A Model Media Ecologist

2012-01-24T23:41:00.001-05:00

Reality Sinks In...

2012-01-16T09:44:00.002-05:00

2012-01-10T23:59:00.004-05:00

Executive Severance Jacket Copy

2011-11-08T14:22:00.001-05:00

"A He Dunit. Sometimes a little verbose, but OMG this is the best twitstery I ever read. It's got everything: narrative drive, mystery, comedy, thrills, tension, laughs. Blechman is on to something, a genre as important to literature as the invention of haiku in rhyme. ..."
- Marvin Kitman, author of The Man Who Would Not Shut Up - The Rise of Bill O’Reilly

"A delightful 'twitstery' - a mystery written in real time Tweets - that is compelling, entertaining, and shows off what can be done in the 140-character form with style and mastery. Blechman's delight in the language shows in every tweet - that is to say, every thread of the story. His plot is tight, tingling, and diverting. Poe would have been proud of the new form Blechman has given to the mystery story."
- Paul Levinson, author of New New Media and The Plot to Save Socrates

"Embracing the challenges found in publishing via the medium Twitter, Bob Blechman’s super silly story Executive Severance is stuffed with punny dialogue, clever character conditions, and a total lack of adherence to the old “rules” of storytelling. It’s a meaty tale told in deliciously rare, bite-sized chunks that I’d recommend for consumption to anyone hungering for fiction that satisfies. Well-done, Bob!"
- Michelle Anderson, author of The Miracle in July - a digital love story.

"Executive Severance, a laugh out loud comic mystery novel, epitomizes our current cultural moment in that it is born from the juxtaposition of authorial invention and technological communication innovation. Merging creative text with new electronic context, Robert K. Blechman's novel, which originally appeared as Twitter entries, can be read on a cell phone. His tweets which merge to form an entertaining novel can't be beat. Hold the phone; exalt in the mystery--engage with Blechman's story which signals the inception of a new literary art form."
-Marleen S. Barr, author of Envisioning the Future: Science Fiction and the Next Millennium

"Executive Severance" has been compared to Shakespeare, Proust and Joyce in that it is a tragedy they'd rather not remember that has driven them to drink. One review called it riveting in the sense of nine inch nails being driven into your skull.

Summary: Limited to 140 characters to confess his sins and meet his Maker, "tweeting" may not have been the best use of Willum Granger's final moments.

Media at the Center - A McLuhan Centenary Symposium

2011-09-16T15:00:00.000-05:00

Media at the Center
A McLuhan Centenary Symposium
Fordham University Lincoln Center Campus
McNally Auditorium
Law School Building
140 W. 62nd Street, Between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues
New York, New York
September 17, 2011
Free and Open to the Public

9:00-10:30 AM McLuhan at Fordham: A Roundtable Discussion

Moderator: Lance Strate, Fordham University

Panelists: John Carey, Fordham University
Jacqueline Egan, QD Healthcare Group
Pete Fornatale, WFUV
Anthony Perrotto, Independent Video Producer
Paul Ryan, New School for Social Research

10:30-11:00 AM Break

11:00-12:00 AM McLuhan and Theology

Moderator: John M. Phelan, Fordham University

Presentation: "Marshall McLuhan's Theological Anthropology"
Joseph Kim, Lancaster Bible College

Discussants: Babette Babich, Fordham University
Eric McLuhan, University of Toronto
Paul Ryan, New School for Social Research

12:00-1:30 PM Break

1:30-3:00 PM McLuhan and New Media

Moderator: Janet Sternberg, Fordham University

Presentations: "Digital McLuhan"
Paul Levinson, Fordham University

"Understanding New Media"
Robert K. Logan, Ontario College of Art and Design

"Confessions of a Would-Be Twitter
Novelist"
Robert Blechman, St. George's University

3:00-3:30 PM Break

3:30 PM-4:30 PM Keynote Address

Moderator: Andrew McLuhan

"Media and Formal Cause"
Eric McLuhan, University of Toronto

4:30 PM-5:00 PM Reception and Book Signing
for Media and Formal Cause
by Marshall and Eric McLuhan

5:00-7:00 PM Break

7:00 PM Media at the Center

Moderator: Lance Strate, Fordham University

Screening: The Gutenberg Galaxy
1961 television program
produced in Detroit by Gary Gumpert

Panelists: Daniel Czitrom, Mount Holyoke College
Paul Grosswiler, University of Maine
Gary Gumpert, Urban Communication Foundation
Joshua Meyrowitz, University of New Hampshire
Dominique Scheffel-Dunand, University of Toronto

Secondary Literacy

2011-09-05T19:55:00.000-05:00

I use the term "Secondary Literacy" to describe the cultural transformation being wrought by our interaction with the Internet. With a nod to Walter J. Ong, I am suggesting that the literacy demands of the Internet have required denizens of our Secondary Orality culture to revisit some of the tropes of primary literacy. This new type of literacy is shaped by influences of the electronic media just as Secondary Orality was not quite the same as Primary Orality.

If generations prior to my parents learned to read before they learned to attend to electronic media, and if my generation and generations going forward first learned to attend to electronic media before we learned to read, what of the generation that learns via web-connected computers before formal training in literacy?

I don't know exactly what the implications of the new literacy will be, but I think if we can look to changes in belief structures, balance of human senses, even neural brain mapping in the switch from Primary Literacy to Secondary Orality, we can begin to search for similar transformations as our culture moves to Secondary Literacy.

Marshall McLuhan What Are You Doin'?

2011-09-03T10:12:00.003-05:00

To my mind, Marshall McLuhan was doing what many of us in Neil Postman's early NYU Media Ecology program were doing: Trying to create a new language and a new structure for describing the true impact of technology on human society and human psychology. One term that comes to mind is "paradigm switch." Through puns, probes and metaphors McLuhan attempted to define how electronic media put us into a post-print paradigm. One problem: when you're in one paradigm, its hard to see it. Terms like "reductionist," "technological determinist" etc are the ways other people try to describe in their own paradigmatic terms what McLuhan was attempting. They were misinformed.

One reason I always bring up Claude Levi-Strauss (ad nauseam to some peoples minds) is that he also straddled paradigms. In an cultural and intellectual environment where it was easy to describe native peoples as "primitive" Levi-Strauss suggested that they were capable of a sophistication of thought and a nuance of expression through their "mythology" equal to or perhaps greater than our own. That doesn't mean "right," just complex. In his analysis of myths Levi-Strauss stumbled upon a great realization. It was the not content of the myths which contained their true meaning. It was the structure of the total mythic canon which contained the "message." McLuhan knew of Levi-Strauss and admitted his debt to him. (see James M. Curtis "Marshall McLuhan and French Structuralism" Boundary 2 1/1:134-46, 1970 and McLuhan's own note in Technology and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Jan., 1975), 74-78.)

"I don't know who discovered water, but it wasn't a fish" McLuhan was fond of saying. He could have added that whoever did discover water was probably labeled an H2O determinist or an "airhead" by the other water dwellers.

Executive Severance - Introduction

2011-03-15T08:56:00.001-05:00

Confessions of a Would-be Twitter Novelist

“What could be more practical for a man caught between the Scylla of a literary culture and the Charybdis of post-literate technology to make himself a raft of ad copy?” (169 characters) -Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

According to Wikipedia, the Twitter network began is 2006 and as of this writing in 2010 is approaching 200 million users worldwide. (133 characters) By 2009 I realized Twitter was a happening thing and if I didn’t jump on the bandwagon I’d be left behind with my ocarina and tambourine. (137 characters) But how to proceed? I had dabbled in Facebook and MySpace, but this Twitter thing was different. (136 characters) Limited to 140 characters (or less), with no photos, videos or extended links, Twitter conveyed the brief, the inconsequential, the trivial. (140 characters) In other words, the Twitter medium was a perfect vehicle for my literary aspirations. (85 characters)

I conceived a literary experiment: Was it possible to maintain a narrative structure and attract a reading public 140 characters at a time? (139 characters) After 15 months and the more than 800 tweets that make up this Twitter novel, I can say confidently that the answer is “no.” (125 characters)

I adopted the detective genre as the driver for my story because the murder mystery is such a standard part of our popular culture. (131 characters) Would my hero solve the crime? Would he undergo physical and mental trials? Would he get the girl? Would he spawn a publishing franchise? (137 characters) I soon realized that Twitter forced me to adopt the serial techniques of newspaper comic page story telling. (108 characters) To succeed I needed to learn and adopt the narrative strategies of Al Capp or Milton Caniff as well as Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane. (139 characters) How did comic strip authors hold their readers’ attention each day and tell a joke while moving the story forward? (114 characters) How did mystery writers plant clues to direct or misdirect their readers while inexorably leading to the revelatory climax? (123 characters)

I created a new Twitter account “RKBs_Twitstery” as a container for my novel and coined a new term for the Twitter mystery genre. (129 characters) Starting on May 6, 2009 I posted a new Executive Severance tweet twice a day every day for 15 months, never missing a deadline. (127 characters) The 140 character limit required intensive wordsmithing, creative editing, the omission of punctuation in some cases and a lot of counting. (139 characters). I cultivated brevity, concision and obsessive-compulsion. Fortunately, once I completed my writing I was able to leave these habits behind. (139 characters) The cumulative result of my Twitter efforts is collected in the volume you hold in your hands. (94 characters).

Camille Paglia Bashes Claude Levi-Strauss

2009-11-12T15:59:00.002-05:00

In her Salon column this week Camille Paglia spared a few column inches to consider and then completely trash the entire career of Claude Levi-Strauss:

"Continuing on the theme of overrated male writers, I was appalled at the sentimental rubbish filling the air about Claude Lévi-Strauss after his death was announced last week. The New York Times, for example, first posted an alert calling him "the father of modern anthropology" (a claim demonstrating breathtaking obliviousness to the roots of anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and then published a lengthy, laudatory obituary that was a string of misleading, inaccurate or incomplete statements. It is ludicrous to claim that Lévi-Strauss single-handedly transformed our ideas about the "primitive" or that before him there had been no concern with universals or abstract ideas in anthropology.

Beyond that, Lévi-Strauss' binary formulations (like "the raw and the cooked") were a simplistic cookie-cutter device borrowed from the dated linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the granddaddy of now mercifully moribund post-structuralism, which destroyed American humanities departments in the 1980s. Lévi-Strauss' work was as much a fanciful, showy mishmash as that of Joseph Campbell, who at least had the erudite and intuitive Carl Jung behind him. When as a Yale graduate student I ransacked that great temple, Sterling Library, in search of paradigms for reintegrating literary criticism with history, I found literally nothing in Lévi-Strauss that I felt had scholarly solidity.

In contrast, the 12 volumes of Sir James George Frazer's "The Golden Bough" (1890-1915), interweaving European antiquity with tribal societies, was a model of intriguing specificity wed to speculative imagination. Though many details in Frazer have been contradicted or superseded, the work of his Cambridge school of classical anthropology (another of whose ornaments was the great Jane Harrison) will remain inspirational for enterprising students seeking escape from today's sterile academic climate."

Now you know I couldn't let that go unanswered! I posted the following comment:

Bashing Levi-Strauss? Really?

As someone who made your academic bones explicating ad nauseum the opposition between Apollonian and Dionysian, I am surprised that you so blithely dismiss Claude Levi-Strauss. To reduce his massive career to a few-sentence caricature implies that you haven't read him carefully or completely.

Even if its granted that his structural armature was a bit overwrought; even if you discount his visionary explication of Amerindian mythology; even if you deduct from his oeuvre all writings from the 1960’s onwards, at least you can grant him some props for the sense and sensibility of his Tristes Tropiques and let him rest in peace. Just sayin’.

Executive Severance is a Textnovel.Com Editor's Pick!

2009-11-06T23:29:00.006-05:00

I recently submitted my in-progress Twitter novel Executive Severance to a site called Textnovel.com which helps fledgling authors like myself get noticed. I'm happy to announce that my story has become an "Editor's Pick"!

Please go to Textnovel.com and vote for my story.

Claude Lévi-Strauss and Media Ecology

2009-11-04T11:38:00.012-05:00

I recommend two excellent obituaries about Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of Structural Anthrology, who died this past weekend. The New York Times does a good job summarizing his life and times.

The Guardian does a better job explaining the roots of Levi-Strauss' Structural Anthropology and I believe, underscoring its importance to Media Ecology. In particular, Maurice Bloch of The Guardian writes:

The basis of the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss is the idea that the human brain systematically processes organised, that is to say structured, units of information that combine and recombine to create models that sometimes explain the world we live in, sometimes suggest imaginary alternatives, and sometimes give tools with which to operate in it. The task of the anthropologist, for Lévi-Strauss, is not to account for why a culture takes a particular form, but to understand and illustrate the principles of organisation that underlie the onward process of transformation that occurs as carriers of the culture solve problems that are either practical or purely intellectual.

It seems to me that there is an unspoken assumption in Media Ecology that there are no differences in the intellectual capabilities of peoples of different ages or technological achievement. By this I don't mean differences in sensory balances, which may be determined by the particular technologies or media of communication available, but rather differences in the basic structure and capacity of the human mind.

When we use the terms, "oral" or "literate" or "post literate" in lieu of "primitive" or "modern", we are not referring to intellectual complexity or intelligence, but rather the modes of thought, the uses of systems of symbols and the religious, social and psychology outlooks encouraged or discouraged by a media environment. In refusing to see the people of cultures without writing (as he called them) as "primitive" or somehow inferior to Western white races, Lévi-Strauss provided the philosophical foundation for McLuhan, Postman and Ong. In a letter to the journal Technology and Culture in 1975, McLuhan acknowledged his debt to Lévi-Strauss' structural methodology for his own Laws of the Media.

If it is possible to distinguish a "primitive" mind from our own then how could we apply Marshall McLuhan's Laws of the Media universally across all cultures and time periods? We can talk about the sensory impact of different types of communication media in different eras only if we accept that the basic mental equipment and the capacity for intellectual activity we are born with has been the same throughout all human history and everywhere in the world. In his exhaustive analysis of Amerindian mythology, Levi-Strauss put the study of human culture on a scientific basis and his work belongs in our Media Ecology foundational canon along with Lewis Mumford, John Dewey and Edmund Carpenter.

Lévi-Strauss wrote:

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.

Isn't this what we Media Ecologists claim in our own studies of how symbol systems and technologies affect human beliefs and activities? Lévi-Strauss discovered and demonstrated connections between seemingly disparate mythic stories, and offered explanations for seemingly random elements of those stories. His methodology can be used as model for ways to interpret the products of our contemporary culture, which, while seeming to be unrelated, actually constitute our system (or systems) of symbolic meanings.

Rest in peace Professor Lévi-Strauss, and thank you for your life and your work.

New New Media by Paul Levinson

2009-09-09T13:19:00.010-05:00

Allyn & Bacon, 2009. 240 Pages

As an experienced media ecologist and communication scholar, Paul Levinson brings to his new work, New New Media, a keen insight into the effects of computer-based communication forms. Levinson documents his encounters with various contemporary forms including blogging, wikis, podcasts and social sites like Facebook and MySpace. Along with a multitude of examples from actual web experience, Levinson compares and contrasts the “new new” media with traditional media and suggests how widespread adoption of these new forms will affect existing social institutions and attitudes.

Levinson sets the phenomenon of blogging in both an historical and a media ecological context. To properly understand what is happening on the web today, it is necessary to understand the way differing media have influenced information transmittal over human history. Thus the nature of blogging is comprehensible if we understand the pluses and minuses of oral, print and mass media communication and the impact the various stages of communication development have had on social mores and cultural and political movements.

Levinson distinguishes the “new new” media from previous forms (including the “old” new media) by the relative ease of entry for non-professional content producers and the absence of gatekeepers. Anyone with a keyboard, a monitor and a web connection can become a movie mogul, a music megastar, a political pundit, an investigative journalist or a widely-read novelist. If Levinson is right, the various internet based media are dramatically altering our notions of professionalism, consumerism, artistry and performance.

Expertly conversant on the mechanics of blogging, Levinson presents not just a scholarly survey, but also a how-to for aspiring bloggers. He discusses individual and group blogging, the influence (or lack thereof) of blogging gatekeepers, and the monetization of blogging content. In comparing blogs to books, Levinson provides an easy reference point to which both Millennials and Baby-boomers can relate.

Blogging’s influence on our social institutions is still in the state of becoming. For example, as the traditional print and mass media news outlets decline, the potential of blog-based investigative journalists to fill in the void remains to be seen. Levinson’s discussion of bloggers’ 1st Amendment rights is on target, and I’m sure would inspire some interesting online discussions.

This very immediacy may be the only shortcoming of Levinson’s book. The relevance of many of Levinson’s examples, while appropriate for this current edition, may quickly pass out of the public sphere, and therefore out of contextual significance. While we may still be talking about the “Obama Girl” during the next election cycle, other references may not be familiar to readers in 2012. This is both a strength and weakness of Levinson’s use of hyper-current examples. The references illustrate his points well, but their possible fleeting nature may be a hindrance in the long term. Things change so fast that each new edition of the book may require significant re-writing, or perhaps a migration from the printed page to a hyper-text online wiki edition. This may be unavoidable given the nature of the topic.

Today’s twenty-somethings and younger, members of the so-called “Millennial Generation,” inhabit the world depicted by The New New Media. They live in a world where texting, tweeting, blogging, Facebook and MySpace and a myriad of other social media are taken for granted and become the tools used for their interactions with their peers and the outside world. As a member of the “Baby Boomer,” generation, I found myself continually checking out Levinson's references to these various social media on my computer. Levinson is deeply involved in many actual aspects of the “new new” media and documents this in his book. So I have viewed his blog pages, his tweets, listened to some of his podcasts, etc. Though this may seem to non-millenials as an introduction to a disorienting brave new world, Levinson’s down-to-earth discussion of the “new new” media is an effective introduction to the impact of cyberspace structures and institutions on our current media environment.

Today's Rainbow Report

2009-07-27T09:42:00.003-05:00

Yesterday's thunderstorms brought a bit o' luck to members of the Forest Hills Tennis Club. As documented in these unretouched (honestly!) photos taken from my apartment window, it is clear that the pot o' gold was to be found at the club!

Happy Birthday Marshall McLuhan! (7/21/09)

2009-07-22T15:51:00.000-05:00

A Literary Experiment: Twitstery on Twitter

2009-07-17T09:52:00.006-05:00

Since May 6th I have been running a literary experiment on Twitter. I've published, 140 characters at a time, a comic murder mystery. The purpose of the experiment is to see if persistent creation of content leads to an increase in "followers" -- and to have fun while doing it.

For those of you who have just joined us, I am re-publishing here the entire Twitstery story to date. Remember that each of these entries was limited to 140 characters or less (including the #Twitstery hatchtag), that they appeared on average twice daily (so there is a time factor involved) and that I'm no Mickey Spillane. Feel free to continue following me by searching for "rblechman" on Twitter.

My hunch is that this sort of narrative owes more to the funny pages of classical print newspapers than to the long form fiction narratives of Charles Dickens. As such, my guide has been more Al Capp and less Raymond Chandler. And yes, there's a little bit of Inspector Clouseau and of "Police Squad" thrown in there.

Comments, questions, guesses as to who the murderer is are welcome.

Will Revolutionary Geeks and User Generated Content Topple the Ayatollah?

2009-06-16T11:16:00.005-05:00

During the 2008 United States presidential election we experienced the first indication of a previously unknown political media ecology. Driven by social media such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and propagated via computer, cellphone and MP3 player, these elements of what Fordham University professor Paul Levinson has called the “New New Media,” changed our national political landscape and are now working globally to transform political balances around the world. At home, grassroots organizers for Barack Obama were able to bypass the mainstream media and speak directly to potential voters and to orchestrate small-cap fund raising drives on an unprecedented scale. Off-the-cuff comments from candidates captured by portable devices drove news cycles for weeks at a time and changed political fortunes. For example, one instance of George Allen’s career ending “macaca” video has currently been viewed on YouTube almost 400,000 times. As Levinson notes in his upcoming book, The New New Media: “the true or fully empowered new new media user also has the option of producing content, and consuming content produced by hundreds of millions of other new new media consumer-producers.”

Now, with the current election fiasco in Iran, we are seeing the true potential of the new new media. The obviously fraudulent Iranian election outcome might have gone unnoticed and unchallenged in previous political media environments. At the very least, the Iranian ruling powers would have been able to clamp down on information flow by shutting down media outlets and controlling reporters’ access to the events.

Not anymore. Cell phone videos and snapshots of demonstrations and reprisals, “Tweets” with tactical and other organizing information and other new new media reporting have completely trumped Iranian efforts to control the public perception of their election. As Richard Engel noted on the Rachel Maddow Show last night, to control the user generated content of civil protest the Iranian rulers would have to shut down the entire country:

“What the Iranian crackdown is, it’s very old fashioned. They want to control the media so they’re cutting off phones and they’re kicking out established reporters and harassing reporters. That’s very 1980’s, 1990’s way of a media crackdown. It has not helped them control the information war.”

In the 1980’s Neil Postman argued that any new technology disseminated to the populace by our electronic conglomerates constituted an uncontrolled social experiment on society. Every new medium or device presents a Faustian bargain, creating winners and losers within the population based solely on the characteristics of the technology. The new new media change the flow of information from the one-to-many of traditional media outlets to the many-to-many of the internet. Without single chokepoints to block the flow of information, would-be tyrants are finding it difficult to control the narrative of their national political events and the word gets out from multiple sources, with pictures!

The upside of the new new media is that democratic inclinations gain new traction against entrenched despotic institutions. The downside is that turmoil is inevitable as current power holders seek to retain their positions. In our own country this turmoil is played out by the decline and fall of the Republican Party and the not coincidental individual incidents of right-wing violence that accompany that collapse. Overseas, the chaos and destruction may be more pronounced as entire societies react to the potentialities of the new new media and the violence spills out into the streets.

