alphabetic and print culture where they could develop rational thinking.

The electronic culture, he said, was a quasi-return to the oral-culture, where individualism is replaced by collectivity of a "global village". Therefore, the media, or technology itself, had preserved -- if not revived -- people's mystical worldview.

"The thing is, during the oral stage, mysticism is not a commodity. In the digital era, it becomes one," Tito, who studied media culture at New York University, said.

Ki Joko said he did not mind if the BRTI decided to prohibit his text-message business, and that he had become accustomed to dealing with rational skeptics who regarded his clairvoyant ability as nonsense.

"I believe everything happens because of an immortal energy. You write because of that energy, an energy that cannot be seen by your naked eye," he said.

He said banning would only make people more curious about him and would not erase the existence of mystical beliefs.

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