Maureen Dowd on Cheney's Saturnine Policies

2009-05-17T09:33:00.006-05:00

I don't ususally post on political events, leaving that task to my betters. Less frequently do I quote Maureen Dowd who I find generally writes snark without substance. However in today's New York Times Dowd has hit the nail on the head concerning Republican reactions to Nancy Pelosi's involvement in George Bush and Dick Cheney's lawbreaking:

Nancy Pelosi’s bad week of blithering responses about why she did nothing after being briefed on torture has given Republicans one of their happiest — and harpy-est — weeks in a long time. They relished casting Pelosi as contemptible for not fighting harder to stop their contemptible depredations against the Constitution. That’s Cheneyesque chutzpah.

and

Besides, the question of what Pelosi knew or didn’t, or when she did or didn’t know, is irrelevant to how W. and Cheney broke the law and authorized torture.

President Obama wants to avoid the national gut-wrenching that a full accounting (and the resulting prosecutions) would subject the country to. I submit that without a full accounting and without holding responsible those who committed these crimes in our names, there is no moving forward.

In Memoriam - Dr. Leonard Shlain

2009-05-12T09:14:00.007-05:00

I've just learned that Leonard Shlain died yesterday after a long struggle with brain cancer. I was first introduced to Dr. Shlain at the 2002 Media Ecology Conference at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. His talk on The Alphabet and the Goddess (website here) was remarkable and I immediately purchased both the book and a video of his lecture. Since that time Dr. Shlain has been a regular attendee at Media Ecology Association and related functions and his contributions to the field are substantial.

Here is a YouTube video of an interview with Dr. Shlain as part of the University of California "Conversations with History" series concerning Art and Science:

From his website:

A celebration of Leonard’s life will be held on Friday, May 15th at 1:00 PM at Sherith Israel Synagogue, 2266 California Street at Webster, San Francisco, CA 94115.

In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Leonard Shlain Scholarship Fund at The Saybrook Graduate School and mailed as follows:

Att: Ed Patuto, Shlain Scholarship Fund
Saybrook Graduate and Research Center
747 Front Street
San Francisco, CA 94111
415.394.5675

My condolences to his family. His death is a great loss to us all.

Her Morning Elegance - Oren Lavie

2009-05-07T14:20:00.001-05:00

A fantastic stop action film. And the music is pretty good too.

Susan Boyle's Transformation: We Have Met The Ugly Duckling And He Is Us

2009-04-25T20:46:00.003-05:00

Turnabout is fair play as Susan Boyle turns Les Mis into Les Millions in her now famous YouTube fairy tale.

The Susan Boyle video clip that currently is reaching new viewer heights on YouTube exhibits aspects implying post-production tinkering (or at least extensive pre-production planning) which moves it from the realm of real time cinema verité to preconceived narrative.
The way Boyle's stunning performance is preceded with shots of her in the waiting room, the contrast of her plebeian appearance with the glamour and celebrity of the judges, even her song choice creates a specific effect. Is it a coincidence that this would-be ugly duckling chose as her performance piece Fantine's swan song from Les Miserables?

I had a dream my life would be

So different from this hell I’m living

So different now from what it seemed

Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

Imagine after that lengthy and somewhat embarrassing introduction, Ms. Boyle had begun singing "Oklahoma!" or "Luck Be A Lady Tonight!" The audience reaction might have been quite different.

The presentation and contemplation of transformation is a key characteristic of mythology, properly understood. Myths and fairy tales use a magical transformation as a standard narrative device. The ugly ducking transforms into the beautiful swan. The kitchen drudge transforms into the beautiful princess. The frog transforms into the handsome prince. What is different about the Boyle YouTube video, which might be called a Twitter fairy tale, is that it is we, the audience, that is transformed, not the protagonist.

Using multiple shots of the Britain's Got Talent judges, hosts, and audience, this video narrative clearly documents their (and by extension our) transformation from ugly critics to enthusiastic supporters. By contrast, Susan Boyle herself remains unchanged, except in our eyes. This reversal of transformational aspect as a narrative device is what makes this video so compelling, and I believe it could only happen in our television-weaned, computer-enhanced, social networking era.

Particular storytelling techniques shape themselves to the available medium. In distinguishing the "light through" aspect of the video image vs. the "light on" nature of movies, Marshall McLuhan observed that with television (and by extension the computer monitor) the viewer is the screen. New media present opportunities to tell old stories in a new way, and from a different vantage point. The salient feature of this Twitter-Tale is that it replaces the protagonist with the audience as the object of transformation. We have met the ugly duckling and he is us.

A Model Media Ecologist

2009-04-06T12:37:00.009-05:00

Under the tutelage of professors Neil Postman, Terry Moran and Christine Nystrom, it was the practice in the 1970's of New York University's Program in Media Ecology to hold annual graduate student conferences where each doctoral class picked one member to deliver a "State of the Class" address.

At the fall 1976 Conference, my own Class of 1977 decided to do something different. I had access to a Sony reel to reel black and white Betamax recorder and a camera, and so instead of one class member giving a 30 minute address, each of us in the Class of '77 prepared up to five minutes on video tape of our own personal metaphor for What is Media Ecology? A Model Media Ecologist was my contribution. (I still have the complete video of the Class of '77 if anyone is interested.)

I sang it to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan's A Modern Major General. I also used a lot of props to add visual humor to the comic lyrics. For instance, when I sang the line "I also know the difference 'tween me and a theologist" I put on a clerical collar. It is worthwhile to click on the link to view the original recording:

I'm proud to say that Casey M.K. Lum has included A Model Media Ecologist at the beginning of his history of Media Ecology, Perspectives on Culture, Technology and Communication: The Media Ecology Tradition published by Hampton Press. No, I don't get any royalties, although I think I should.*

For those of you who haven't already downloaded A Model Media Ecologist from iTunes, here are the lyrics (modified slightly to bring them into the 21st Century):

A Model Media Ecologist

I am the very model of a Media Ecologist
I also sense the difference 'tween me and a theologist
I've read a bit of Mumford and a little of McLuhan
I also have a fair idea what Watslavik is doing.

Of Levi-Strauss and Jacques Ellul I seem to have a smattering.
The work of Ames and Cantril I am very often flattering.
I'm versed in Systems Theory and in models mathematical
Which I'll dispute with you until the start of my sabbatical.

I know how Shannon-Weaver strove to overcome their channel noise.
I'm well aware that Hayakawa hung out with the Senate boys.
Although it would be better to have been an anthropologist
I am the very model of a Media Ecologist!

I can recite the history of radio and telephone.
As well as why it is Korzybski's ghost is never left alone.
I've studied silent language and the biases of media,
Of Structuralistic notions I'ma real encyclopedia.

I've learned proxemics, kinesics, linguistics styles polemical.
I know why Greeks were oral and why monks were academical.
Then I'll recite five verses from a Bible made by Guternberg,
And guess the probability you know the work of Heisenberg.

Why TV is immediate, massaging your right hemisphere,
While functioning discursively is bound someday to disappear.
Although it would be better to have been an icthyologist,
I am the very model of a Media Ecologist!

When I can tell the difference 'tween "dub" and "dupe" and "master tape";
When I can tell a hot film splicer from a waffle plate;
When showing films or video no longer gets the best of me;
When I can show awareness of the workings of 'lectricity;

When laser beams and holograms no longer seem so magical;
When my attempt to splice a tape does not turn out so tragical;
In short when I've a smattering of modern day technology,
Then I'll feel better saying I know Media Ecology!

For my modern hardware training, though I'm plucky and advertury,
Has only been brought down to the beginning of last century!
Although it would be better to have been a gynecologist,
I am the very model of a Media Ecologist!

*BTW. As a published poet (see above), in 2005 I claimed the title of Media Ecology Association Poet Laureate. However, after reading Lance Strate's body of work, as published at his own MySpace blog "Lance Strate's Blogversed" (available here) I hereby abdicate in his favor!

The Battlestar Galactica Guide to Great Literature

2009-03-25T10:23:00.005-05:00

As they contemplated Season Four, Battlestar Galactica's writers confronted the narrative mess of the previous three years and exclaimed "There must be some way out of here!"

Would-be screenwriters, novelists and playwrights can learn an important lesson from this past week’s Battlestar Galactica finale. For those not tuned into the BSG universe, the series finale revealed that Starbuck, the plucky fighter pilot who died and came back to life a few seasons back, was not quite human. You may think that BSG’s writers mixed up coffee brands in their minds, Starbuck’s Incorporated with Chock Full 0’ Nuts (that heavenly coffee), when they reincarnated Starbuck not as an android or a clone or some other high SciFi concept, but rather as a true angel. In fact, Angel Starbuck allowed the writers to conveniently tie up of a number of loose ends, contradictory story arcs and mythological red herrings that kept viewers coming back for more Human/Cylon action week after week and season after interrupted season.

In true Deus ex Machina fashion, Angel Starbuck leads the wandering BSG survivors to Earth, not the cinder Earth they previously visited, but our own true Earth of 150,000 years ago where the primitive native inhabitants sat around their campfires humming Bob Dylan tunes. The various BSG humans, Cylons and hybrids disembark, toss their advanced technology into the nearest convenient fusion recycler, scatter themselves to the Earth’s four corners and presumably become fruitful and multiply. Having completed her angelic mission, Angel Starbuck simply vanishes, leaving Lee Adama ("Apollo") to wonder on God's inscrutability.

Flash forward to our present-day world on the verge of creating its own Cylons thanks to Japanese robotics advances, and we witness two angels in America. They appear in the guise of Cylon Caprica 6 and Human Gaius Baltar strolling arm-in-arm through the streets of Manhattan, and go about wryly commenting on our civilization’s chance to get the cybernetics thing right this time.

So Battlestar Galactica turns out to have been about angels, not robots, divine intervention, not binary interpolation. A better title for the series might have been "Cylons In The Hands of An Angry God." This is where the other arts can learn a lesson from television in general and Battlestar Galactica in particular. No matter how dire the circumstances, how severe the situation, how irreconcilable the protagonists, there is no conceivable story line that can’t be resolved by supernatural agency.

A survey of the great literature of the world reveals that, with the exception of The Bible, The Koran, John Milton's Paradise Lost and possibly James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, no writer of note has hit upon this simple device to resolve the dramatic crises of their writings. In tale after tale, protagonists suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without the benefit of divine intervention.

Imagine a Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act V, where an Angel prince Hamlet exchanges the poison drinks and weapons for less lethal alternatives and convinces usurper Claudius to voluntarily abdicate his throne to a newly heroic Prince of Denmark.

Or an Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman where a reincarnated Angel Ben Loman appears bearing a new, lucrative sales route to bestow on his father.

How about an update of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind where Angel Melanie reappears and leads the South to victory, saves baby Bonnie from her equestrian mishap and convinces Rhett and Scarlett that they were truly meant for each other.

And of course, there would be a Herman Melville's Moby Dick where another angelic Starbuck finally nails the great white whale for Captain Ahab with a propitious cast of his harpoon.

You can see the possibilities.

Post-modern critics may argue that dramatic art isn’t like that. In our poetry, our plays, our books and our movies, bad things happen to good people all the time and recently deceased revenants with heavenly bodies don’t always appear to make things right.

Aristotle taught us that art imitates nature. Isn't it about time that art imitate the supernatural?

Columbia Journalism Professor Says "F*** New Media!"

2009-03-20T09:45:00.029-05:00

An homage to the guidance and sagacity of Columbia University Journalism Professor Ari Goldman.

According to New York Magazine, when addressing his "Reporting and Writing I" class, Columbia Journalism Professor Ari Goldman is reported to have said "Fuck new media!" and to have described online media training as "playing with toys." His print-centric approach to journalism joins a chorus of practicing newsgatherers contemplating the end of the newspaper business as we know it.

It might appear a bit self-serving or conflicted when bastions of the mainstream media publish article after article bemoaning the death of newspapers, or claiming that only their business model for the collection and dissemination of information will save the American republic. Thus there are Walter Isaacson over at Time Magazine, David Lazarus of the LA Times and David Carr of the New York Times (among many others) who insist that readers pay for their news or suffer an increase in corruption or the end of the Republic. According to these sources, if news dissemination moves to the Internet, we must adopt a new, lucrative business model that will generate revenue sufficient to support their extensive news operations.

At least L. Gordon Crovitz over at the Wall Street Journal is upfront about his perceived need to feather journalists' nests. Under the heading "Information Wants to Be Expensive" he writes:

“People are happy to pay for news and information however it's delivered, but only if it has real, differentiated value. Traders must have their Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters terminal. Lawyers wouldn't go to court without accessing the Lexis or West online service.”

I wouldn't say I'm happy to pay for my news, especially when the traditional newsgathering operations set much of the agenda of what is worth investigating and knowing about and what isn't.

What traditionalists contemplating the future of news on the internet don't mention is that the need to charge their readers is a result of the hyperlink structure of the World Wide Web itself where banner ads have not yet (and may never) replace the revenue generated by print advertising.

Under the current business model in newspapers, the amount of news that is "fit to print" is determined by the number of column inches of advertising sold. The money I pay for my personal copy of the paper largely goes to support the newsstand where I make my purchase.

Of course, setting up pay tiers for information automatically creates text-based information "haves" and broadcast media-based information "have-nots", not exactly what the Founding Fathers envisioned when the drew up the First Amendment. Those who can pay will get the internet value, the rest of us news seekers will have to watch or listen to broadcast headlines.

There are alternatives already in production on the web. Blogs, Wikis, Facebook groups, Twitter cabals and many other information sharing operations are still in the process of becoming, but may have the potential to replace the key functions of mainstream media with free, open access to just the information each of us needs. As David Bollier notes in The Huffington Post, a myriad of below-the-radar activities on the Web are undermining corporate gatekeeping and control of news content:

“There are now countless online communities dedicated to generating their own content. It turns out that the joys of shopping pale in comparison to the pleasures of sharing and curating information with a community of peers.”

One can easily imagine a near future without newsprint:

Well, its been two years since the last printed newspaper shut down and I’ve finally settled into to the newspaperless media ecology. My day started with a two way tweet to President Obama concerning the latest stimulus package, protesting the inclusion of yet another bailout for NBC, CBS and ABC. The President agrees that network broadcasting is obsolete, but we can’t afford to let the three majors fail. Meanwhile, over at Fox, the “all reality programming all the time” former network, Bill O’Reilly was voted off “Debating with the Stars.”

I pulled out my handheld to review this hour’s digital news headlines, some of which I had contributed, when I noticed that our new puppy, Rush, had had another accident on the new carpet. “Bad boy!” I scolded him, tapping him lightly on the nose with my PDA. I completed my other chores, cycling out the old disposable laptop from the bottom of the budgie cage and lining the bottom of the garbage pail with old thumbdrive detritus. I wonder what we used before they came up with that solution?

As usual to start my work day, I exchanged text messages with my congressman, my senator and my friend in the Middle East who keeps my Facebook group up to date on the Palestine-Israeli détente. I noted that my YouTube video has achieved 100,000+ views and surveyed some of the response videos. I considered starting a new group, “Media Ecologists against the use of sepia tone videos” but put it off until later.

Later I set up a three way video conference with my SO who is away on business in Chicago and my daughter, who is on a mid-term break trip to Africa. We finalized plans for our family vacation this summer to one of the new National Tree Farm Parks that recently opened while the country gives the older national parks a few years fallow time to complete recovery from the ravages of the Bush years.

My daughter is researching and shooting a school report on the history of newspapers and had some questions:

Is it true that the first toy airplanes were made out of something called "paper"?
Did opinion columns and editorials once only go one way?
What is papier maché?

As printed newspapers go the way of buggy whips, anti-maccassers and Republicans, it is comforting to know that the traditions and the triumphs of the age of newspaper journalism is being preserved by the Newseum in Washington D.C(which bills itself as "the world's most interactive museum") and online. Someday I’ll take my daughter there to see it in person.

So, Professor Goldman, perhaps the better message to your students (and would-be future journalists) would be: "Make love to the new media, not war!"

_______________________

I don't often post an entire article written by someone else on my blog, but this overview of this new "Digital Republic" by David Bollier is so germane to the continuing news about newspaper decline that I think its worth a read.

From The Huffington Post, March March 19, 2009:

How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own

The Bush Administration achieved a virtual lockdown of American political culture for eight years, bringing policy innovation to an utter standstill. So consider this improbable fact: one of the most significant achievements in open, participatory democracy in history burst forth during the Bush years.

Working in the parallel universe of the Internet, a loosely coordinated, global federation of digital tribes built a new kind of democratic culture. This culture is embodied in free and open source software, the blogosphere and hundreds of wikis on specialized topics. It can be seen in remix music and amateur videos, the flourishing social networking sites, and new types of "open business" models.

These innovations are not primarily creatures of government or the marketplace. They represent a new "commons sector" -- a realm of collective wealth generated by ordinary people through their own resourcefulness and sharing, largely outside of the money economy.

Although the tech world gets a lot of attention, few people appreciate how the new commons sector is achieving a slow-mo political revolution. As I put it in the subtitle of my new book Viral Spiral, the commoners have built a digital republic of their own. Using software code, free public licenses authorizing sharing and their own imaginations, the commoners have built an impressive civic, economic and cultural infrastructure that belongs to them. It is a world based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence and cheap and easy sharing.

The established order, meanwhile -- the world of centralized control, strict intellectual property rights and hierarchies of credentialed experts -- is under siege. Broadcast networks, daily newspapers, government agencies and politicians are still nominally "in control" -- but with each passing day, the new culture of the commons asserts its powers and out-maneuvers the old order.

The influence of this new sector -- law professor Lawrence Lessig has dubbed it "free culture" -- is large and growing. There are, for example, thousands of free software and open source software programs that power Web sites and blogs, information archives and social networking communities. Where would we be without GNU Linux (operating system), Mozilla (web-browsing), Thunderbird (email), bitTorrent (file-sharing) and BIND, Perl and Apache, which are central to many Internet functions? Linux alone -- a free program created by a vast commons of programmers -- is estimated to have spawned some $30 billion in economic activity.

More than 150 million Web objects now use Creative Commons licenses, an ingenious "hack" around copyright law that lets people allow the legal sharing, copying and distribution of their works. Online sharing and collaboration have become so popular that companies now base their business models around them.

Yet the real story is the power of the commons itself. There are now countless online communities dedicated to generating their own content. It turns out that the joys of shopping pale in comparison to the pleasures of sharing and curating information with a community of peers.

For every name-brand commons like Craigslist, Flickr and Wikipedia, there are thousands of impressive niche sites like Flu Wiki (decentralized tabulation of flu outbreaks), Wikitravel (user-generated travel guides) and Jamendo (music sharing). Sometimes these commons actual serve as "staging areas" for commercial startups. The Internet Movie Database, now the leading database of film facts and credits, was started by two film buffs. Gracenote, the database that looks up information about audio CDs, was started by a community of music fans. This is a new macroeconomic reality -- the commons as an incubator for market innovation.

To date, the commons sector has largely eluded mainstream attention because it is so fragmented and decentralized. It doesn't necessarily make money and it is run by self-organized amateurs. Neither government nor corporations are "in charge" of this eclectic, unorganized realm. It's supposedly a world of bloggers in their pajamas and teenagers exchanging silly videos via YouTube. How can we take it seriously?

Not surprisingly, powerful people from President Obama to corporate executives to newspaper publishers use the commons sector as a convenient foil. They try to dismiss it as a way to show that they remain in control -- and that the insurgent digital republic can be safely ignored.

The commoners know better.

After centuries of being victimized by market forces, the commoners now have powerful tools to protect and advance their interests. They no longer have to put up with the privatization and commodification of their shared inheritance and collective work -- a process known as "enclosure."

The commoners now have their own software infrastructures and open platforms. They have their own legal licenses to prevent anyone from "taking private" their content. One need only recall how Disney appropriated fairy tales and literary classics to build its corporate empire. Or how commercial broadcasters have used the public's airwaves for decades, for free. Or how Big Pharma pays a pittance (if anything) for exclusive rights to federal drug research -- which is then sold back to us as expensive proprietary drugs.

But in the online world, the commoners are asserting their control. Think how the mainstream media are often two steps behind the blogosphere, and how GNU Linux has taken huge market share away from Microsoft. Consider how YouTube is stealing audiences from the broadcast networks....and how the music industry has now eliminated "digital rights management" encryption from most recorded music.

Remember how Barack Obama's candidacy was borne aloft by the commoners acting on their own -- and think how Obama and Congress now face a mobilized public that is more actively engaged in our national political life than ever.

While centralized media continues their sad decline, remix artists and indie musicians and filmmakers are producing some of the most daring new works around. Newcomers with style and vision are using the Web to reach audiences cheaply and directly, without having to get the approval of stodgy, risk-averse Hollywood gatekeepers.

In education and science, there are strong movements underway to reclaim control over knowledge. In the face of soaring subscription rates for academic journals, academics have created more than 3,900 "open access" journals that are free to everyone, in perpetuity. M.I.T. and dozens of other universities have put their curricula up on the Web for free, spurring a new "open courseware" movement.

Students frustrated by exorbitant textbook prices are starting to develop "open textbook" projects, in the style of a wiki, so that they can pay $25 for a print-on-demand textbook with the latest scholarship, rather than $125 for a standard commercial textbook that may be outdated.

An open culture, a sharing economy and a digital republic: the foundations for this new world actually matured during the nightmarish Bush years, beneath its contemptuous gaze. Now that such radical ideas as participation, transparency and accountability have a stable home on the Internet (provided Net Neutrality can be assured), the challenge will be to safeguard this world -- and build it out even further.

R. Buckminster Fuller once said, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." That's exactly what the commons sector is doing. For all the thrashing about that will surely occur in coming years, somehow I think I know who will prevail.

David Bollier is an editor of OntheCommons.org and the author of Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (New Press). For several short video interviews with Bollier on the "viral spiral," visit here, here and here.

The Decline and Fall of the Times Roman Empire

2009-03-06T09:45:00.008-05:00

What we know about the death of newspapers
-or-
Do 400,000 Twitters = 1 New York Times?

If you still read newspapers and magazines, or watch network television for that matter, you are probably aware that times are tough for the mainstream media. Latest casualty: The Rocky Mountain News which folded after 150 years in the press. News rooms across the country are laying off staff and cutting costs. Even the venerable New York Times is forced to sell and lease back its headquarters to stay afloat. Of course, the journalistic consensus is that the fault lies not in themselves but in their competition. In a recent issue of Time Magazine Walter Isaacson blames the Internet for print journalism’s decline:

“The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines.”

His solution? Micropayment charges that would allow newspapers to collect revenue from web browsers:

“Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day's full edition or $2 for a month's worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough.”

Over at the LA Times, David Lazarus, rejects the iTunes model for a new revenue generation, an “iNews” as it were, in favor of a subscription approach that would provide the funding for expensive news gathering:

“But unless we want digital newsrooms staffed by skeleton crews of a dozen or so reporters and editors, we have to accept that it costs money to cover news events, perform investigations and tell yarns.”

Bad times affect not only print but also broadcast television. Under the headline “Broadcast TV Faces Struggle to Stay Viable,” Tim Arango at the New York Times quotes Jeff Zucker of NBC Universal:

“…broadcast television is in a time of tremendous transition, and if we don’t attempt to change the model now, we could be in danger of becoming the automobile industry or the newspaper industry.”

Ouch! As newspapers go the way of the buggy whip it is appropriate to examine where the defenders of the press have got it wrong, and where they are right. I have included a mention of broadcast television because the news organizations of broadcast media have often adopted the poses and nomenclature of print journalism even though their now digital-based product is quite a different animal.

Defenders of the press as it stands mistake the physical medium of print with the function of the Press in a democratic society as envisioned by our nation’s founders. Indeed, the rational behind including "freedom of the press" in the First Amendment was detailed by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist #84. Answering the objection that a large central government would be too far away to be effectively monitored and controlled, he wrote:

“The public papers will be expeditious messengers of intelligence to the most remote inhabitants of the Union.”

This is necessary because

“Of personal observation they can have no benefit. This is confined to the citizens on the spot. They must therefore depend on the information of intelligent men, in whom they confide; and how must these men obtain their information? Evidently from the complexion of public measures, from the public prints, from correspondences with their representatives, and with other persons who reside at the place of their deliberations.”

The remedy for the dangers of a remote, central government is a system of communication which, of necessity in that colonial era, relied on the printing press to carry word to citizens at a distance from the seats of government. Living at the height of the print era, Hamilton would naturally rely on the printing press as the medium of choice to preserve the transparency of government he deemed essential to a democracy. If the internet had existed in his time, he might have deferred to any number of Internet blogs rather than to the printing press.

Paul Starr’s epitaph “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to the New Era of Corruption)” in the March 4 issue of The New Republic is one of dozens of recent laments that mistake the medium for the message. Starr assumes that newspapers have everywhere and always lived up to Hamilton’s ideals, or that only through the medium of ink pressed on newsprint can the "Truth" be revealed and corruption curtailed. He notes that:

“Although the rise of broadcast journalism changed the newspaper business, radio and television did not kill it because newspapers retained their local advantages in providing information to readers and connecting advertisers and consumers in a city.”

I was at CBS News in the 1980s when the decision was made to convert the entire news operation from a cost center to a profit center. Salaries of top news stars were increased. News support operations deemed not essential to the primary goal of maximizing ratings were abandoned. For example, CBS News used to employ a staff of full time research librarians and a facility in-house for news staffers to use in the development of their stories. This was among the first things to go, with a resulting decline in the quality and quantity of fact checking for news productions.

This decision to extract the monetary value of CBS’s crown jewel was not based on ideological or editorial criteria, but on a purely financial one. That such a criterion would ultimately lead to the tarnishing of the jewel never seemed to have occurred to them. The resulting, inevitable degradation of the broadcast news product has also tainted print journalism as newspapers struggled to maintain relevance in the face of sound bite news delivery.

The new information environment of broadcasting required a subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) change in journalistic practices and created a gap between what the public wanted to know and what the public needed to know. This gap, being environmental, was largely invisible until the advent of the Internet. The “amateurs” of this new media environment have brought this gap to the foreground, focusing our attention on unquestioned compromises of mainstream media news gathering and reporting that have little to do with real journalism.

Newspapers’ reliance on advertising and classified revenues has always left them vulnerable in economic downturns. This vulnerability has become critical in the face of simultaneous assault for eyes and minds by a competing medium, the Internet. Had print journalism really fulfilled Hamilton’s vision of the Fourth Estate, large scale newspapers might still be viable. If collectively newspapers were still the source the distant public could turn to for information important to their lives and well-being, we might not be witnessing newsprint’s end. The problem is that often they did just the opposite. I won’t go into the shortcomings of the obviously biased papers like Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, the Washington Times or the Chicago Tribune. Even the so-called liberal papers of record like the Washington Post and the New York Times have fallen short of the mark more often then not.

For too long most of the press has gone along with the Washington establishment to get along. Publishers and editors alike mistook the physical ownership of the printing press for the spiritual ownership of Hamilton’s function of the Press.

On both economic and political fronts, the mainstream media often have failed to keep the public informed. Where was any of the press during the length of Madoff Ponzi scandal? More than twenty years in the making, with numerous warnings from whistleblowers like Harry Markopolos, but no financial reporting organization picked up the lead. For that matter, where were the warnings of the current Great Recession? Not only did the mainstream media failed to call the Bush Administration to account during the lead-up to the Iraq War, most of them actively enabled that catastrophic misdirection, including the New York Times whose own Judith Miller helped cheerlead the war.

But you don’t have to look only to the most recent events to see the shortcomings of the press. During much of the Vietnam Era if you wanted the straight facts on the War you had to seek out a tiny little independent weekly newsletter by I.F. Stone.

Having consolidated their smaller competitors out of existence, the declining newspapers can’t use the same trick that they used in the face of broadcast journalism, that is exploiting “local advantages in providing information to readers and connecting advertisers and consumers in a city.” This opportunity has been sucked away by the Internet.

In other times of media change, old media found new, albeit smaller niches in which they thrived. When video killed the radio star, radio said “I shrink, therefore FM.” In a similar manner, newspapers must reinvent themselves to survive. By this I don’t mean to find new business models or sources of revenue to continue doing the same old thing.. To retain the mantle of the “Fourth Estate” the old guard media must rediscover what reporting is really about. Maybe the example of I.F. Stone’s Weekly from forty years ago can serve as a model. Stone suggested that if you can’t compete with the media, go small, go independent:

"Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the habits, attitudes, and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him... But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own — particularly if he is his own employer — is immune from these pressures."

Stopping by the Woulds on a Snowy Day

2009-03-02T11:23:00.005-05:00

Being snowed in would be much better if the weather wasn't so terrible and we could do something with the free time. After all, I spent Sunday soaking up the requisite 15 hours of television to make up for viewing time lost during the week to office hours. And, to be honest, I have not yet reached the stage where weekday television programming (Rachel Ray? Seriously?) is appealing. No bowl games, no playoffs, no golf tournaments in sunny climes, no marathon airings of Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, no Bear Grylls exposing his digestive system to something abhorrent, not even a commercial showing Lewis Black in Aruba.

Sure there are carpets to be vacuumed, floors to be washed, other household chores to be deferred, but is that really the best use of this bonus time? I could write another inspiring blog about media ecology, but I haven't been able to come up with a good tetrad about snow. Is a snowstorm an extension of our senses anyway?

So I sit watching the snow on my neighbor's air conditioner pile up and check the Accutrak Radar every so often. Oh wait, they're plowing the rooftop parking garage across the way. See you later.

What the Music Really Sounded Like at the Inauguration

2009-02-27T14:55:00.001-05:00

I'm #26! Yay!

2009-02-17T17:17:00.015-05:00

Ranking blogs is so "old media".

There was a time when Time Magazine was a truly national magazine, without an obvious political agenda and as such, was a valuable resource for newshounds. I think that time was for a year or two in the mid 1970's.

Alas, those days are gone. What better evidence for this than their current list of the top 25 blog sites for 2009? I was discouraged and outraged when I discovered that my own blog A Model Media Ecologist is not considered by Time Magazine to be one of the top 25 blogs (in the country, the world, the blogosphere?) Time seems to be completely unaware that A Model Media Ecologist won the Blogger of the Year Award (see here).

Here's a Media Ecology question. Why aren't magazines in trouble like newspapers? Specifically, why isn't Time in jeopardy?

I realize that such sour grapes are unbecoming a model media ecologist. Time Magazine has as much right to exist as the next main stream media publication, biases and all. Of course, you may wonder why any of the main stream media should be judging and ranking any the new media in the first place. Isn't there a conflict of interest there?

I wrote an imaginary letter of complaint to Time and received this imaginary reply:

Dear (your blog name here):

We appreciate your concern about the many worthy blog sites that did not make it into our pantheon of the Top 25. Perhaps it will be of some solace to you to be told (and this is completely off the record) that your own blog missed it by only that much, that is, (your blog name here) came in at 26!

Congratulations, and better luck next year!

Sincerely,

Time Magazine

It is some solace, but not much. I might feel better if my imaginary Time Magazine correspondent had taken the trouble to actually type the name of my blog into his boilerplate.

Oh well, its on to the Peabody Awards!

Hundreds Attend Global Warming Protest

2009-02-09T16:18:00.002-05:00

(h/t Peter Blechman)

Un-Buttoning Cinema

2009-02-02T16:07:00.008-05:00

Film criticism prospers when time flies like a boomerang.

In the current issue of The New Yorker, David Denby bemoans the decline of the Academy Awards selection process, focusing on the paltry quality of this year’s Oscar picks compared to previous years. In toting up the golden votes present vs. past, he notes:

The total of thirteen nominations for “Benjamin Button” has to be some sort of scandal. “Citizen Kane” received nine nominations, “The Godfather: Part II” eleven, and this movie, so smooth and mellow that it seems to have been dipped in bourbon aging since the Civil War, is nowhere close to those two.

If we accept Denby’s premise that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards was ever about quality rather than commerce, and concentrate on the seeming vacuity of Benjamin Button it is clear that Denby misses the true message of the film, which is both a savage rebuttal of traditional linear modes of film viewing and a call to arms for all of us to revisit and re-evaluate our cinema favorites by viewing them in reverse.

I have obtained a bootleg DVD of Benjamin Button and have discovered that the film plays much better backward rather than forward. By means of the reverse button on my remote control, I can watch the marvel of the film’s protagonist growing old while everyone and everything around him rejuvenates. For example, Cate Blanchette transforms from a crotchety middle aged woman with a truly Medean mother complex into a vibrant young woman with an alarming Oedipal complex.

In forward time Benjamin Button takes us through a veritable IMDb of cinematic classics as the protagonist de-matures through a Grapes of Wrath New Orleans, an End of an Affair Moscow, a Guns of Navaronne war era, A Harold and Maude 50’s romance, a decidedly non Brando-esque Wild One on a road trip, until finally settling into a perverse version of Look Who’s Talking. In reverse, Benjamin Button’s United States of America progresses from its present Bush-ian chaos back to a golden age when robber barons, racial apartheid and the absence of womens’ or workers’ rights characterized the century.

Benjamin Button is beyond post-modern and therefore deserves something beyond post-modern critcism. Looking backwards, as it were, may be the new technique for looking forwards. For example, run Citizen Kane in reverse, and the Wellsian morality tale takes on a new patina. Rather than summing up or explaining a man's entire life experience by means of a lost childhood toy, getting that "Rosebud" discovery out of the way at the beginning of the film enables us to see that Kane is really about growing young gracefully. In the end (former beginning) of the film, young Kane is joyfully reunited with his beloved sled and returns to a life where happiness is determined by the ups and downs of snow accumulation.

The Godfather: Part II in reverse chronicles the ascent of Michael Corleone from the depths of mafia moral corruption of America circa 1955 to the heights of the mafia moral corruption left over from The Godfather: Part I, setting us up for his ultimate regeneration in the backwards viewing of that previous epic.

This new approach to film criticism, which might be call pre-post modernism, works for film after film, whether its Tom Joad and his family triumphantly returning to their Oklahoma farm, in effect putting the wine back into the grapes, or Moses closing the Red Sea as the Israelites reconsider the relative merits of being the “chosen people.”

I’ve run dozens of films through this reverse critical process and the result has been a deeper understanding of the human condition and the art of filmmaking. The sole exception so far for some reason is Memento, which makes no sense no matter which way its viewed.

What We Know About Battlestar Galactica

2009-01-22T23:07:00.002-05:00

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

The final season of Battlestar Galactica has begun and the teaser commercials have posed the question: Who is the 5th secret Cylon? While this will be the focus of the final ten BSG episodes, there are a number of other questions the series has presented that may not be resolved by the final curtain.

1. Why do Cylons’ spines glow red when they make love?
It would seem that such an obvious sexual tell would be counterproductive for a cadre of seductive simulacrums. In all the years of sexual subversion, did no human ever wonder why their incredibly attractive partners insisted on the missionary position?

We do know that Cylons like sex as much as the next automaton and that they are genetically compatible with humans. They claim to experience “Love” and they purport, at times, to having free will. One can only conclude that the glowing red spine was a feature meant to be included only in Christmas Cylons, but someone slipped in production.

2. How did Cylons develop monotheism?

BSG humans are portrayed as generally secular and polytheistic. Neither Greek nor Hebrew, but rather both and more, human BSG characters sport names or appellations like "Adama," "Apollo," "D'Anna" and for the coffee worshippers amongst us "Starbuck." Their twelve colonial worlds correspond to the twelve signs of the zodiac. They say things like "Thank the Gods" and "Gods help us."

The robotic Cylons are monotheistic, fanatical and proselytizing. Despite their claim that their one god is “love,” or perhaps because of it, they bring about the destruction of the twelve human colonies, killing billions of people and then zealously pursue the few survivors. There is one chilling scene from the first season where the Cylon attack is imminent and Number 6 bends over a carriage to kill an infant. It is unclear whether this is an act of mercy or a preemptive strike.

The odd thing is that the Cylons, being robots, have already achieved eternal life. They literally cannot be killed. Or rather, we see them continually dying and then being reborn. Their reincarnation factory vessels are even called “resurrection ships.” A reborn Cylon is not a type or a clone. It is a recreation of the dead individual Cylon, downloaded from the original with memories and emotions intact. In other words, one of the core motivators of many of Earth’s religions is already an integral part of Cylon existence. The only exception to the rule is if a Cylon dies out of range of a resurrection complex. Then they truly die.

If, in spite of being formed in the image of their creators, Cylons reject polytheism, how did they stumble across monotheism?

There is a school of cultural evolutionary thought that suggests that a pre-existing condition to the adoption of monotheism is a phonetic alphabet and some degree of literacy. In a 1977 Issue of ETC: The Journal of General Semantics, in an article titled "Alphabet, Mother of Invention," Marshall McLuhan (yes, that Marshall McLuhan) and Robert K. Logan speculate on the possible origin of monotheism:

"Western thought patterns are highly abstract, compared with Eastern. There developed in the West, and only in the West, a group of innovations that constitute the basis of Western thought. These include (in addition to the alphabet) codified law, monotheism, abstract science, formal logic, and individualism. All of these innovations, including the alphabet, arose within the very narrow geographic zone between the Tigris-Euphrates river system and the Aegean Sea, and within the very narrow time frame between 2000 B.C. and 500 B.C. We do not consider this to be an accident. While not suggesting a direct causal connection between the alphabet and the other innovations, we would claim, however, that the phonetic alphabet played a particularly dynamic role within this constellation of events and provided the ground or framework for the mutual development of these innovations." (Emphasis added)

While the final verdict on this Media Ecological interpretation of religious thought is still out, there surely is some confusion over how the artificial intelligence products of the pantheistic human culture of BSG could arrive at the notion of one God. Religious robots, while intriguing, remain a problem, especially self-ordained monotheistic robots.

Computer processing, as we understand it, requires at least binary notation, which would imply a minimum of two gods. I believe that the depiction of Cylons as monotheistic in the absence of human mortality or alphabetic literacy can only be seen as a true leap of faith on the part of BSG's creators.

3. Why didn’t the Cylons make their “skin jobs” better than they are?
Humanoid Cylons are stronger, arguably smarter and definitely sexier than their human counterparts. However, given the range of possibilities presented by human/android genetics, one wonders why the Cylons didn’t do more?

How about x-ray vision or invulnerability? Is a spider-like precognition out of the question? At the very least, all Cylons could have been equipped with metallic claws that pop out of their knuckles on command.

When you compare humanity’s current evolutionary state to our closest monkey’s uncle, it is clear we are far superior. Our brains are so large we only need to use 10% and often use much less. Every year some Olympian or Marathoner runs faster, jumps higher, or swims more synchronously. To your average orangutan, we must seem like the types of Super Hominid into which they’d all like to evolve. For those of us already at the summit of Earth’s evolutionary trail, where is there to go but up, as in “Up, Up and Away!”?

It may be that Cylons, while clearly superior to humans in every conceivable way, lack the ability to imagine the next great steps in humanoid evolution and the amount of spandex required.

4. Why do the Cylons want to breed half-human/half-Cylon children? Why have children at all?
Any parent who has been on the receiving end while changing a diaper, who has been involved in any school science project or who has attempted sound moderately coherent while explaining the facts of life to a pre-pubescent human child would wonder why Cylons wouldn’t design their offspring to skip right to adulthood. Would-be Cylon parents will soon discover that it is not possible to annihilate the remainder of the human race while coordinating a schedule of after-school activities.

5. Finally, who is the fifth Cylon? What’s the deal with Starbuck? And what about Earth-that-was?

I personally believe that Starbuck is Amelia Earhart and Colonel Tigh is Jimmy Hoffa. The fifth Cylon is not Ellen Tigh, he's Howard Hughes. Or maybe Walt Disney's head. Wait. Didn't he invent animatronics?

That's it! The Cylons are Disney World Character refugees, who fled Earth when Lawrence Lessig finally got Congress to approve term limits on corporate copyrights! First they evolved from singing bears and cavorting pirates into “toaster-heads.” Now they swing full circle back to humanoid approximations of perfection, but they have not been able to completely eliminate the desire to slavishly cater to the pre-adult offspring of their creators.

If this “Magic Kingdom Galactica” hypothesis is true, we should be on the lookout for an upcoming Battlestar Galactica episode that would be a dead giveaway: “Cylons On Ice”.

Corporate Tax Liabilities

2009-01-22T12:09:00.001-05:00

Has anyone ever done a cost/benefit analysis of corporate taxes? I'm sure there are accounting tools which would let us estimate how much Federal, State and Local value a particular corporation realizes each year versus how much they pay in taxes. This would include a pro rata share of usage of public utilities, public services and public spaces. It would give us a yardstick to determine who is paying their fair share and how much their taxes should be increased.

Does anyone know of anything like this?

Congress Debates Adding Elaborate Dance To Obama's Inauguration Ceremony

2009-01-15T11:27:00.003-05:00

The current Onion video was written by my son, Alexander.

Congress Debates Adding Elaborate Dance To Obama's Inauguration Ceremony

DWUI-CP: Driving While Under the Influence of a Cell Phone

2009-01-14T14:47:00.013-05:00

I was on Thom Hartmann's radio program yesterday, discussing the use of cell phones while driving. Thom's position was that regulating cell phone usage in cars was an imposition and probably unenforceable anyway. I suggested that like drunk driving, driving while cell-phoning impaired responses and may result in hazardous driving. Here is an edited clip of the transcript:

Hartmann: The Safety Council... now they want to tell you that when you are driving your car you cannot use a hands-free cell phone. You know the little Bluetooth things that most cars have where you've got the phone in your pocket and your car answers the phone and you're just talking at the windshield wipers or the dashboard. You don't even have to take your phone out of your pocket. Hands-free phones. And they're saying we should ban this. It turns out 2600 deaths, 12000 serious injuries per year, this is 6% of vehicel crashes, are attributed to people using phones. Now that's not hands-free phones, that's just phones. But included in that some small percentage of people using hands-free phones and they say "Let's make that illegal."

I say enough of the conservatives telling us what we can do or not do anywhere on earth. Or maybe we should just ban talking in the car, because their argument is that...its not just what you're doing with your hands, its that your head is in the conversation. OK, so lets ban talking to people in the car. In fact, lets even take it a step beyond that. Lets make it required that people have duct tape in their car and that when they get in and sit down not only do you have to fasten your seat belt but you also have to tear off a three inch strip of duct tape and put it over your mouth. Because how are you going to know. I mean, if a police officer's driving by and they see somebody talking, they see their mouth moving, how do they know that that person is not talking to the person next to them or is not talking on a hands-free phone?
....
Blechman: There are researchers who have shown that using a low-fidelity instrument like a cell phone as compared to a high fidelity radio or even talking to a person in a car takes more brain processing power. Its what McLuhan called a cool medium and you actually develop a form of tunnel vision while you're doing that.

Hartmann: Right, but if it was Bluetooth and it was running through the speakers in your car that would not be the case, would it?

Blechman: Its still low fidelity. The signal is coming from the cell carrier, not from the FM radio station.

Hartmann: Oh, so its the bandwidth. Now that's interesting. Now let me extend the logic on this. You're saying that the bandwidth is narrow because there's not such a broad spectrum of frequency the brain has to focus on it more intently. You know AM radio has a narrower bandwidth than FM radio. Should we ban AM radio?
Blechman: Well, I guess you have to find the degree of involvement.

Hartmann: There's some critical threshhold there. That's interesting, Bob! I tell you, I've got the smartest listeners in the world! I thought I was bringing some science to the table here and Bob trumps me! Well done Bob!

Its not every day that I can trump Thom Hartmann! And while I did get the McLuhan reference in, I'm sorry I wasn't able to work in Media Ecology or my blog site as well.

I think the fact that using the cell phone can be demonstrated to affect perception is an excellent example of McLuhan's "Cool Medium" terminology. Like connect-the-dot drawings as compared to photographs, cartoons as compared to paintings or traditional television as compared to cinema, a cool medium requires that we "fill in the blanks."

We experience a voice we hear over the phone as the same as normal conversation because our brains are filling in the gaps. Its only when we hear a recording of a phone conversation that we become aware of the low fidelity. That the process of talking on a cell phone can result in tunnel vision is truly interesting.

So thank you Thom for having me on and for recognizing how smart McLuhan was!

Revisited: What We Know About the Joker

2009-01-11T22:29:00.004-05:00

In honor of Heather Ledger winning the Golden Globe award for best supporting actor in The Dark Knight, I am reposting my piece on The Joker from this past July:

Ruminations about the man behind the masque.

Though this past weekend’s top performing movie is titled The Dark Knight, it might easily have been called "The Clown Prince." Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker, already hailed as Oscar-worthy, owes more to Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice than it does to previous Batman malefactors. Ironically, Keaton was the first film Batman and could have played off against himself as both the Caped Crusader and the Prince of Fools.

Like Keaton's Beetlejuice, The Joker in this latest Batman-iteration is the ultimate trickster: a destroyer of worlds and a slayer of men, whose word cannot be trusted and whose motives cannot be divined.

The Joker’s wild success throughout The Dark Knight's dark nights depends on a script which constitutes a stacked deck in his favor. For most of the two hours of this latest Batman saga, everything goes the Joker’s way. He knows where mob kingpins will be meeting and gains access with impunity. He easily defeats the defense mechanisms of a high-security bank. He cannily manipulates good guys and bad guys alike seeking both a higher class of criminal and a lower class of law enforcer. He survives high speed truck flips, Kevlar-armored right crosses and highrise bungee jumps.

Though he is painted up to be an enigma wrapped in a riddle (or was that someone else?), based on evidence from The Dark Knight, we do know the following things about The Joker:

He is a munitions expert. He is equally at home with C4 suppositories and oil barrel chemical peels.

Though he is an expert project manager, at least in the bank-robbery field, he is prone to waste his resources.

He is empathic. He knows just what to say to push anyone over the edge of madness, and then leap in after him.

He is a man ahead of his Timex. The Joker can take a likin’ from Batman and keep on tickin’. He may once have belonged to a fight club.

He obviously was involved in covert ops in the past. He knows how to anticipate scenarios and plan alternatives.

He knows where to acquire esoteric weapons and how to use them.

He moonlights as a Mary Kay agent.

He has had access to Jack Benny’s joke vault.

Omigod! The Joker is Jason Bourne!

Blogger of the Year

2008-12-31T09:27:00.012-05:00

Update Below: A stunning visual to help you donate more

Update II below: We don't seem to have the hang of this donation thing.

Every year at about this time I feel an incredible need for self-actualization. The old year is over (thank the Gods) and the new year is begun. That's why this year, for the very first time, I have selected myself as Blogger of the Year. I have surveyed the various entries I have written over this past year and have determined that this blog, "A Model Media Ecologist," is absolutely the best blog I could have produced. The writing was sharp, the wit was acerbic, the opinions were always pithy. (Am I describing a blog or a mango?)

I accept this award, Blogger of the Year, with gratitude and humility. If I wasn't doing such a terrific job I wouldn't deserve it, so I must be doing a terrific job. However, this is not the time to rest on my laurels. In these challenging economic times I need to pursue bigger and better ways to monetize my writings:

Now that Time Warner Cable is losing Comedy Central I am offering my services to them. (With Bush and all of his cronies leaving office there is no longer any need for John Stewart or Stephen Colbert anyway.)
With Al Franken joining the Senate there will be an increased need for a humorist for speaking engagements, best-selling books (Judith Regan, call me!) and childrens' birthday parties.
Those of you who are still reading this self-congratulatory screed could take a second to click on the "Donate" button to your left and be generous. Go ahead. Make my day.
Or you could send me a check.
Or you could donate your car.

So thank you, one and all for this great honor. I will continue to serve as Blogger of the Year for the rest of 2009 and, depending on the take and the state of the economy, maybe 2010. Wait, Blogger of the Decade. Doesn't that have a nice metric ring to it?

Update: For some reason, pictures of rising thermometers encourage people to donate money. I've provided this one, cribbed from Buzzflash, for those who require visual aids. As you can now see, we have a long way to go to reach our goal of $250,000. In fact, we have $250,000 to go.

Please give generously!

Update II: Normally during a fundraising drive the thermometer is updated periodically to indicate progress. For example, I had already prepared the graphic for the first report:

However, checking the latest results, I find that the actual state of my finances would best be represented by the following:

So you see we're heading in a direction opposite from that desired. Its very simple really. I ask for money and you donate it. I've even drawn you a picture.

Let's try to pick up the pace a bit. Don't make me start selling "Model Media Ecologist" T-shirts and mugs!

Glenn Greenwald on the Rule of Law

2008-12-14T09:29:00.005-05:00

As in many other blogs this weekend I would like to call attention to Glenn Greenwald's interview on Bill Moyer's Journal which aired this past Friday and is being rebroadcast tonight. It can be viewed on the PBS website here.

Greenwald, who writes a blog on Salon, is a constitutional scholar and tackles head-on the question of whether the Bush regime should be investigated and tried for crimes commited:

What you have is a two-tiered system of justice where ordinary Americans are subjected to the most merciless criminal justice system in the world. They break the law. The full weight of the criminal justice system comes crashing down upon them. But our political class, the same elites who have imposed that incredibly harsh framework on ordinary Americans, have essentially exempted themselves and the leaders of that political class from the law.

They have license to break the law. That’s what we’re deciding now as we say George Bush and his top advisors shouldn’t be investigated let alone prosecuted for the laws that we know that they’ve broken. And I can’t think of anything more damaging to our country because the rule of law is the lynchpin of everything we have.

While Greenwald addresses this issue from his vantage as a constitutional scholar, I will add a Media Ecological slant to his argument shortly

2008-12-06T01:01:00.004-05:00

In a message dated 12/04/08 18:46:39 Eastern Standard Time, Lance Strate writes:

"I'm not sure if you absolutely have to have a sense of humor to be a media ecologist, but it certainly is highly recommended. McLuhan was a notorious punster, Postman loved to people people on, and there is a trickster mentality that constitutes a significant strain in our intellectual tradition."

Lance is right. The tradition of humor in Media Ecology goes back over 16,000 years to the Lascaux cave paintings. Recent scholarship has suggested that the cave paintings were actually elaborate knock-knock jokes. The reason the humorous tradition was lost is that the creators of those cave paintings were in the habit of telling their knock-knock jokes with a stone club.

A careful reading of the Socratic dialogues reveals what a kidder Plato was. For example, consider this exchange between Socrates and Phaedrus.

(Phaedrus gives a long exposition on the relationship between lovers and then asks:)

"What do you think of the speech, Socrates? Isn't it extraordinarily fine, especially in point of language?"

Socrates: "Amazingly fine indeed, my friend. I was thrilled by it. And it was you, Phaedrus, that made me feel as I did. I watched your apparent delight in the words as you read. And as I'm sure that you understand such matters better than I do, I took my cue from you, and therefore joined in the ecstasy of my right worshipful companion."

Phaedrus: "Come come! Do you mean to make a joke of it?"

Socrates: "Do you think I'm joking, and don't mean it seriously?"

What a kidder that Socrates was! And a true Media Ecologist!

At nearly the same time, Moses was knocking them dead at the Red Sea with his own unique variation on the classic surfer dude/wipeout routine. That was after God had said to Moses, "Take two tablets and call me in the morning."

Fast forward 2000 years, and Johannes Gutenberg was killing the scions of the Catholic Church with his famous "You're not my type" tag line.

Our own electronic era owes a lot to the whimsey of Alexander Graham Bell who liked to play tricks on his assistant:

Bell: Come here Watson, I need you.
Watson: Who said that?
Bell: He he he.

There are countless other examples of the mirth and humor of the pillars of Media Ecology, but its late, and I'm not getting paid for this. However, I will include one of my favorites, which I've shared here before, the best McLuhan joke ever:

Several students of Media Ecology consult a famous psychic in order to contact Marshall McLuhan and finally get a clear explanation of his writings. The seer goes into a trance, but says nothing for several minutes.
Losing patience, one of the students cries out, "Dr. McLuhan, are you there? Why won't you speak to us?"
A deep voice replies, "The Medium is the Message!"

So the next time you are at a media conference, and someone tries to go all serious on you over the biases of communication, technological determinism or hot and cold media, remember that humor is an integral part of Media Ecology and look that person right in the eye and sing "Media Ecology almost is theology!" and walk away. If one person does that, they'll think he's crazy and try to ignore him. If two people do it, they'll think that Media Ecology is some sort of conspiracy and try to have them removed from the building. But if 50 people do it, imagine, 50 people singing "Media Ecology almost is theology!" and then walking out! They'll think its a movement, which it is.

Rating The Internet

2008-12-02T17:06:00.008-05:00

Seven words that you can never say on TV but are OK on the internet

When I seek out entertainment, I depend on the various ratings organizations to help me avoid explicit portrayals of sex, gratuitous graphic violence, foul language or unacceptable vulgarity. I am familiar with the movie ratings systems which warn me of "R" or "NR" or "PG-13" content. When I turn on the TV, I check the rating box in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, and reach for my remote at the first sign of offensive material. When I purchase a video game, I make sure there is no "A", "M" or even "T" on the box.

While there is no comparable safeguard for web browsing, some simple common sense measures have heretofore stood me in good stead. I don't respond to email promises to increase the size of my penis or enhance my sexual experiences. I don't reply to requests from correspondents with names like "CandyPantsXXX" or "NaughtyGirlOXOX" who promise to be my friend or relieve my boredom. Most off-limits web sites reveal their intentions right away by bombarding you with racy music, presenting pre-pubescent nymphs who want you to "get to know them" and, finally, soliciting your credit card number in order to see more.

So imagine my surprise as I was browsing the web site of the Parents Television Council, "ParentsTV.org," which purports to survey and rate the content of television programming for the parents of impressionable children, so they don't have to. According to their "About Us" link, the Parents Television Council "is a non-partisan education organization advocating responsible entertainment. It was founded in 1995 to ensure that children are not constantly assaulted by sex, violence and profanity on television and in other media." Attached to each program is a color code rating, green, yellow, red to serve as a parental guide. These codes are defined briefly as follows:

Red: "Show may include gratuitous sex, explicit dialogue, violent content, or obscene language, and is unsuitable for children"
Yellow: "The show contains adult-oriented themes and dialogue that may be inappropriate for youngsters."
Green: "Family-friendly show promoting responsible themes and traditional values.
Blue: "Not yet rated by the PTC."

Well naturally I wanted to know more about what actually goes into the various ratings categories, and so, ignoring the warning that the ratings details contain "graphic descriptions," I clicked on. I don't think I can adequately describe my horror at what I discovered.

To my chagrin, I learned that the "Red" designation refers to the following words (out of modesty, I have replaced letters with random characters): "Sh*t, d&ck, pr$ck, f@ck, !sshole, c^ck, G—damn, profaning Jesus Christ." These words in their unexpurgated form were accompanied by explicit details of the types of sex and violence, and their frequency, that would warrant red, yellow or green designations.

I also learned that the frequency of "veiled or mild innuendo" or "responsible discussion of sexual issues" may bump the rating from "green" to "yellow," where even one depiction or mention of "sexual innuendo, marital sex, sex implied, homosexuality, pre-coital and/or post-coital or responsible discussion of pornography or masturbation" would suffice. More than three occurrences of the former per half hour gets the bump from green to yellow. Three or more per half hour of the latter group gets the red. I think you get the idea.

Here via a link available to anyone, of any age, is web content that would offend everyone, of every age, from the youngest sprout to the oldest beanstalk. So the question springs to mind, who rates the raters? If we can't rely on our media censors to clean up their act, who can we trust? The Parents Television Council may be performing a noble function visavis television, film and literature, but I'm afraid that until they censor themselves, I cannot in good conscience recommend their website.

For that matter, their example suggests that any website, no matter how innocuous, may contain offensive material. Until an organization takes the burden of discovery off of me by publishing a comprehensive rating list of all internet web sites, I'll just have to console myself by listening to my new collection of George Carlin CDs.

Happy 100th Birthday Claude Lévi-Strauss!

2008-11-28T23:18:00.003-05:00

Here is my quick take on Claude Lévi-Strauss's contribution to Media Ecology:

His approach to the interpretation of so-called "primitive" cultures revealed the complex patterns of thought that went into the development of systems of myth and kinship. His notion that "primitive" intellectual activities were equal to our "modern" systems of knowledge, just applied to differing objects, put the entire body of anthropological writings, going back to James Fraser's Golden Bough into a new perspective. Lévi-Strauss's work, building on the linguistic structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and the evolutionary approach to cultural studies of Franz Boas, revealed the biases in the use of terms such as "primitive" and "modern" (even though Lévi-Strauss himself used these terms), and paved the way for Walter Ong's distinction between orality, literacy and secondary-orality as more appropriate explanations for differing cultures.

Lévi-Strauss discovered and demonstrated connections between seemingly disparate mythic stories, and offered explanations for seemingly random elements of those stories. His methodology can be used as model for ways to interpret the products of contemporary culture, which, while seeming to be unrelated, actually constitute a system (or systems) of symbolic meanings.

I find the tools Lévi-Strauss provides useful in a number of ways. I also think that his notion of "things that are good to think with" as powerful as Postman's question regarding a new technology: "What problem does it provide a solution to?"

I like Lévi-Strauss's idea that a myth is not a "false" story or idle tale, but rather a dynamic technique which members of a culture use to address cultural discrepancies. To me, this is a compelling explanation for why myths persist in a culture. It may also explain how, if we know where to look, we can identify the mythic systems of our own culture that provide us with a coherent world view in the face of constant change and turmoil.

I know that structuralism has been in eclipse in academic circles lately, that Lévi-Strauss has been accused of a binary focus that, being Hegelian in origin, cannot apply to current thinking about media. I think that to write off Lévi-Strauss's methodology as a thesis/antithesis/synthesis intellectual game misses the subtlety of his analysis. A closer reading of all 2200+ pages of his Mythologiques shows that, while he may begin an analysis by identifying polar opposites, this is only a starting point. The analysis of a mythic system must account for far more that just a pair of opposites. In the course of his analysis of the myths of the Tupi Indians, Lévi-Strauss moves spiral-like through multiple mythic variations and multiple opposing pairs and by proceeding A to B and B to C, etc., demonstrates internal consistencies within the mythic system that aren't immediately apparent to an outside observer. In other words, Lévi-Strauss provides a useful tool for analysis regardless of whether you wish to extrapolate the function of the method to the deeper structures of the human mind or not.

I also find Lévi-Strauss's methodology completely compatible with McLuhan's Laws of the Media. Where McLuhan, via the Tetrad asks us to consider what a technology or medium enhances, obsolesces, retrieves and reverses into, Lévi-Strauss will start with a pair of opposites "A" and "B", but in the course of his analysis will present examples of what he calls " A' " (A prime) and " B' " (B prime) as recursive iterations of the original pair. Perhaps someone will someday conduct a Lévi-Straussian analysis of McLuhan's system of myths.

Lévi-Strauss is also compatible with Ong's notions of primary orality. Ong discusses how different human thought processes must be without text. Lévi-Strauss gives example after example of exactly how these thought processes work. I don't recall Lévi-Strauss discussing the poetry of the Tupi Indians as a means of perpetuating the culture, but he does demonstrate how interconnected myths can act as intellectual place holders for a non-literate population to help them consider complex systems of thought.

Our current system of myths is not only presented verbally, but also via images, in print, and even in interplay of biases amongst all of our competing media. Since we may be relearning this manner of thinking as we move deeper into secondary orality, Lévi-Strauss provides us with a map of where we may be headed.

So as Professor Lévi-Strauss enters his second century, I wish him a Happy Birthday or Joyeux Anniversaire!

Television's "Good News"

2008-11-18T15:51:00.010-05:00

University of Maryland study finds television causes unhappiness.

There is a posting in Tuesday's Canada.com entertainment section concerning a recent University of Maryland study on television. Commenting on how the study asserts that television makes viewers unhappy, Alex Strachan writes:

"The study's conclusion is that TV has addictive qualities, and that viewers addicted to TV share behavioral traits with those who are prone to substance abuse, "since addictive activities produce momentary please but long-term misery and regret. People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged, with TV becoming an opiate."

The point Strachan misses is that the purpose of television is to make us unhappy and then to provide solutions to our discomforts through advertising. As former FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson pointed out nearly 40 years ago, the viewer is not the consumer of television, he is the product, offered to advertisers at a cost per thousand. (see his book, How To Talk Back to Your Television Set).

Without the bad news of "News", the end-of-the-world melodramas of "Dramas" or the embarrassment provoking unlikelihoods of "Comedies," advertisers would not have the properly conditioned audience to pitch their products to.

That is why Marshall McLuhan, also almost 40 years ago, called advertising television's "good news" or "gospel."

So Strachan's concern over which came first, the unhappy viewer or the television is misplaced. Sure unhappy people may naturally gravitate toward television, but why they do so has less to do with chickens and eggs and more to do with the underlying purpose of television broadcasters.

And as for the University of Maryland's study, as I haven't read it yet, I won't comment except to note Charles Schultz's take on the impact of television on children:

Charlie Brown: Do you think television is harmful to children?

Linus: I don't know. I've never had one fall on me.

Google Searches Can Also Track Intellectual Outbreaks

2008-11-13T08:49:00.002-05:00

Simple steps to avoid an epidemic of Media Ecology.

An article in yesterday's New York Times discusses how Google queries can anticipate the rise in reported flu outbreaks and beat the forecasts of the CDC, sometimes by weeks at at time.

A similar technique could be used to track Media Ecology activity through Google queries. We have known since the early 1970's that there is a correlation between the rise of reported flu queries and Media Ecology activities. Sometimes, the rise in temperature, the muscle aches and feelings of nausea due to the latter are attributed to the former.

Using the data gathered from Google searches, we can anticipate an increase in Media Ecology activity before it occurs and take steps to prevent it. While there is currently no preventive vaccine or cure available for Media Ecology activity, a few basic steps of mental hygiene can reduce the severity of the outbreak:

An outbreak of Media Ecology activity often is preceded by a discussion of the works of any of a number of scholars, including Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Walter J. Ong, Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, Alfred Korzybski or Suzanne Langer.

This may be followed by secondary discussion of Paul Levinson, Lance Strate, Robert Logan, Joshua Meyerowitz or James Carey. Should you encounter a group discussing any of these authors, immediately change the topic to sports, the weather, politics or religion. A good lead in is: "Yes, technology may have influenced the course of human evolution, but weren't weather patterns, available raw material resources and the ineluctable modalities of warfare more significant?"

While there is no evidence that Media Ecology activity can be picked up on toilet seats, it is advisable to always have a supply of alternative reading material available, including old issues of Consumers Reports, copies of Mad Libs or almost any graphic novel, except any by Douglas Rushkoff or Neil Gaiman.

Media Ecology activity is easily spread among college students and can then be brought into the home during semester breaks or over weekends. One approach is to make enormous quantities of food available when anticipating a home visit and make sure the student's mouth is always full. Others suggest planning a trip to areas of the world not currently experiencing any Media Ecology outbreaks and leaving before the infected student arrives. While Canada has long been off limits, recent outbreaks in Mexico have put that country in doubt. However, many Caribbean islands are still considered pristine.

Media Ecology activity is most detrimental to the very young and to the elderly. Special steps should be taken to shield these groups from exposure.

Avoid enclosed areas where Media Ecologists are known to converge. For example, this weekend at Fordham University in New York City, the Media Ecology Association is co-sponsoring an Institute of General Semantics Symposium, "Creating the Future: Conscious Time-Binding for a Better Tomorrow." It is anticipated that the reported incidents of Media Ecology activity will rise exponentially by the conclusion of this symposium.

Should you begin to feel any of the symptoms of Media Ecology, bed rest, fluids and aspirin-lots of aspirin- are recommended. Symptoms may persist for up to two weeks, with feelings of lethargy and agoraphobia continuing for up to a month after that.

WARNING: Do not under any circumstances attempt to consult a Ph.D. They will only prolong the course of the disease.

I'm Binding My Time

2008-11-09T21:54:00.004-05:00

'Cause that's the kind of guy I'm.

Lance Strate has posted the program for this coming weekend's Institute of General Semantics Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture and Symposium at his blog "Lance Strate's Blog Time Passing." I highly recommend that you immediately stop reading this post and click on the link to view the schedule. I'll wait.

Well, what are you still doing here? Really, go to Lance's blog and then go to the IGS site and register to attend. The link is here.

No. I don't know what they're serving for dinner.

Now that you've read the schedule you've probably noticed that I will be giving a talk at 9:10 on Sunday as part of the symposium. My topic is "Things Come in Fours," and if you want to know what it is about, click here.

OK. That's it. See you Friday night.

Really that's all I'm going to post today. Go away.

You're still there aren't you?

Have you ever wondered where blogging would be if Christopher Latham Sholes had never invented the typewriter? Or if Michel Eyquem de Montaigne had never invented the personal essay? Or if Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg had never invented printing using movable type?

Isn't Wikipedia wonderful?

Claude Lévi-Strauss Celebrates his 100th Birthday This Month!

2008-11-05T06:53:00.000-05:00

Yes, Claude Lévi-Strauss is still alive and will celebrate his 100th birthday in a few weeks.

Beyond his well-known scholarly accomplishments, I think I can say without fear of contradiction that Professor Lévi-Strauss' personal longevity is a testament to the positive benefits of the pursuit of structural anthropology on long life and good health. Just carrying around his four volume, 2200 page oeuvre, "Mythologiques" will improve your muscle tone and cardiovascular capacity.

In his Times Literary Supplement article (available here), Patrick Wilcken notes that Lévi-Strauss' three dimensional approach to myth analysis is like a Klein bottle:

"Mathematically generated, but with an organic feel, the Klein bottle’s bulbous, undulating form is self-consuming and conceptually difficult to grasp. It has no true inner or outer surfaces. Like Lévi-Strauss’s oeuvre, it eternally feeds back through itself."

What Wilcken is referring to is the recursive nature of Lévi-Strauss' technique. A myth cannot be understood by itself, but only as part of the complete body of a culture's mythology. According to Lévi-Strauss, such an analysis is necessary because the reasoning taking place within a myth defies what we understand as logic. It is not linear thinking, but rather a metaphoric leap of faith that finds connections where there aren’t any and achieves the reconciliation of the irreconcilable.

The Klein bottle may be an apt metaphor for the recursive nature of Lévi-Strauss' technique. I like better his other metaphor of mythology as a culture's musical score of which we only see a bar at a time and which we must reassemble in complete "musical notation" form to fully grasp.

Lévi-Strauss' work came at a time when anthropologists in general were abandoning the belief of James George Frazer and the other pioneering anthropologists that pre-literate peoples were somehow more primitive, more childlike or less intellectually capable than modern man. His attempts to define the structures of aspects of pre-literate societies demonstrated a complexity of thought and a subtlety of mind equal to our own.

Some critics get hung up on discrepancies within the structural methodology which Lévi-Strauss used to explain mythology, totemic systems and kinship systems. Other criticism focus on how a particular interpretation doesn't fit the recorded ethnography for a culture. While the methodology itself, or its particular application may be subject to review and revision, what is important is that Levi-Strauss demonstrated that there is a universality to the human mind, and given sufficient symbolic material, all peoples, whether within an oral culture, a literate culture or our post literate culture still retain a commonality with can be explored through our symbol systems and perhaps understood in terms of the underlying structures transmitted via the stories told.

Our own "modern" culture also has a mythic "score," but being part of it, it is difficult for us to see. The distinctions between "raw" vs. "cooked," "nature" vs. "culture" and "modern" vs. "primitive" that Lévi-Strauss finds in his studies of North and South America native populations drive the narratives, beliefs and social customs of 21st century populations as well.

Happy Birthday Professor Lévi-Strauss!

President Barack Obama

2008-11-04T23:23:00.002-05:00

America comes of age.

Things Come in Fours

2008-10-28T10:44:00.015-05:00

Some unabashed shameless self-promotion ensues.

If you happen to be in New York City on the weekend starting November 14 (which coincidentally is my birthday!) I will be presenting a paper at the Institute of General Semantics Symposium: "Creating the Future: Conscious Time-binding for a Better Tomorrow" which begins with the 56th Annual Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture Friday Night.

A link to the IGS site can be found here. For a detailed listing of the weekend's proceedings look here. In addition, my friend Lance Strate, who was recently appointed IGS Executive Director, has a number of posts concerning Korzybski and General Semantics at his blog "Lance Strate's Blog Time Passing" which can be found here.

My talk, "Things Come in Fours," which will be given on Sunday, November 16th at 9:10AM, is about my encounter with Marshall McLuhan in 1977. We were both speakers at a conference at Fairleigh Dickinson University, with students such as myself delivering papers concerning their dissertation research and Dr. McLuhan then commenting.

My doctoral dissertation is titled "Myth As Advertising: An Analysis Of Prime Time American Television Advertising Using A Structural Methodology Based On The Theories Of Claude Levi-Strauss" copies of which are still available from Proquest here.

When it was my turn, I gave an elaborate presentation on French Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss' use of the "triad" to analyze the structure of human cultures. Levi-Strauss' most famous example is the "culinary triad" which differentiates between that which is natural from that which is cultural by describing how foodstuffs move from their original "raw" condition to the condition of "cooked" or "rotten" depending on whether they go through a cultural or a natural process.

After I completed my talk, Dr. McLuhan observed that I had missed the point in focusing on the triad, because, he noted, "things come in fours."

At that time McLuhan was working on his "Laws of the Media" which state that the impact of any technology or medium of communication on a culture can be determined by examining four characteristics:

What does it enhance?

What does it obsolesce?

What does it retrieve that was previously lost?

What does it reverse into if pushed to an extreme?

For example, the impact of blogging can be understood by the following effects:

Blogging enhances “many to many” communication. As a medium, blogging allows me to get my message out to many without the need of access to television, radio, print or film production facilities. Blogging also allows me to receive messages from many sources.

Blogging obsolesces one to one or many to one communications. Telephone chats and television binges are replaced by blogging connections.

Blogging retrieves the habits of 18th letter correspondents or diarists. Though this varies widely, at the minimum blogging requires that we capture and express our thoughts via the keyboard. Some bloggers go much further than that. In the blogosphere, we all become nacent Montaignes.

When pushed to an extreme, blogging reverses into total narcissism. I write only to myself, for myself. I put myself into the blogosphere, and seeing my own image, become entranced.

So while I was thinking in terms of Levi-Straussian "threes", McLuhan was thinking in terms of Laws of the Media "fours." My talk on November 16th will address this distinction and compare McLuhan's Laws to Levi-Strauss' own four part analysis of the structure of mythology.

Oh yes, and some other guys like Paul Levinson, Martin Levinson (no relation), Alan Flagg, Douglas Ruskoff, Terry Moran, Janet Sternberg, Andrew Postman, Thom Gencarelli, Stephanie Bennett etc. etc. will be there too.

Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?

2008-10-14T08:33:00.004-05:00

To our extra-terrestrial visitors: Had we but world enough, and time, this coyness, alien, were no crime.

Today, October 14, 2008, is the full moon, and, according to many notes circulating the World Wide Web, the day when we will finally make first contact with extra-terrestrials. According to an "Australian channeler" whose claims are available here on YouTube, the "Federation of Light" will come in peace to elevate all of mankind and start a new era of human prosperity and interstellar travel.

Wow. So much to mock, so little time. Let me begin by presenting my bona fides regarding UFOs and extraterrestrial phenomena in general.

Childhood's End
I can state without equivocation that I have been fascinated with science fiction depictions of space travel and visits to and from other worlds since I was a child. I read books such as Space Cat, The Mushroom Planet and Rusty's Space Ship early and often. As a teen I subscribed to Sky and Telescope with the intention of pursuing a career as an astronomer, only to be thwarted by my parents' refusal to buy me a telescope. At age sixteen, I was one of the total audience of three to view the first episode of Star Trek ("The Salt Vampire") and I proudly accept the term "Trekker" along with my other titles.

The Day The Earth Stood Still
I lost my virginity at age 19. This has nothing to do with extra-terrestrials, I just wanted to use that title. (It was, however, out of this world).

Stranger In A Strange Land
I discovered Media Ecology shortly after the day the earth stood still and have been wandering within its boundaries ever since. This, along with my day job, has left me little time to adequately research the documented UFO phenomena, the Roswell incident or other such X-Files fodder. So it is entirely possible that I've missed some key piece of evidence that would convince me that we have actually been visited by intergalactic travelers and I owe "The Federation of Light" an apology.

To Serve Man
Naw. In my universe, any ET visitors with sufficient intelligence to overcome the obvious impediments to faster-than-light travel would think of better ways to make their presence known than to draw designs in cornfields or to contact Earthly representatives whose known affinity toward such pseudo-sciences as parapsychology, paranormal activity or paragliding would render their credibility suspect.

Close Encounters of the Third Coin
So here is my challenge to all you UFO worshippers. Send me a dollar. Send me ten dollars. Send me 100 dollars. The more dollars I receive, the more inclined I will be to believe that you're willing to put your money where your mouth is (I know this is the point in these types of diatribes where the author demands some actual physical evidence of extra-terrestrial visitation or even personal contact with an actual ET, but honestly, I'd rather have the money).

In the meantime, I'll console myself with viewings of the newly CGI-enhanced original Star Trek series and the notion that no matter how far you wander, there's no place like home.

Robinson Crusoe Faces Retirement

2008-09-30T09:21:00.021-05:00

Having been cast away in my wretched condition for the better part of seven and forty years, as best I could reckon by my calendar post, I found it necessary to provide certain machines and contrivances to make allowances for those physical dysfunctions which accompany the advancement of old age. Nor could I rely too heavily on the albeit willing assistance offered by my still loyal and devoted man, Friday, whose life span seemed to be a great deal shorter than mine, whether owing to his nurturance in the primitive wilds, or to some personal peculiarity, and thus was feeling at his younger age similar impairments and disabilities as I was suffering under due to my more advanced age. Taking this into account, and realizing that things would get worse as time went on, our mortal condition being what it is, I exercised as much foresight as possible to supply not only for my present needs and wants, but also for those which could occur thereafter, although my careful consideration proved insufficient for certain emergencies, especially regarding my man, Friday, as will be seen shortly.

As for the bounties provided by my island, and God's great mercy, they continued as much and as plentiful as ever. My goat herds increased and prospered. I never suffered a single crop failure, though such good fortune rarely blesses the farmers of England, or any other country I have knowledge of. I still had my supply of raisins, limes and other fruits which 50 such men as myself could not have begun to deplete. Through careful marshalling and rationing, I kept a good supply of rum, though not nearly so much as I had started out with. And most important, and most gracious of God to whom I did not miss one day falling upon my knees to thank and praise, and whose words I continued to instruct Friday in, I still retained my two front teeth, without which I would have been hard put to enjoy most if not all of the aforementioned bounties.

The contrivances I found necessary took a great deal of thought and much painstaking labor until I had achieved to my satisfaction their construction. Chief among these was a chair with wheels, or a wheel-chair, which I now found necessary in order to get around my island. The construction took many months of labor, it being hardest to hit upon a feasible means of creating the two wheels without which the whole machine was useless. I finally solve this problem by finding a straight hardwood tree whose trunk was of the diameter I desired, and then very painstakingly cutting and sawing until I had two equal cross-sections of that trunk, which served me very well, and were as perfect as any wheel that could have been fashioned by a carpenter or a blacksmith in England. Along with this, I found it necessary to abandon my methods of fortification, and cut a threshold through the two walls protecting my domicile, as my old method of climbing up a ladder and then pulling it in after me was no longer feasible. It was, in fact, this necessary alteration which led to the dire and tragic circumstances of which I will now treat concerning my man, Friday.

Since I could no longer rely on sheer strength and the impenetrability of my wooden hedge for my security, I resolved to resort to disguise and the various wiles necessary to make up for the weaknesses under which I now suffered. With this in mind, I sent Friday, who though old, still had use of his legs, out in search of those broad palm leaves which graced the trees of the far side of the island. I intended to use the broadness and hugeness of these leaves to fashion a covering for the entrance to my cave which would make it indistinguishable from the surrounding foliage, except upon a very close inspection, and yet would allow me a quick and easy ingress or egress.

Friday had been gone on this errand for the better part of a week when I began to worry and take notice of his absence. The island was still visited occasionally by savages from the mainland, and I became afeerd lest Friday should have fallen into their clutches, and in his enfeebled condition have become the main course of one of their cannibalistic feasts. With the passage of another week, I resolved to set out in search of my faithful servant and companion, carrying with me those weapons I thought necessary in case my worst fears proved to be real, vis., two muskets, several hand pistols, a saber and an assortment of smaller knives, plus sufficient supply of shot and powder. These I carried by means of containers and straps I had fastened to the back of my chair, my arms of needs being left free to provide propulsion for the wheels.

It was with great difficulty that I navigated the rough terrain between my fortress and the aforementioned area where the palm trees grew in abundance. Many time I had near escapes from running into trees or toppling over into a ditch, and so I made my way as carefully as possible, though I knew time was of the essence, it was not to be helped unless I wished to be the casualty and have Friday come searching after me. I paused overnight at my country retreat, and on the morning of the third day since I left my fortress, I arrive on the shore where the palms were at hand. After a careful search, which I feared would be fruitless, I fairly stumbled upon poor Friday, lying beneath one of the largest of the trees, several of it huge leaves still clutched in his hand. I was at a loss at first to discern the nature of his affliction. From the manner in which he lay, it appeared that he had been suddenly afflicted, though no spear lay with his flesh, nor did any blood show to stain his garments, so I put any fear of an attack by the cannibals out of my head. It was possible that he had been struck by some tropical ailment of which I was ignorant, or possibly the random unlucky dropping of a coconut from the very tree beneath which he lay. Upon careful examination, I discerned that he was, in fact, still alive, though barely breathing, and I decided it was of the utmost urgency to transport him back to the fortress where I could care for him properly, and put off discovering the cause of his misfortune until he himself could tell me.

With this in mind, I returned with all due haste to my fortress with the intention of fashioning some contrivance to transport Friday home. Feeling more and more the desperate nature of the situation, I did not bother with refining or perfecting my design, but set out to construct it as quickly as possible. What I had in mind was simple enough, and the materials for its construction were readily at hand. Here is what I decided upon: a stretcher fashioned out of good, sturdy wood; and some of the canvas that I still kept in my cave. I did not consider then some of the obvious difficulties that would ensue, which will be recounted shortly.

Most of the canvas was rotten. However, I did find one piece of sufficient strength and proportions for my purposes. My next problem was to find two study poles to attach my canvas to and so complete my project. I was at first torn between choosing a hard wood or a soft wood. I finally decided that soft wood poles would not only be easier to cut and alter, but would also better support the strain of carrying a man's weight. With some difficulty, and several false starts, I cut and refined the wood for the poles. Then, at a great expense in time and effort, I sewed the canvas onto the frame--the task being all the more difficult as I had neither needle, nor thread--until it was good and strong, and would have supported not just the weight of one man, but several, if the need should arise. All this labor cost me many weeks, at the end of which I was all the more eager to set out, my fears for Friday being all the more increased. However, it was the start of the rainy season, and even if I had braved the storm and dangers of wind and rain, I would have found the way so muddy and treacherous that I could not have helped but made for two casualties, rather than one. Therefore, I could only sit within my cave, and wait for the rain to end.

During my time of enforced confinement, I gave much thought to the calamities which can befall a man when he least expects it. I thought of poor Friday, who, while not in his prime, still maintained a good physical condition, and could look forward to many more years on our wretched island. When I thought of him lying beneath that tree, I wept bitterly, and then realized that no matter how miserable my condition, I could nonetheless be worse off, as the unfortunate circumstances of Friday's misfortune attested to. I further reflected on how God, in His great mercy, had let me find Friday before it was too late, and then supplied me the wherewithal to affect his rescue. Nor did I fail to give thanks and praise to Him.

A Good Reason to Give Bush a Third Term

2008-09-23T09:43:00.002-05:00

Economists Warn Anti-Bush Merchandise Market Close To Collapse

Full Disclosure: My son suggested the idea for this video.

Shock and Awe, Financial Division

2008-09-20T20:39:00.003-05:00

In her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein documents how the Republican Neocons have perfected the use of shock and awe to get what they want. Briefly, Klein's doctrine describes how using the uncertainty that surrounds a crisis situation (9/11 Attack, Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina etc. etc) Republicans push through rules, decisions and laws that otherwise would be too unpopular to attempt (Patriot Act, Removal of Habeas Corpus, approval of torture...sorry enhanced interogation, privatization of the army in Iraq, warrant-less eavesdropping on American citizens, etc. etc.)

I have one question.

Is this week's financial meltdown another example of shock and awe? On the one hand we have the irony of the Neocon Republican oligopoly presiding over the largest imposition of socialism in our country's history.

Nixon in China anyone?

On the other hand, the end result of their attempts to save us from another Great Depression is the propping up of financial managers who guessed wrongly in their gambling of shareholder assets and the transfer of $700 Billion in taxpayer dollars to the aforementioned private sector to benefit those managers and possibly their shareholders.

Can anyone help me out?

The Elementary Structures of Political Kinship

2008-09-19T23:23:00.001-05:00

There have been some questions concerning my previous post where I suggested that John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running "mate" was both profound and perverse. By selecting a woman who is both unknown and unqualified to serve in national office, John McCain is not asking us to view his choice in terms of her own personal merits or any pre-existing attitudes we may have towards her known accomplishments. McCain's "message" is that knowledge, experience, even temperament are not necessary qualifications for Presidential office.

The thunderclap of attention that has accompanied Palin's political ascent is not the admiration appropriate to an accomplished public sector administrator but rather the adulation due a mother-goddess figure. Republican groupies and media sycophants reacted to Palin as an archetype, not as an individual. By suggesting this political liaison, McCain used Palin's gender to achieve his political ends and in doing so reified age-old practices where women were treated as commodities that are exchanged to balance and confirm the social order.

In his study of pre-modern cultural practices, Structural Anthropology, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called the marriage arrangements of pre-literate societies a type of "slow" communication:

"Each human society conditions it own physical perpetuation by a complex body of rules, such as the prohibition of incest, endogamy, exogamy, preferential marriage between certain types of relatives, polygamy, or monogamy--or simply by the more or less systematic application of moral, social, economic, and esthetic standards. By conforming to these rules, a society facilitates certain types of unions or associations and excludes others." (Structural Anthropology, p. 353)

When we define appropriate marital liaisons, we determine the course of human evolution and complete the transition from nature to culture. By the way, Lévi-Strauss' characterization of kinship strictures as a type of communication is not totally unfamiliar to Media Ecologists. In The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman wrote:

"Children are the message we will send to a time we will never see."

By describing children as a "message," Postman challenged us to imagine what medium is being used to convey these messages. Though Postman's focus was on our education systems and how electronic media redefine notions of childhood, a broader view places children "messages" within the "medium" of kinship systems and matrimonial proscriptions.

Marital restrictions have loosened in our post-industrial society, though they have not disappeared entirely. But clearly, as women approach social equality with men in our era, the archaic limitations placed on women's aspirations, the so-called glass ceiling, has developed cracks. John McCain's attitude towards women, as manifested in his partnership with Sarah Palin, is an attempt to cement over those cracks.

Why Women Wear Makeup: Sarah Palin As A Medium of Communication

2008-09-18T11:09:00.008-05:00

I missed my 9/17 posting. I'm working on a comment connecting Sarah Palin's annointment to "VP wannabe" with Levi-Strauss' view that marital relations in pre-modern societies are a form of slow communication, with women being the medium, but I haven't been able to pull together the appropriate citations. The basic idea is that, by selecting Palin, "Grandpa" McCain tapped into primal notions concerned the exchange of women and incest taboos.

Joshua Greshin Gunn has a relevant post at his Rosewater Chronicles blog:

The appeal of the Palin pick to a certain set of conservatives is, however, not really postmodern at all. The contrast between Palin and Clinton is. If we focus on Palin alone, we find that a very “primitive” form of communication is in play: the exchange of women. However flawed we have come to learn Claude Levi-Strauss was (e.g., he falsified his data), his central observation about kinship systems remains uncontested: for whatever reason, society as we know it is based on the exchange of women; it is based on the circulation of women as objects. From a theoretical standpoint, there is no reason that men or children are not exchanged, it just happens that women have been the object of value, for good or ill (mostly ill). The Palin pick is an indirect reminder of this basic, social dynamic. To denote its special status as an event, let us capitalize: the Palin Pick.
In her monumentally influential study Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Juliet Mitchell bends over backwards to protect Levi-Strauss from the charge of anti-feminism. It’s amusing to read, but we must remember this study is almost forty years old and published in the last gasps of the second wave. Nevertheless, she correctly underscores that Levi-Strauss’ theory of kinship understood familial relations as a form of communication, a dynamic establishment and reestablishment of society through the exchange of signs:
Levi-Strauss has shown how it is not the biological family of mother, father, and child that is the distinguishing feature of human kinship structures. . . . The universal and primordial law is that which regulates marriage relationships and its pivotal expression is the prohibition of incest. This prohibition forces one family to give up one of its members to another family; the rules of marriage within “primitive” societies function as a means of exchange and as an unconsciously acknowledged system of communication. The act of exchange holds a society together: the rules of kinship. . . are society.
Contemporary society as we know it is a displacement, or rather a metonymy. Carol Pateman’s book, The Sexual Contract, advances a very convincing argument that this “primordial” exchange is the basis of contractarian theory itself: the so-called “social contract” is at some mythic remove the law of exogamic exchange. Pateman argues this is also what Freud was after in his recovery of Darwin’s myth of the primal horde. It all comes back to an agreement or promise made over an exchange, and historically, the object has been the body of woman.

Seen in this light, the appointment of Palin goes beyond anti-feminist. By resurrecting the notion that women are objects of exchange, McCain's selection completely denies the feminist movement and is an attempt to reintroduce women as chattel.

Republican Cognitive Dissonance

2008-09-16T22:33:00.003-05:00

It not just the financial markets that we are watching crash and burn. The Republican Party, lead by two candidates who are not fit to run for office, much less run the country, are hitting bottom. As they witness the fruits of almost 30 years of Republican economic policy, the cognitive dissonance they experience must be deafening. Wikipedia defines cognitive dissonance as:

"an uncomfortable feeling or stress caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a fundamental cognitive drive to reduce this dissonance by modifying an existing belief, or rejecting one of the contradictory ideas."

Let's see. Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin gave us a good example of this phenomenon in one of her speeches today:

"Guys and Galls, our regulatory system is outdated and it needs a complete overhaul...Our economy will grow and we will get government out of the way of private sector progress."

So we can have increased regulation and also get government out of the way. We can have conservative values and also trash the Constitution, increase the Federal deficit and engage in nation building overseas.

While the Republican Party flounders we are also witnessing the demise of Rovian campaign tactics. When the master himself calls John McCain a liar, is there any doubt that the American public by and large is no longer swayed by wedge issues and distractions?

As a final note, I'd like to share with you a video produced by Andrew Postman that examines the decline and fall of John McCain.

Your Assignment

2008-09-15T22:15:00.002-05:00

In today's New York Times Health section, in an article title "Limiting, and Watching, What Children Watch," Lisa Guerney quotes Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Columbia University:

“Marshall McLuhan was wrong when he said the medium is the message,” she said. “It’s the content. It’s what’s in the medium.”

Discuss.

Doomed to Repeat History

2008-09-14T22:09:00.007-05:00

As a model Media Ecologist, I seldom put on my finance MBA hat, earned almost thirty years ago from NYU's Stern School of Business. I am putting on that hat now to comment on the demise of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America and the continuing jeopardy of AIG and Washington Mutual. So far we haven't had a stock market crash like the one credited with precipitating the Great Depression, but it is clear that our economy teeters on the brink of a comparable collapse, and that the wisdom and actions of financial leaders and government officials over the next several months will determine whether we follow in the footsteps of our great-grandparents or dodge the silver bullet this time.

Think about the types of things that FDR's administration put into place to pull us out of the last Depression: federal programs like social security; public works to employ those cast out by the tanking economic infrastructure; and a clear commitment to regulate financial markets and curb the most egregious activities of financial movers and shakers. For example, we take for granted the presence of auditors overseeing the financial presentations of our corporations. There once was a time when corporations could report financial results in whichever way they wanted, with no necessary connection to actual performance or liquidity. Though abuses still abound, most corporations and investors appreciated the level playing field that financial transparency provides.

That's the broad picture. From a Media Ecological perspective it will be interesting to see how the current media confront the bad economic news and whether they help or hurt efforts to deal with the unavoidable decline of American economic might. Populations prior to the great Depression depended on print, radio and film both to gain an understanding of what was going on, and also to escape it from time to time. We add to these television and the internet, plus the wisdom gained from 75 years of comtemplation of what went wrong before.

It is clear that a proactive program of public works, a new commitment to regulation of markets and corporations and a bolstering of the social safety net will be necessary if we are to weather this current economic storm. Look for clear pronouncements from the various candidates of what they will do and what specific steps they will take immediately to meet this challenge. Note which media are used to lift our spirits, confront recalcitrant citizens and communicate a vision for a post-Depression II America. FDR used the radio for his Fireside chats to confront fears and to unite the disparate regions and social classes of Depression era America. How will his successor use contemporary media to the same ends?

The Synagogue As A Multi-Media Environment

2008-09-13T22:17:00.002-05:00

Vestigial elements of past cultures persist within our own and affect our public discourse and our artistic creations. This notion is the basis of my recently published paper The Heart of the Matter (Proceedings, 2005 Media Ecology Association Convention) where I trace the concept of the heart as the seat of consciousness through various times and different media. An enhanced version, with illustrations is available here. Though we know today that the heart is not the organ of thought and memory, our casual expressions reveal the hidden vestige of past beliefs. We speak of memorizing “by heart.” Our song lyrics remind us that our heart is an open book, or a window into our true feelings and emotions.

Another good example of this principle of persistence can be found in most synagogues. Visit any Saturday morning Torah service at any synagogue and you will witness a multi-media environment that manifests traces of all the pre-modern media eras of mankind.

In my congregation, the Rabbi leads the service, but most of the heavy liturgical carrying is performed (literally) by the Cantor. The Cantor himself is a bard, a remnant of the oral culture of our ancestors. His chants employ mnemonic devices and multiple repetitions to enhance comprehension and memorization. He recites the Torah from a manuscript scroll to an audience who, while they aren’t busy making copies as would have monastic scribes in the Middle Ages, respond orally just like members of any pre-literate culture. At the same time, with all these pre-literate vestiges evident throughout the ceremony, Jews are characterized as the “People of the Book.”

While several media are represented in the Jewish service, they are all word based. Images are proscribed by the Second Commandment, and so pictures, paintings and sculptures are not allowed. No illuminated texts. And of course, no film, no video, no Powerpoints. So it could be argued that Judaism acts as a counterpoint to our modern mass media-saturated culture.

Neil Postman argued in Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century that our schools should operate as conserving opponents to the continuous non-discursive bombardment of electronic media in order to preserve and perpetuate the beliefs and values of the Enlightenment. These values include such things as individual liberty, rational discourse and democratic decision making. Along with the Sabbath and Holiday liturgy, other aspects of Judaism demonstrate a conserving characteristic very much in sync with Postman's suggestions. The Jewish holidays reflect remnants of the rituals and living conditions of earlier societies. Harvest festivals, year-end story-telling cycle celebrations, days of atonement and renewal, commemorations of significant historic events may not signify in modern cultures what they did to early farmer/shepards, but they act as reminders of other times and other places. Jewish males are circumcised, passing through a ritual of physical mutilation or transformation that corresponds to those of pre-literate societies all over the world. Jewish dietary restrictions also reflect those of pre-literate cultures, which, according to Claude Levi-Strauss, have less to do with what is good to eat, than what is good to think with.

Whether we will ever see a K-12 curriculum founded on Postman's suggestions is debatable. However, it is clear that the liturgies and rituals of Judaism perform this very function. By excluding non-discursive media, by copying and disseminating the manuscript form, and by actively promoting the practices of pre-literate chanting and poesy, Judaism confronts modern media-generated attitudes and beliefs and offers alternatives based on tried and true social and cultural practices.

Presented For Your Consideration: Why Women Wear Makeup

2008-09-12T09:46:00.007-05:00

Headline: Hey, Is That Eva Longoria? Yes, It Is

PopEater
posted: 2 HOURS 28 MINUTES AGO
comments: 7
filed under: Gut Reactions, Movie News, Photos, TV News
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(Sept. 12) -- Eva Longoria's dinner trip on Wednesday night is making gossip headlines not because of who she went with or what she wore ... but what she didn't wear.
The 'Desperate Housewives' starlet stepped out wearing zero (or at least much less than normal) makeup, showing herself in a way the public rarely gets to see. While still looking quite pretty, she bore little resemblance to the red carpet diva Eva we're all used to.

The original article can be found here

One could make the case, as Naomi Wolf does in her book The Beauty Myth, that women wear makeup because they buy into the patriarchal notion that there is a "Professional Beauty Qualification" without which a woman can't succeed. Besides providing a litigation-free way to discriminate against women, Klein notes that the PBQ proposes three "vital lies":

"(1)'Beauty' had to be defined as a legitimate and necessary qualification for a woman's rise in power.
(2) the discriminatory purpose of vital lie number one had to be masked (especially in the United States, with its responsiveness to the rhetoric of equal access) by fitting it firmly within the American dream: 'Beauty' can be earned by any woman through hard work and enterprise. Those two vital lies worked in tandem to let the use of the PBQ by employers masquerade as a valid test of the woman's merit and extension of her professional duties.
(3) The working woman was told she had to think about 'beauty' in a way that undermined, step for step, the way she had begun to think as a result of the successes of the women's movement." (The Beauty Myth, 2002, p. 28)

My contribution to the discussion relies on Claude Levi-Strauss' distinction between nature and culture. In order to move from nature to culture, and therefore to be acceptable as an equal (or near equal) in patriarchal society, women must engage in all manner of diet, exercise and surgery to attempt to approximate a beauty ideal. Whatever transformation can't be accomplished by those means is masked over with makeup.That Eva Longoria appearing in public without makeup is gossip-worthy just underscores the disparity between men and women.

In Memoriam

2008-09-11T22:19:00.002-05:00

Thinking about those lost on 911 and the families and friends left behind.

Lipstick on a Pig

2008-09-10T22:10:00.005-05:00

Actually, I don't have anything to add to the ongoing Republican kerfluffle over Barak Obama's use of a well-known phrase (which incidently has also been used by John McCain). I've just put this in to annoy "Artiefacts" who takes exception to my suggestion that women use makeup to become equal culturally to men.

To my regular readers, I promise to return to more worthwhile posting tomorrow.

Losing Middle America

2008-09-09T21:46:00.008-05:00

The turning point in the Vietnam war, at least from a public support perspective, has often been attributed to the decision in 1968 by then CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite to come out against the war. An the end of his evening news report on February 27, 1968, Cronkite concluded an uncharacteristic commentary criticising our involvement in the war with the following words:

"To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."

Upon being told of Cronkite commentary, President Lyndon Johnson is quoted as saying "That's it. If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."

Last night I think I witnessed a similar turning point, not in American opinion concerning the Iraq War, but rather concerning global warming. On his nightly Late Show, comedian David Letterman launched into an uncharacteristic tirade concerning CO2 levels, global warming and human prospects for survival that skirted the border between comedy and drama. Opining that we have not had any real Presidential leadership on global warming for the last 30 years, Letterman concluded his discussion of current climate change with the following:

"We are so screwed. If everybody in the world right now began riding bicycles... Leave your limo in the garage...Everybody...bicycles, and we cut carbon emissions 100%. No more carbon emissions. And that was improving the layer of carbon around the atmosphere. If everybody did that, the planet... and you're thinking, "That would be great wouldn't it?" Yes it would be great, but the planet would continue to heat at precipitous levels for 60 years. We are SO screwed."

If "Mr. Middle America" David Letterman can come out so forcefully against obfuscators of the perils of climate change, can overwhelming public opinion be far behind?

Post Convention Coverage Relief: The Best Media Ecology Joke, Ever!

2008-09-08T22:03:00.005-05:00

It seems clear that, with a few notable exceptions, the mainstream media are going at this election with the same lazy journalistic habits used in previous campaigns. Eric Boehlert at the blog Media Matters explains why mainstream media coverage of both the Democratic and Republican Conventions has given him a headache:

It's impossible to escape the conclusion that journalists for much of the week in Denver weren't informing news consumers about the unfolding event, they were purposefully misinforming people. (Bill and Hill might snub Obama!) Think about where journalism is heading when an entire industry knowingly adopts a false narrative and pushes it for days simply because it likes it; because it gives journalists a good storyline.

Fifteen thousand journalists in Denver and they couldn't even report what actually happened there. Instead, they invented a storyline of their liking. And (surprise!) it was one that demeaned Democrats.

Marshall McLuhan noted that all jokes are grievances. On the Media Ecological premise that the journalists aren't totally to blame, but that, inevitably, political discourse on television will degenerate into entertainment, I invite all Media Ecologists, or would-be Media Ecologists to come grieve with me:

Several students of Media Ecology consult a famous psychic in order to contact Marshall McLuhan and finally get a clear explanation of his writings.
The seer goes into a trance, but says nothing for several minutes.
Losing patience, one of the students cries out, "Dr. McLuhan, are you there? Why won't you speak to us?"
A deep voice replies, "The Medium is the Message!"

Take this joke or its equivalent two times a day and call me in the morning.

Culture vs. Nature Part II: Why Women Wear Makeup

2008-09-07T20:34:00.009-05:00

In my post on September 3, I commented on the joke Sarah Palin told at her RNC VP acceptance speech:

"How are hockey moms different from pit bulls? They wear lipstick."

Governor Palin, her face expertly made-up (including lipstick), her hair perfectly coifed, her outfit fashionable and figure-complementing, is herself an example of the division between the sexes that persists in our culture.

That women still want to wear makeup reflects a failure of the feminist movement in particular and the immaturity of our culture in general. Makeup is a mask that allows women to tap into corporate power. I don't mean corporate as in business, but rather corporate as in the power of the group versus the individual.

Men achieve this power by actually belonging to corporations - whether they are lodge brothers, corporate raiders or political standard-bearers. Women counter by painting their faces. Hiding physical imperfections or accentuating certain features makes sense only if the result is more power for the individual, whether sexual, social, or corporate.

Why makeup? The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once asked a native informant why his people tattooed their bodies. "Because we are not animals," was the reply. That women still use makeup is a reflection of their continuing status as not-quite-human. To put it in a more Lévi-Straussian mode, women without makeup are still seen as "natural," while men without makeup are seen as "cultural."

By acceding to cosmetic industry standards of beauty, women who wear makeup promote a status quo that says women are not equal to men. Men can be "cultural" just by showing up. Women, to participate in the culture, must put on a corporate mask. While a woman who uses makeup is considered "cultural," a man who uses makeup is considered absurd. Mass media meditations on masculine makeup — like Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, and Mrs. Doubtfire — are always comedies.

Madison Avenue-driven cosmetic companies have made some inroads into the use of body fragrance by men, but they have not yet found the right inducement for men to paint their faces, highlight their eyes, and gloss their lips. My suggestion is that advertisers market tattoos as acceptable body paint for men. Invent a tattoo "makeup" that needs regular renewal but involves some pain to apply, and your fortune is made.

In politics, the play of the game depends on who makes up the rules. Republicans are expert in framing arguments in their favor, in starting whisper campaigns to malign opponents while maintaining deniability and in lying with impunity to advance their candidates.

In gender relations, the play of game depends on who rules the makeup. Though it may be true that Hilary Clinton's unsucessful presidential campaign left 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling, until women can be "pit bulls" without the lipstick, they will not succeed in breaking through.

Your Gut Feeling

2008-09-06T17:31:00.011-05:00

The ancient notion of internal organs as cognitive resources has resurfaced in discussions this week on the process by which John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running partner. For example, on August 30 the Los Angeles Times commented on McCain's selection:

For a candidate known to possess a quick temper and an unpre- dictable political streak, the decision raises questions about how McCain would lead -- whether his decisions would flow from careful deliberations or gut checks in which short-term considerations or feelings outweigh the long view (emphasis added.)

Ancient peoples in general believed that thought and consciousness presided in the gut, not in the head. Greeks of the Classic period believed that consciousness resided in the lungs, with the heart contributing emotional content. Lacking our modern knowledge of the circulatory system, Classic Greeks believed that aspects of human consciousness didn’t reside just in the lungs, but were distributed throughout the chest, with different organs contributing different attributes. Expressions like “venting our spleen” when angered represent the residue of these kinds of beliefs. During the process of mummification, ancient Egyptians discarded brain tissue as unnecessary for existence in the afterlife, but preserved the intestines, liver and other organs in special canopic jars for the journey. The heart, thought to be central to the individual’s “self” or consciousness, was left in place.

What appeared to classical societies as a characteristic of human anatomy has slowly, over the ages, become a metaphor. No one today believes that the seat of consciousness can be found in the heart or lungs, and yet the references persist. We refer to the act of memorization as "learning by heart." An example from popular culture illustrates this head/gut opposition:

Aragorn: No news of Frodo
Gandalf: No word. Nothing.
Aragorn: We have time. Every day Frodo moves closer to Mordor.
Gandalf: Do we know that?
Aragorn: What does your heart tell you?
Gandalf: (meaningful pause) That Frodo’s alive. Yes. Yes, he’s alive.
(The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 2004)

In conditions of primary orality people assigned different aspects of cognition to different organs. We are content, in most cases, to let the heart represent all feeling or emotion and to assign to the “gut” an ability to intuitively grasp the proper solution to a problem. When placed in opposition to the head or intellect, the gut prevails in modern cultural references as the deeper source of wisdom and the more reliable arbiter of reality.

Here is the problem. If there is a deeper seat of wisdom that we all possess, why should anyone listen to academic specialists or experts of any type? Much of our current public debate between a faith-based versus reality based orientation may be a manifestation of this head/gut split. If the United States can be governed “from the gut”, what need is there for subject matter experts on foreign policy, economics or political agendas?

By pointing out this reification of archaic beliefs, a "gut-check" if you will, the media suggest that John McCain does a disservice to the American voter in particular and to subject matter experts in general. As Sarah Palin's qualifications for office become more apparent over the next few weeks of campaigning, it will be interesting to see whether the American voter wants four more years of gut feelings, or prefers a more deliberative path.

The Problem With Myths

2008-09-05T16:02:00.002-05:00

Many cultural analysts believe that a culture's myths are the stories that are told containing cultural archetypes, heroic figures, epic confrontations and/or magical occurrences. As represented by such scholars as Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and Marie-Louise von Franz, this approach to the study of myth assumes that the various aspects of mythology represent externalizations of internal, psychological processes in humans and by studying the content of myths as archetypal examples we can better understand the stories of our own lives and the assumptions we make about ourselves and our interactions with other people. For them, the archetypal content is the thing.

The term "myth" for French structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has a different meaning. Myths are stories because, in an oral culture, storytelling is the means by which cultural information is transmitted from one person to another and across generations. The mythic heroes and monsters, magical activities, and impossible events are presented because they are memorable; they need to be to preserve the information being transmitted. But it isn't the content of these tales that's important, its the structure.

In his series "Mythologiques", Levi-Strauss has suggested that myths are not important because they present archetypal images; myths are important because they demonstrate an externalization of structure of human thought processes. Levi-Strauss assumes that since we are all members of the same species, that the thought processes of less technologically advanced peoples are the same as our own, just applied to different objects. With our modern sensibilities, we look at the absurdities and inconsistencies of fairy tales and myths and assume we have discovered evidence that "primitive" thought processes are illogical and immature when compared to modern thought. Levi-Strauss suggests that by interpreting the logic of myths, we can understand how the human mind works.

It is also assumed that individual myths that have been passed down to us may be incomplete. In order to understand the "message" we must contrast and compare multiple variants of the same tale. The true message of a myth is revealed when one is familiar with its place in the total cultural context that generated it. The overall structure reveals the true message, and by implication, gives us a window into the structure of our mental processes.

What isn't as apparent is how advertising functions in modern society the same way storytelling functioned for preliterate people. Advertising presents us with of the vast body of examples of our culture's mythology. Advertisements are constantly changing, constantly reflecting current cultural conditions, and self-validating through sales trends. Advertising is generated by many individuals, is often memorable and perhaps most important of all, is inherently multi-media.
Advertisements work over space the way myths work over time. Mythic stories survive over time because they resonate with the population. An individual advertisement may have a much shorter shelf life, but, because it has to be distributed throughout a large population, it must also resonate with a large number of individuals to be effective.

What does advertising tell us? As I noted in yesterday's post, our collective body of advertising defines what is cultural and what is natural, and offers concise advice on how we can best exist in culture rather than nature. This collective resource, acting as a sort of cultural encyclopedia, performs the same function in our age that the mythic storytelling performed for preliterate cultures. It is by becoming aware of these underlying structures in our most dominant media of communication that we can begin to understand their on importance in our culture.

This sort of approach to the study of the mass media shows that the difference between modern culture and so-called primitive culture is not so great as is supposed, and that human beings at all times tend to concern themselves with the same types of problems, the differences arising from the particular symbols and the particular media used to convey the solutions. The proper way to interpret the mythology of a culture is by understanding its overall structure, not by focusing on the particular content of a tale.

Drawing From The Internet "Memory Well"

2008-09-04T23:32:00.000-05:00

We used to hear about news items "disappearing down the memory hole." With the advent of YouTube, blogs, Google, Lexis-Nexis, and other web-based resources, we can now draw almost anything from the Internet-based "Memory Well." And, contrary to the old saw, you can go back to the Well as often as you like.

The Internet Memory Well will redefine private vs. public areas. As Joshua Meyerowitz described in No Sense of Place:The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, the older mass media have already blurred the distinctions between adult and child, between genders and between social classes. Even so, some areas remained more "hidden" than others.

When we lived under conditions of primary orality, human memory was the only way to transmit cultural heritage from one generation to the next. During the manuscript and print eras, written documents replaced memory as the primary means of transmitting information over time and space. In the early years of electronic media, only a few had access to external memory devices to record and preserve our culture. An electronic broadcast would be sent to many, but then disappear into the aether.

With video cell phones, cheap editing technology, and Internet access, what once was available to few is available to many. What was private has now become public. The Internet has added a readily accessible Memory Well to enable cultural recall and dissemination. Items dropped down the Memory Well no longer vanish forever. We now can retrieve video, audio, text, and photos at will. Vast server farms store everything in readily accessible form, and provide the infrastructure for perpetual retrieval. As long as our society can provide power to these vast data warehouses, the Memory Well will exist. If the power grid goes down, one can assume that there will be greater concerns than retrieving YouTube videos.

The ability easily to retrieve many if not all of our artifacts will bring about an ontological shift in our culture. For example, in oral cultures a person's word was his bond. Without written records to provide proof, people had to depend on the spoken word to bind agreements. Our political leaders must now cope with the new power the Memory Well has given to the spoken word. This has profound implications for politics, education, social policy, and mass media, including broadcast news organizations and the press.

Jon Stewart, among many others, already makes great use of the Memory Well to call our leaders and celebrities to account. Juxtaposing what they say now with what they said then generates laughter now, but will have more dire consequences in the future as the new Memory Well-based standards take hold.

Culture vs. Nature: Sarah Palin and the Pit Bulls

2008-09-03T21:54:00.009-05:00

During her acceptance speech tonight, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin posed the following question:

"How are hockey moms different from pit bulls?"

"They wear lipstick."

Here Governor Palin unwittingly has invoked the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Struass who theorized that a primary function of any human society is to distinguish between culture and nature.

To help better grasp this concept, I’d like to ask the following question: Why do women in our culture wear makeup? Why does lipstick turn a pit bull into a hockey mom?

One response is that our culture still distinguishes men from women along a culture/nature opposition. The religious and scientific stories of our culture tell us that as human beings we are outside or above the constraints of the natural world. At the same time we come into this world through childbirth, we get sick, we age and die, we suffer from various bodily afflictions. How do we reconcile this contradiction?

Lévi-Strauss cites an instance where an anthropological field investigator asks his native informant why his people apply so many tattoos to their bodies. "Because we are not animals" is the reply. They complete the transition from nature to culture, they make themselves cultural beings rather than natural ones, via tattoos, and the fact that they are not within nature makes them want to do so. The implication is that they differentiate themselves from the natural order by decorating their skin.

What I am suggesting is that when women apply makeup they are doing the same thing. They are making themselves into cultural beings. By applying a corporate (meaning collective) mask, women tap into a source of collective power. Men don't need to wear makeup because they are, by definition, already cultural. Of course, much advertising operates along this borderline, and because both men and women buy their products, advertisers pitch to both sexes. Ads say “If you have a problem with a bodily function (i.e. nature) we have a cultural product that can help.”

This also applies to sexual attraction. In order to attract a mate both men and women have to look sharp by applying proper grooming aids, and smell sharp by applying proper perfumes, but women must go much further. They must color and condition their hair. They must paint their eyes, their lips, and their faces. They must remove hair from inappropriate places on their bodies. Ads never discuss (beyond the obvious sexual claims) why they must do this, only how.

Advertising in general wrestles with the same types of concerns that Lévi-Strauss discerned in the mythology of "primitive" South American Indians. That is, in a context relevant to our modern sensibilities, ads are really dealing with an opposition between nature and culture. In doing so, they provide structure to our lives, disseminate guidelines for how to look and feel, and mandate what rituals to perform to be fully human.

It may seem that economic factors and competition from new media are forcing advertisers to reevaluate how to get their messages across; to engage in product placement and other tricks to penetrate the clutter. In fact this is just the tail wagging the dog. It has always been inevitable that the "content" - what we call "ads" - would move from the confines of the 15 or 30 seconds spaces between the old content presented by traditional electronic media or the column inches of traditional print media to become involved in every aspect of our lives.

Think about how the average person in Homeric Greece related to The Iliad or The Odyssey. These performance/poems weren't just the "literature" of Greek culture, separate from the general experience. As Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan and others have pointed out, The Iliad and The Odyssey constituted cultural how-to manuals, presenting the proper ways for Greek men and women to conduct ceremonies, the proper relationship of Greeks toward their gods, and the proper things to believe about just about everything in their world. Claude Lévi-Strauss added that such cultural encyclopedias reconcile or deny the inevitable contradictions within a culture. By doing so, they promote the well-being and peace of mind of the members of the culture.

Our collective body of advertising defines what is cultural and what is natural, and offers concise advice on how we can best exist in culture rather than nature. This collective resource, acting as a sort of cultural encyclopedia, performs the same function in our age that the Homeric epics performed in classical Greece. The new media are taking our existing cultural encyclopedia and transforming it into a wikipedia. How this transformation affects our social institutions, our belief structures, and our notions concerning gender remains to be seen.

What is an advertisement in a new media website? Is it presenting a narrative, like television advertising, or is it evoking a response through a still image, like print advertising? The answer is probably both and neither. Banner ads on a web site try to be TV commercials or they try to be print ads and yet they aren’t really either. This is a prime illustration of Marshall McLuhan's assertion that we are numb to the true impact of our media. By shifting the communication paradigm, the new media allow advertising myths to burst out of the confines of the traditional media. While the new media sorts itself out, the advertising of the old media breaks out and becomes the content of our everyday lives. As the mythic avatars of our culture, advertising icons want to insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives, and we subconsciously want them to do so.

Reel World Politics

2008-09-02T10:33:00.000-05:00

Cinematic sub-texts shape campaigns of strategy vs. substance.

We are only half-way through the Republican Convention and there are still two months to go before Election Day, but the underlying cinematic metaphors in use by each Presidential campaign are already apparent. Although the main stream media tend to discuss election winners and losers in terms of horse racing metaphors, it is clear that for this election, the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates have adopted the dramatic arcs found in popular movies as their guides. The use of a movie metaphor gives the candidates a pre-written, pre-vetted script from our popular culture of what to do on the campaign in the media environments that they can control and how to react to the unforeseeable situations that inevitably arise.

For John McCain, and perhaps more pertinently, for his campaign strategists, it is increasingly clear that their motivating movie metaphor is “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” This Steve Martin/Michael Caine comedy follows the competition between two con-men. Caine is a suave, sophisticated poseur who has no trouble convincing gullible heiresses that he is a deposed aristocrat seeking funds to reclaim his rightful throne. Martin is a small-time con artist who stumbles into Caine’s scam-monde and knows a good thing when he sees it. The two antagonists decide to settle their differences by competing for the wealth of an American soap heiress (Glenne Headley). The salient campaigning example found in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” is the give and take between the two con-men and the way they adapt their strategies to take advantage of the each others perceived weaknesses.

In a similar fashion, John McCain’s political campaign seems to operate purely at a strategic level. Issues of fundamental political agendas, moral constants and national priorities take a back seat to strategic imperatives. Thus the McCain solution to Obama’s commanding performance at the Democratic National Convention is not to confront issues of policy or perspective, but to trump continuing media coverage by nominating Sara Palin as his Vice-Presidential co-runner. That Governor Palin is neither qualified for the job, nor was sufficiently vetted by McCain’s advisors is not as important as winning that strategic round in the Presidential contest.

For Barack Obama, it is clear that his guiding cinematic metaphor is “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” with perhaps a dash of “Indiana Jones” thrown in. Stigmatized as elitist, arrogant (code word for “uppity”) and aloof, criticized for missing opportunities to exploit faux pas and verbal gaffs of his opponent, Obama has faced speculation that he’s not tough enough to compete in the world arena. His critics miss the point. Adopting the James Stewart/Harrison Ford persona allows Senator Obama not only to present himself as the “lone” outsider battling the entrenched corruption of Washington, but also to conduct a presidential campaign that is not driven by strategic imperatives, but which raises substance and principle above strategy. Obama’s emulation of “Mr. Smith” allows him to follow the movie’s dramatic arc to ultimate success in his pursuit of the Presidency.

The Marathon Begins

2008-09-01T08:52:00.008-05:00

I've decided to spend the month of September writing for this blog. My goal is to post at least once a day, and more if possible. Some of these posts may be very brief. When possible, I will post smaller pieces multiple times per day. These may take the form of separate posts, or additions to the main post of the day.

Since this intense activity will have a negative impact on my job, my social life (such as it is) and my health, I ask my readers (Hi Mom!) to send money, love and drugs. OK Just money. Here's how you do it:

My suggestion to my loyal readers is that you begin today by donating $.01 via the Paypal "Donate" button you see to your left. Then, tomorrow, donate $.02, the next day $.04 and so on, doubling your donation each day until the end of the month. This small contribution will help to ensure quality commentary via this blog.

If you find by the end of September that you don't have $5,368,709.12 to spare, I will accept any donations in any amount.

Your generosity will ensure that quality blogging doesn't disappear from the Internet.

What We Know About The Joker

2008-07-22T16:29:00.005-05:00

Ruminations about the man behind the masque.

Though this past weekend’s top performing movie is titled The Dark Knight, it might easily have been called "The Clown Prince." Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker, already hailed as Oscar-worthy, owes more to Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice than it does to previous Batman malefactors. Ironically, Keaton was the first film Batman and could have played off against himself as both the Caped Crusader and the Prince of Fools.

Like Keaton's Beetlejuice, The Joker in this latest Batman-iteration is the ultimate trickster: a destroyer of worlds and a slayer of men, whose word cannot be trusted and whose motives cannot be divined.

The Joker’s wild success throughout The Dark Knight's dark nights depends on a script which constitutes a stacked deck in his favor. For most of the two hours of this latest Batman saga, everything goes the Joker’s way. He knows where mob kingpins will be meeting and gains access with impunity. He easily defeats the defense mechanisms of a high-security bank. He cannily manipulates good guys and bad guys alike seeking both a higher class of criminal and a lower class of law enforcer. He survives high speed truck flips, Kevlar-armored right crosses and highrise bungee jumps.

Though he is painted up to be an enigma wrapped in a riddle (or was that someone else?), based on evidence from The Dark Knight, we do know the following things about The Joker:

He is a munitions expert. He is equally at home with C4 suppositories and oil barrel chemical peels.

Though he is an expert project manager, at least in the bank-robbery field, he is prone to waste his resources.

He is empathic. He knows just what to say to push anyone over the edge of madness, and then leap in after him.

He is a man ahead of his Timex. The Joker can take a likin’ from Batman and keep on tickin’. He may once have belonged to a fight club.

He obviously was involved in covert ops in the past. He knows how to anticipate scenarios and plan alternatives. He knows where to acquire esoteric weapons and how to use them.

He moonlights as a Mary Kay agent.

He has had access to Jack Benny’s joke vault.

Omigod! The Joker is Jason Bourne!

Random Thoughts

2008-07-15T09:06:00.020-05:00

Out for the Count

I haven't posted for the last several weeks because I've been recuperating from my third cardiac ablation. This last procedure seems to finally have returned my heart to regular sinus rhythm, though only time will tell.

Since about 2000 I've suffered from an irregular heartbeat, first in the form of atrial fibrillation, and then, after my first two ablations, a persistent heart flutter. My downfall this time around was not the procedure itself, which went as smoothly as a "non-invasive" procedure could go. This time around I was given a "bridge" anti-coagulant to which I had a bad reaction. Evidently, when blood seeps into a muscle it acts as an irritant and leaves what looks like a bruise in its wake. My experience of this, which required a visit to the emergency room on the evening of July 4th, was as if my entire right thigh muscle was locked in an unrelenting "charley-horse."

At any rate, I haven't done much over the last week other than down pain killers and watch television. In-between reruns of Star Trek Voyager and The Dog Whisperer, I have had some random thoughts which I thought I'd share here:

Newtonian vs. Einsteinian Media Biases:

Harold Innis, a founding father of Media Ecology, used a Newtonian metaphor to argue that the nature of a civilization is determined by the characteristics of its dominant communication medium. Innis believed that a medium contained either a time bias or a space bias.

Cultures that carved their stories into stones, like the early Sumarians or Egyptians, were time-binders and tended to be conservative in terms of change and stable in terms of social hierarchy. Stones were hard to carry any distance, but lasted a long time. Carved stone is an example of a time-binding medium.

Papyrus is an example of a space-binding medium, which the Romans used to command a vast empire. Papyrus could be carried easily and allowed the Romans to send orders over great distances, but it didn't last very long, and was subject to destruction by fire and other forces. Cultures that used more portable materials were able to command vast empires, but lacked the stability of stone or clay cultures.

The Internet, upon which rich media technology is dependent, may be the first instance in human history of a medium which binds both space and time equally. Therefore, it may be time to abandon Innis' Newtonian metaphor for an Einsteinian metaphor. New electronic media, especially the Internet, bind both time and space. The ubiquity of the World Wide Web is counterbalanced by the permanence of server storage and retrieval, a combination I have called the “Memory Well.” Combined with cheap and ubiquitous recording devices, sites like YouTube and blogs like Crooks and Liars permit the permanent storage and and nearly instantaneous retrieval from anywhere in the world of any cultural event, from political panders to sneezing pandas.

A society which based its communication structure on the Internet would have to change its notion of what knowledge is and how to communicate that knowledge to its citizens. Just as the handheld calculator freed students from the need to memorize the multiplication tables, the Internet Memory Well may force a reassessment of what needs to be taught and how to teach it.

A One-Horse Race

Remember when John McCain's bid for the White House was declared dead and buried? How is it that it was resurrected?

Is there anyone besides me who thinks that the McCain run for the Presidency is a farce? Has any candidate for President committed so many factual gaffs, surrounded himself with so many counterproductive advisers or seemed so out of touch with the true concerns of the electorate?

Even George W. Bush in his dry-drunk prime could run a coordinated political campaign. John McCain can't remember that Czechoslovakia is no longer a country, or that Sunnis are different than Shias. He can't even remember what he was for before he was against it. He admits to economic ignorance and technological backwardness. He perpetuates positions on Iraq and civil liberties that have been proven non-starters for years.

I think that the Republicans know that 2008 is not going to be their year, big time, and so they have fielded a non-candidate, letting poor McCain fulfill his lifelong dream to run towards a goal that no Republican can win.

The question is, what neo-conservative wheels are turning while we are distracted by the continuing political circus? Are the major trauma of the home mortgage crisis or the oil price fiasco evidence of neo-con last ditch efforts to cash in before January 20, 2009?

George Carlin, Google and Community Values

2008-06-26T19:00:00.000-05:00

Taboos change as new communications media determine what is accessible and what is not.

More often than not, commentary on the recent death of comedian George Carlin centers on his famous "7 Words You Can't Say on TV" routine and his confrontation with the FCC. If you haven't heard it yet, gather your children to your side and click here.

Carlin's "7 words," which he correctly identified as taboo in the 1970's, have become less so in the 21st century. Cable denizens, including South Park cartoon children, Sopranos Mafiosi and Comedy Central fake newsmen use any and all of Carlin's words with impunity, while their broadcast counterparts must still watch their mouths. Even so, some proprieties are preserved on cable. Cartman on South Park can say “Shit” and Tony Soprano can say “Fuck”, but John Stewart and Stephen Colbert still get bleeped. Meanwhile, if Oprah or Barbara Walters drop the F-bomb, network executives tremble. One gets the impression that the FCC cracks down on broadcaster language slips just to show they can.

All societies have their taboos. More often than not, forbidden words or places or things define acceptable and non-acceptable public behaviors and tend to support and reinforce the status quo and the existing power structure. Sexual taboos, which are included in Carlin’s “7 Words”, try to define both adult and child boundaries as well as a society’s sexual preoccupations.

As Joshua Meyrowitz documented in his ground-breaking book No Sense of Self, modern communication media have blurred the boundaries that existed in the print era between public and private and between adult and child. Meyrowitz discusses how literacy requirements created learning hurdles that allowed adults to limit the spread of some types of information to prying young minds. With no necessary education required to watch TV, view a movie, or access the World Wide Web, the former taboos are now brought under scrutiny.

Case in point. An article in today's New York Times discusses how the attorney in a Florida obscenity case is using Google search data to defend his client:

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

To those of us who came of age under the tutelage of George Carlin, the hypocrisy of so-called obscenity standards has long been evident. Dick Cheney can say "Fuck You" to a United States Senator in the United States Senate, but Janet Jackson can't show a bare breast. Richard Nixon surreptitiously records political, sexual and scatological epithets spoken in the Oval Office while George Carlin and WBAI lose their right to free speech before the Supreme Court.

That cable programming allows Carlin's “7 Words” without hesitation and that Internet giant Google's usage data can be used to challenge attitudes about community values is further evidence of the transformational powers of new media.

Feelings of YouTube Inadequacy

2008-06-11T13:44:00.002-05:00

Update Below

(May 30, 2008)
Over at Lance Strate's Blog Time Passing, Lance discusses the new heroes created by the internet and features a hilarious South Park clip lampooning YouTube celebrities. Many of these, like "Tron Guy" and "Sneezing Panda" have generated millions of views each.

A quick check of my own YouTube posting reveals a pitiful 801 viewings as of today, not even close to other YouTube celebrities or even the 1970's TV commercial I posted for L'Eggs pantyhose (7459). This is embarassing.

Let's try a bit of viral social networking. I'm asking you, my loyal blog readers, to send this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsHhNCLaT5s

to five of your friends, asking them to view my video and also to send the link on to five more friends, etc., ect.

Lets see if we can get my YouTube numbers up to at least those of Tron Guy.

Update 6/11/08:

As a tribute to the power of social networking, I'm happy to announce that since I first posted this blog, my "Model Media Ecologist" Youtube views have risen from 801 to 892 views! At this rate I may pass 1000 views by this time next year! During the same period, my L'Eggs commercial rose from 7459 to 7645.

Thank you to everyone who viewed my video and for all the supportive comments. Don't forget to pass it along to five of your friends.

Beating Golf Clubs Into Swords

2008-05-17T00:20:00.001-05:00

President Bush chooses war over golf.

In a recent interview with Politico, President Bush admitted that he had given up golf in deference the families who have lost a loved one in Iraq.

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf," he said. "I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

Bush's remarks, which have received widespread condemnation, are more apt than he realizes. The game of golf itself is a metaphor for constructive human activity and recapitulates the human experience of our historical transformation from hunter-gatherers to cultivators. Golf as a metaphor stands in opposition to the realities of war, which is the ultimate destructive human activity.

For those who are not addicted to the playing or to the viewing of grown men chasing a tiny ball across an enormous lawn, the appeal of golf may be hard to understand. However, if we look at golf in terms of its media ecology, its attraction can be better understood.

The playing of golf is a linear, one-at-a-time activity that was well suited to the biases of the print era in which it was created. It is not an accident that golf was first conceived in Scotland and became popular just as the printing press was converting the Anglo-Saxon manuscript culture into a print culture. With its one thing at a time play and its linear progression, golf reflects the one at a time linear experience of reading. Golf stands out against all other sports in that the goal is to minimize scoring, not maximize it. In a similar fashion, reading text minimizes the context of language, removing the normal cues of intonation, inflection and volume.

The environment in which the golf game takes place is a vast cultivated pasture. A skillful golfer avoids the "rough" and progresses from the fairway to the manicured green. As the golfer "reads" the lie of the land, he recapitulates the human experience of the hunter-gatherer morphing into the cultivator. The golfer chases the ball through the groomed undergrowth until he finally deposits it in the hole. Then it's on to the next hole and the next hunt.

Viewing golf on TV is a completely different experience. Modern televised golf coverage suffers from ADD. Gone is the linear progression of the game. Many cameras provide many points of view that reflect the biases of television rather than those of print. The commentary and viewpoint continuously jump from hole to hole in a non-linear fashion, focusing on the highlights of the game, while eliminating the tedium of the hunt. The medium of television transforms golf from the linear one-at-a-time play of an individual into the simultaneous interplay of all the golfers. Golf viewers have already internalized the process of the play and are experiencing the essence of the game as presented on TV, that is, as myth.

That President Bush would think it appropriate to give up golf in a time of war indicates that he has abandoned the constructive capabilities of society in favor of the destructive ones. Critics complain that claiming to give up a game as a sacrifice in time of war trivializes the nature of combat and demeans the true sacrifices of our soldiers and their families. What they miss is Bush's true message: He is a War President, not a Peace President.

Meta Four Play Part 4 - McLuhan's Tetrad and Lévi-Strauss' Canonical Formula: Down the Rabbit Hole

2008-05-09T15:25:00.011-05:00

My previous posts on this topic, which can be found here, here and here attempted to link the process of mythic analysis proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his Canonical Formula with Marshall McLuhan’s approach to the study of technology which he termed his “Laws of the Media.” McLuhan demonstrated his laws using his Tetradic division of that impact into enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval and reversal. This linkage is possible because visual media operate on a mythic basis. The difference between the myths of our era of secondary orality and those of primary orality is that there is now a stronger dependence on visual imagery to tell the story. McLuhan noted that

“…when the entire economy is on an artistic or magical basis, sparked by the magical appeals and promises of the ads (visual ads are in themselves magical in their habit of transforming ordinary objects and situations) is it not repugnant to the total pattern and promise of the new life to accept ‘natural’ effects even at the level of physical taste? The power of the machine to transform the character of work and living strongly invites us to transform every level of existence by art.

Gilbert Seldes mentions how in the early days of TV crowds would stand by the hour watching a TV screen in a shop window when the only picture on the screen was of the traffic in the street in which they stood. Such is likewise the magical power of the press. Reportage takes up the ordinary events, the weather and the municipal events in which we all participate, and changes them simply by virtue of the medium of print and photography. Any communication link or channel necessarily possesses this myth dimension. Much more are the ineluctable modalities of sight and sound charge with powers of metamorphosis which have been magnified by technology into the size and posture of mighty djinns.”(1)

Our current system of myths is not only presented verbally, but also via images, in print, and even in interplay of biases amongst all of our competing media. Since we may be relearning this manner of thinking as we move deeper into secondary orality, McLuhan and Lévi-Strauss each provide us with maps of where we may be headed. What hasn’t been apparent before is how their particular approaches are complementary and when used together, provide a stronger methodology to interpreting and understanding media effects.

Every television commercial is a lesson in the ways of thought under secondary orality and, as advertising icons spread out to other venues, they act as constant reminders of the secondary orality way to process experience.

Theatrical television is based on literary conventions. Film school students can tell you how every movie is divided into three acts--just like a stage play. One hour theatrical tv programs extend the dramatic arc to four acts, each about 11 minutes long. The drama progresses via thought processes that are linear, based on literacy-based cause and effect logic. TV Ads teach us to think like pre-literate peoples, using the type of non-linear thought processes that Claude Lévi-Strauss divided into "empirical" and "transcendental" deduction.

"Empirical deduction occurs whenever a myth attributes a function value or symbolic meaning to a natural being because of an empirical judgment durably associating the being with the attribution. From a formal point of view the correctness of the empirical judgment is irrelevant." (2)

Empirical deduction begins with some observation of reality. It then treats that observation as if it were an abstract concept. This type of mental process can occur using two different types of association. First, through the use of a metonymic association, some observed characteristic or habit of an animal is treated as if it stood for the entire animal. If this characteristic is found elsewhere in the environment, it too is associated with that animal. The metonymic association then becomes a metaphoric assertion. Lévi-Strauss’s term for such uses of metaphor is “imaginary association.”

"An imaginary association…results in the attribution of curative powers against snake bite and tooth decay to seeds shaped like fangs." (3)

The metonymic association (fangs of a snake) is used to make a metaphoric assertion (fang-shaped seeds cure snake bite). In classic television advertising we see this type of reasoning regularly. The air bubbles in Baggies sandwich bags make the bag look like an alligator’s skin, so an alligator is used as the product mascot. The Volkswagon “bug,” the Turtlewax turtle, and the old Exxon tiger are further examples of this type of association.

In current advertising, the associations are more subtle. For example, many ads feature automobiles that will never in real life leave a paved road "roughing" it through forests or deserts, avoiding natural obstacles and endowing the driver with the "freedom of the wilderness." The irony of these images is that the car or SUV, which often is given an animal name, is actually the embodiment of culture that provides the driver with protection against the storm. This is why Marshall McLuhan could refer to the automobile and driver as a knight in shining armor:

"The car gave to the democratic cavalier his horse and armor and haughty insolence in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided missile." (4)

"Transcendental" deduction operates at another step removed from reality. The characteristic attributed to an animal or an object is removed from any grounding in empirical observation, and is determined by its relative position in the culture's symbolic structure as a whole. Lévi-Strauss states that:

"It does not necessarily rest on a true or false, a direct or indirect empirical base; rather, it stems from the awareness of a certain logical necessity, that of attributing certain properties to a given being because empirical deduction has previously connected this being with others on the basis of a set of correlative properties." (5)

Lévi-Strauss has borrowed the notion of redundancy from communication theory to explain the rationale behind this procedure. Imagine that you are the story teller of a culture that relies on oral communication for the transmission of its body of knowledge. Let us assume for the sake of argument that you are fully aware of the hidden structural associations that your stories are portraying. How would you insure that the information contained in those tales would survive the erosion of time and the individual idiosyncrasies of future story tellers? One way would be to take the basic message or messages and repeat them over and over again using different formats and imagery. Though the stories would seem to be about different heroes, animals, events, and so on, the underlying structure would be more or less the same throughout. Furthermore, future story tellers would internalize these structures so that they would tend to reject any alterations which went against the general pattern.

That's why, in our secondary orality culture, ads want to insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives: Not just as an accepted part of television and radio and magazines but also in movies and broadway theaters, in our schools and workplaces. Can our places of worship be far behind?

The type of thought manifest in television advertising represents the symbolic realization of the lesson of the medium itself. A medium of images and sounds, TV's biases toward the non-discursive are represented and reinforced in the narratives of advertising.

(1)McLuhan, M. (2005). "Notes on the Media as Art Forms" in Marshall McLuhan - Unbound, E. McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon, eds. (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press), pp 8-9.

(2) Levi-Strauss, C. (1971). “The Deduction of the Crane,” in Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition, Maranda, P. and Maranda E.K., Eds. (p. 3). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

(3) Ibid. (p. 3)

(4) McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (p. 17). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

(5) Levi-Strauss, C. Op. Cit, (p. 3)

Education in the Age of Secondary Orality

2008-04-16T18:41:00.005-05:00

The first humans lived under conditions of primary orality. Individual memory was the only way to transmit cultural heritage from one generation to the next. Learning was based on oral modes with parables, puns, poesy and music central tools of the "educational" system. For example, in oral cultures a person’s word was his bond. Without written records to provide proof, people had to depend on the spoken word to bind agreements.

During the manuscript and print eras, written documents replaced memory as the primary means of transmitting information over time and space. Copying texts became a means of acquiring knowledge, with remnants of memorization persisting. We learned our ABC's by song and memorized math tables and poetry while at the same time our teachers required written examinations of memorized material.

In the early years of electronic media, only a few had access to external memory devices to record and preserve our culture. An electronic broadcast would be sent to many, but then disappear into the "aether." Educators used video for distance learning and to perpetuate the lecture model of education of the manuscript age. Students experienced increasing alienation in the classroom as the culture's true pedagogy was conducted via mass media-based advertising organizations.

With video cell phones, cheap editing technology, internet access and so on, what once was available to few is now available to many. What was private has now become public. The World Wide Web has added a readily accessible "Memory Well" to enable total cultural recall and dissemination. Items dropped down the Memory Well no longer vanish forever. We now can retrieve video, audio, text and photos at will – without resorting to memorization or physical texts.

This ability easily to retrieve many if not all of our artifacts will bring about a shift in our culture's notion of what is important to know and how to educate our young. It has already generated a crisis in the copyright arena as students unwittingly cut and paste together their assignments from material available online.

Our political leaders and media personalities must now cope with the new power the Memory Well has given to data retrieval. This has profound implications for politics, education, social policy and the mass media themselves, including broadcast news organizations and the traditional press.

Our educators must anticipate the characteristics of this cultural shift and design an education system that prepares our students to live in the era of "secondary" orality. We must learn how to mentor the Millennial Generation.

Something Wiki This Way Comes.

2008-04-08T16:42:00.006-05:00

If you spend any time browsing the YouTube, you've probably seen the Media Ecological videos produced by Kansas State University Professor of Cultural Anthropology Michael Wesch. In his videos, Dr. Wesch focuses his camera on text written and re-written on pads of paper, computer screens or student flash cards. Reminiscent of the "Show Us Your Lark Pack" commercials of the 1960's, Dr. Wesch's camera leaps from pillar to post-it, constructing his critique out of a series of billboard announcements, classified ad notices and graffiti scrawls. Through a carefully scripted video bricolage Dr. Wesch constructs a narrative criticizing the current limitations of classroom pedagogy and exposing the true media environments that govern the Millennial Generation.

The persisting paradigm of most current classroom education is a remnant of the medieval academies where the curriculum consisted of a monk at a lectern reading from a sacred text while everyone in the class copied word for word at their desks. Education then consisted of making a copy of all "great" books for your own library. The model has survived into the industrial age because, if you add a series of bells and a rotation schedule, you prepare students to "graduate" from the classroom to the factory.

In the Information Age the Monkish/Assembly line mode of teaching is revealed as an arbitrary and perhaps counterproductive way to impart knowledge. As the mass media usurped the educational prerogative from the old school system, a student’s true learning occurred outside the classroom. This transformation was predicted over 50 years ago by Marshall McLuhan who noted that advertising was providing the epistemological foundations of our culture, moving pedagogical control from the classroom the boardroom. As computer-based new media supplant the mass media, the paradigm is shifting once again.

The techniques of print, billboard and mass media advertising are not adequate to create the new curriculum of the internet community, although many are trying to fit this square peg in that round hole. Searching for new "business models" to rationalize the internet, corporate advertisers think they can bend the aesthetics of the internet to the requirements of consumerism. The problem here is that advertising itself is a deadend epistomology where the transcendental characteristics of consumer products have determined the logic of our cultural narrative. As "one to many" product factories give way to "many to many" production communities, the product becomes subservient to the process, and narrative control shifts from the producer to the consumer.

As represented in his videos, Dr. Wesch is clearly a product of the advertising paradigm. Creating the content for the New Media out of the aesthetics of the old media, Dr. Wesch's videos owe more to print, billboard and mass advertising than to the wiki inspired internet. In twenty years his student subjects will create their own critiques that draw from the paradigms of instant messaging, wikis and media multi-tasking. We mass media suckled, advertising educated old-timers may very possibly find these millenial narratives incomprehensible.

Randi Rhodes and The First Amendment

2008-04-03T21:01:00.001-05:00

Air America Radio suspends Randi Rhodes for using the "W" word.

In the 1919 case Schenk v. The United States, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech doesn't permit someone to falsely yell "fire" in a crowded theater. That interpretation of our Constitutional rights was brought up to date today when the management of Air America Radio suspended talk show host Randi Rhodes for calling Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton "whores." Ms. Rhodes' live tirade was not broadcast on the Air America network. We know about it because it was captured on tape and made available for endless viewing on YouTube.

When our Founding Fathers added the First Amendment to the Constitution, they didn't anticipate two things: first, that there would someday be radio and radio talk shows, and second, that there would someday be YouTube. If they had, they would have included a clause like, "Freedom of speech shall not be abridged, except when talk show hosts use foul language when describing a political candidate and the whole thing is captured on video and shown on YouTube."

Surely the owners of liberal talk radio network Air America were thinking of this Constitutional omission when they suspended Ms. Rhodes. But let's be clear about the intent here. No one would argue that these prominent politicos, Ferraro and Clinton, are literally whores in the Elliot Spitzer sense of the term. If you go to YouTube and watch the video (14,907 views as of 2:40 on Thursday) it is clear that Ms. Rhodes was using the term to mean that these women will "sell" themselves to the highest bidder for political advantages. (How else to explain Ms. Clinton's recent decision to appear before Richard Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorial board?) I would argue that that appearance makes Ms. Clinton less of a whore and more of a hooker, but let's not quibble over technicalities.

It is OK to call Ms. Clinton a murderer, a fraud, and other foul names if you are writing for the Tribune-Review (see their coverage of the Vince Foster suicide). It is unacceptable for a radio talk show host to use pejorative language against Ms. Clinton before a small group of appreciative listeners if it is captured on tape and ends up on YouTube. So we have to assume that in this case the medium is truly the message.

Every society has its taboos. Our culture distinguishes "polite" language from "foul" language. The management of Air America Radio would have us believe that this modern taboo trumps any Constitutional rights or privileges we may think we have.

Meta Four Play Part 3 - McLuhan's Tetrad and Lévi-Strauss' Canonical Formula: Breaking Down the Formula

2008-03-15T22:03:00.004-05:00

"I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact." - Claude Lévi-Strauss (1)

In my posts on January 7 and January 15 I suggested that there is an affinity between Marshall McLuhan's Tetrad and Claude Lévi-Strauss' Canonical Formula (CF). I pointed out the similarity between the Tetrad's four aspects of technology influence (enhance, retrieve, obsolesce and reverse) and the CF which states that all myths operate by a function of analogy and inversion, where f_x(a) : f_y(b):: f_x(b) : f_(a-1)(x), which can be read as "the function 'x' of (a) is to the function 'y' of (b)" as "the function 'x' of (b) is to the inversion or opposite of the original element f(a-1) when considering the original x function as an element.

This approach interprets McLuhan's Tetrad in a way different than he may have intended. Merging the Laws of the Media with the CF allows us to focus on the transformation brought about by a technology, not the technology itself. McLuhan formulated his Laws of the Media as a methodology to bring to the foreground the otherwise hidden influences of technology. My approach proposes that the Tetrad can help to reconcile technological incompatibilities, that is, the incompatible effects of a technology on human activities. A new technology no longer "enhances, retrieves, obsolesces and reverses." Instead, we can say that the Tetrad shows how the technology "empowers" one aspect of a social organization while "repressing" a related aspect that had been empowered by a preceding technology.

Lévi-Strauss has shown how the purpose of myth is to reconcile inconsistencies in a culture's world view. I am suggesting that the purpose of a Tetrad is to tell a story and that story is an attempt to resolve a contradiction brought about by the adoption of a new technology. Seen this way, the Tetrad becomes a mechanism to mediate between some characteristic of a new technology and the resulting societal effect when that technology is pushed to an extreme. I also suggest that the assumed agent of a Tetrad be brought to the foreground in order to reveal the mythic operation McLuhan’s Laws of the Media .

To take one example from McLuhan's Laws of the Media (2), a Tetrad for the automobile might look like this:

The Automobile

Enhances: Privacy
Obsolesces: The horse and buggy
Retrieves: The knight in shining armor
Reverses into: Gridlock, massive traffic jams.

A man driving his carriage past one of the first automobiles might have shouted "Get a horse!" Early cars may not have been a match for horsepower, but as the technology improved horse and buggy users were caught in a contradiction. The most efficient mode of personal travel no longer depended on horseflesh, and the automobile began the process of setting new requirements for road quality, service stops, travel times, geographic distances and expectations concerning travel. The culture of the horse was no longer relevant. What the Tetrad reveals is how a new technology creates a contradiction within the corporate and social structure fostered by the preceding technology.

It is possible that McLuhan, in formulating his Laws of the Media, demonstrated how the mythology of secondary orality will develop. In classical mythology, an agent, who represents the first part opposition of terms, performs an action that is opposed by a second agent, who performs a contradictory action. McLuhan’s Tetrad assumes an agent or agents, but only examines the results of an agent’s actions.

Re-formulating using the Canonical Formula, the automobile Tetrad might look like this:

a= New Technologies: “automobile “
x= empowering
b= prior technologies: “horse and buggy”, “knighthood”
y= repressing

If we frame the narrative of the Tetrad as a story with actors and agents, here is one possible narrative representing the effect of the automobile:

Henry Ford created a mechanical vehicle far superior to prior modes of transportation (a). He gave this “automobile” to John Q. Public so that he could go faster and travel farther. This created a private space for speedier travel f_x(a). John Q. Public stopped using the horse and buggy f_y(b). Exemplary (i.e. modern) instances of the car re-create John Q. Public as a knight in shining armor f_x(b). However, too many knights create gridlock or traffic jams, bringing travel to a standstill and reversing Henry Ford’s original intention f_a-1(y).

Thus, the privacy enhancing function of the speedy automobile f_x(a) is to its repressing function of the horse and buggy as f_y(b) as its enhancing function of retrieval of the “knight in shining armor” f_x(b) is to its reversal into gridlock when pushed to an extreme f_a-1(y) or

f_x(a) : f_y(b):: f_x(b) : f_(a-1)(x)

which is one example of how McLuhan’s Tetrad conforms to Lévi-Strauss’ Canonical Formula.

Next: Implications of the use of Levi-Strauss' Canonical Formula to understand technology change.

1. Lévi-Strauss, C. The raw and the cooked: introduction to a science of mythology, Vol. 1. New York: Harper & Row, 1964, p. 11.

2. McLuhan, M. and McLuhan, E. Laws of the media: the new science. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 148.

This Just In From the Washington Post: Women Are Dim

2008-03-03T16:49:00.012-05:00

Sunday's Washington Post didn't see anything wrong with running an Op Ed piece by Charlotte Allen, We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?

Allen argues that all women are dumb because some scream at a Barak Obama rally, some watch Grey's Anatomy, some get into car accidents and some, evidently, accept tripe as Op Ed pieces for the Washington Post. (Actually, I don't know if the editor who accepted this piece was a man or a woman, but, following Allen's own guidelines, we can assume it was a woman.)

Allen concludes her strange, mysogynistic screed with the following:

"So I don't understand why more women don't relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts' content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim."

Imagine an African American, a Muslim or a Jew writing a similar diatribe about their own demographic group: All African Americans are shiftless... All Muslims are terrorists... All Jews are greedy... Would such garbage make it into the editorial pages of the Washington Post?

As I noted in my February 20 post "Makeup Your Mind: Reflections on Cosmetics And Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue," women are sometimes their gender's own worst advocates. They sometimes buy into the admonishments of the cosmetic industry, they sometimes accept the "ditzy female" stereotype with affection and they sometimes write Op Ed columns noting their own limitations as a gender.

Maybe this piece was meant to be tongue in cheek. Is Allen spoofing arguments based on gender? Does she really mean exactly the opposite of her final sentence, "Women are..kind of dim"? Where is any indication of humorous intent?

If this had been Erma Bombeck, Molly Ivens, or even, God forbid, Maureen Dowd, we may have granted some ironic intent. Who is Charlotte Allen? Does she write humor columns?Without context there will be many who take Allen at face value and assume that her own dim column is proof of her contention. Maybe Allen just doesn't have a sense of humor and we shouldn't judge all women by her shortcomings. Maybe when God created woman from one of man's ribs, the joke was on us.

To quote a famous dim man, "Stupid is as stupid does."

Makeup Your Mind: Reflections On Cosmetics And Sport Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue

2008-02-20T11:16:00.011-05:00

A level playing field may apply in sports, but not in gender relations.

Sports Illustrated's annual paean to impossible feminine perfection celebrates an arbitrary nature/culture distinction between men and women that reflects a deep-seated cultural misogyny and perpetuates an uneven playing field in the battle of the sexes. Until our society matures to the point where women don't have to wear makeup to be considered equal to men, they will continued to be objectified and treated as less than human.

Commenting on the February swimsuit issue, the Huffington Post’s Verena Von Pfetten notes that "The SI Swimsuit Edition is like the Holy Grail of men's magazines: little to no articles, and pages upon pages of absurdly beautiful women in little to no clothing.”

While acknowledging that super model Marisa Miller looks older with all the makeup they pile on for her photo shoots, Von Pfetten doesn’t suggest that women abstain from makeup entirely: “And I know that we all have our limits. I, for one, cannot leave the house without mascara or blush. I've got flimsy mousy-colored lashes, and while tans may be tacky, my paleness always needs that little added flush. But all I'm asking is that we just lighten up. Pick your products, and use them wisely.”

That women still want to wear makeup reflects a failure of the feminist movement in particular and the immaturity of our culture in general. Makeup is a mask that allows women to tap into corporate power. I don't mean corporate as in business, but rather corporate as in the power of the group vs. the individual. Men achieve this power by actually belonging to corporations, whether they are lodge brothers or corporate raiders. Women counter by painting their faces. Hiding physical imperfections or accentuating certain features makes sense only if the result is more power for the individual, whether sexual, social or corporate.

But why makeup? The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once asked a native informant why his people tattooed their bodies. "Because we are not animals," was the reply. That women still use makeup is a reflection of their continuing status as not-quite-human, or to put it in a more Lévi-Straussian mode, women without makeup are still seen as "natural" while men without makeup are seen as "cultural." By acceding to cosmetic industry standards of beauty, women who wear makeup promote a status quo that says that women are not equal to men. Men can be "cultural" just by showing up. Women, to participate in the culture, must put on a corporate mask.

And while a woman who uses makeup is considered "cultural," a man who uses makeup is considered absurd. Mass media meditations on masculine makeup like “Some Like It Hot,” “Tootsie” and “Mrs. Doubtfire” are always comedies.

Madison Avenue-driven cosmetic companies have made some inroads into the use of body fragrance by men, but they have not yet found the right inducement for men to paint their faces, highlight their eyes and gloss their lips. My suggestion is that advertisers market tattoos as acceptable body paint for men. Invent a tattoo "makeup" that needs regular renewal but involves some pain to apply, and your fortune is made.

In sports, the play of the game depends on who makes up the rules. In gender relations, the play of game depends on who rules the makeup.

On Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

2008-02-13T09:41:00.004-05:00

I am happy to see my 2007 article about Ray Bradbury and his novel, Fahrenheit 451, cited as part a bibilography connected with the National Endowment for the Arts "Big Read". I reproduce it here, or you can go to Blogcritics where it was originally published here.

Rock, Paper, Video: Ray Bradbury Interprets Fahrenheit 451
An author is not always the best interpreter of his own work.

In a recent interview in the LA Weekly News, speculative fiction master Ray Bradbury claimed that most people have misinterpreted his seminal classic Fahrenheit 451. According to Bradbury, F451 was not about censorship and the threat of a tyrannous government. It was about the way television will make us into a nation of non-readers, which means being non-reflective, hedonistic and conformist.

Bradbury now asserts that Montag and other readers in his future dystopia were pursued because they refused to conform to the television-induced stupor of the general population, not because they subverted book burning. Books were burned, not as an act of suppression, but because they were irrelevant.

As books are burned and reading becomes a crime, what do the literate rebels in Fahrenheit 451 do? They each memorize a book, and on their deathbeds they pass that work on orally to a descendant. Bradbury rightly intuited that as electronic media superseded print, the values and concerns of our culture would change. But, being literate himself, Bradbury couldn't imagine that a society without literature could be anything but childish and shallow.

Borrowing from Northrop Frye, I would like to suggest that often the author of a work doesn't always fully comprehend its significance, but I would like to go one step further. Sometimes, authors are more intuitive than they themselves realize. Fahrenheit 451 may or may not be a book about government censorship, but the more important idea that Bradbury offered way back in 1953 was that electronic media would return us to an oral culture, or as Walter J.Ong later termed it, a condition of secondary orality.

Media Ecologists identify three major eras in the development of human cultures: orality, literacy and secondary orality. Pure oral cultures existed before writing was invented and had to devise various tricks and mnemonic devices to pass hard-won knowledge from generation to generation. Rhymes, rhythms, parables and puns helped preserve oral culture. Personal skills that were valued included memory, voice and the ability to weave an encyclopedian epic from standard poetic pieces. "Rhapsodist" was Classical Greek for "weaver."

When writing was invented, information could be preserved outside of human memory, and essential cultural activities of orality like story telling and singing became pastimes. Reading, writing and 'rithmetic became the tools to educate our children. It then became of concern which medium was used to preserve the writing. Durable media like stone were long lasting, but hard to carry around. Portable media like papyrus and later, paper were easy to transport, but didn't last nearly as long. Writing not only allowed the preservation of culture, but also the distribution of that information far beyond its source of origination.

In secondary orality, the major institutions and beliefs of a culture are once again driven by modes of thought and practices based on oral communication, not literacy. Linear thinking gives way to gestalt thinking, logic is replace by intuition, and we begin to think with our "guts" rather than our heads. Computer hardware takes the place of human brain cells for information storage, but oral activities like singing return to center stage. The tools of cultural transmission may be the same as those of primary orality, but the arts are informed by a legacy of writing.

So, is Ray Bradbury an early Media Ecologist? One could say that all writers of speculative fiction are practicing speculative Media Ecology. In Bradbury's case, he could predict the outcome of adopting a new media environment without fully grasping the influence of electronic media. It is significant that by the end of Fahrenheit 451, the TV-addicted culture has destroyed itself in war and the secondary orality rebels move to rebuild society. Their ultimate supremacy signifies the ascendancy of secondary orality, not its defeat.

Performance Enhancing Drugs

2008-01-31T22:15:00.001-05:00

In case you've been sleeping for the last 42 years, this Sunday the sports/media event known as the Super Bowl takes place. This penultimate football event, which might well be called "normal football on steroids," reminds us of all the media attention paid to the use of performance enhancing drugs in professional sports. Recent news reports of performance enhancing drug use have included sports ranging from track and field to cycling to major league baseball. These reports have focused on the transgressions of individual athletes rather than the significance of sports programming in our television culture and its influence on our attitudes concerning drug use.

From a Media Ecology perspective, it is possible to examine television content as a function of the television medium itself. As a "one to many" medium, American television acts to dictate and reinforce acceptable social norms and behavior. The content of television seems to have fallen by accident into three distinct categories : entertainment, news and advertising. In fact, these broad categories of programming each stake out a different level of social behavior to manage and control.

Advertising: TV ads deal with social versus antisocial behavior on a personal level. Television advertisements are full endorsements of performance enhancing drugs, from Pepto Bismol to Claritin to Viagra. Participation in social events and personal relationships is made possible for the individual by the use of the proper product. Sometimes the performance enhancing claim is subtle, as in ads for "smart" cereals, cold medications or vitamin supplements. Sometimes it is overt, as in ads for male and female fragrances, erectile dysfunction medications or body building shampoos.

Entertainment: Television entertainment shows are chiefly concerned with social versus anti-social behavior on an interpersonal level. The archetypal television program sets up one or more characters who exist at the borderline of social acceptance, whether they are juveniles learning the ropes, clown characters who are unaware or otherwise ignore social norms, or villains who attempt to subvert the existing social equilibrium and replace it with one of their own.

In all instances the depiction of rule breaking and resolution acts to reinforce those rules. In terms of drug usage as a breaking of social rules, Showtime's Weeds stands out in particular, though it tends to deal with the supposed social dynamics of the drug trade rather than the psychodynamics of the drug itself. Otherwise, most TV entertainment discussions of drug use and its consequences are relegated to occasional afternoon specials and to all episodes of House.

News: Television infotainment shows (otherwise known as "News Broadcasts") address this social/anti-social opposition at the public level. Public order is disturbed by rogue political activists, events of nature or common criminals. Though the particular infraction may not have been resolved by the time of the newscast, the very act of reporting frames the event in terms of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. In each case there are implicit or explicit rules which have been broken and then are reaffirmed. These programs are also full of reports about the drug or alcohol induced exploits of our celebrities, individuals whose very notariety hinges on reporting of their latest binges.

Sports: Where do sports broadcasts fit into to the structure of television content? Sports, as the WWF demonstrates each week, are mainly entertainment broadcasts. Sports participants are tightly bound by the rules of the particular sport. While any given standard entertainment program is about the breaking of rules, sports events are about abiding by rules. Each sport has a cadre of referees, line judges or umpires whose sole purpose is to make sure that the rules of the game are strictly adhered to.

In that sense, all sports are totally "made up." That is, the parties involved, no matter how adversarial they may seem, all agree to the set of rules of play. Rules determine what is allowed and what isn't, and ultimately who wins and who loses. What is acceptable or unacceptable behavior varies from sport to sport, but some set of rules always applies. At the same time, the outcome of the sporting event is not determined. The playing of a sport may be entertainment, but the result of that play is news.

This is the problem with sports programming. It is both news and entertainment. It crosses established boundaries of television content. It is a "made up" activity, but not in the same way that a comedy or drama is "made up."

So we have a basic opposition within the content structure presented by American television. On the one hand we have advertisements, where the performance enhancing drugs or products must be used, and on the opposite end we have sports where the performance enhancing drug must not be used. In between we have differing interations of this primary opposition, with entertainment and news content reflecting multiple variations of this use/don't use opposition.

The point is that we aren't concerned with the effect of drug use, or the unfair advantages performance enhancing drugs might give to advertising, entertainment or news personalities. We are concerned with the advantages performance enhancing drugs might give to professional atheletes. In their case, the use of any drug is itself a violation of the rules which state that, though any given athelete might already represent an outlier of norms concerning physical strength and ability, they shouldn't do anything "artificial" to enhance their already considerable talents.

It is not an accident that the way television content is differentiated conforms to Levi-Strauss's Canonical Formula regarding mythology:

fx(a):fy(b)::fx(b):f(a-1)(x)

In this case, the ultimate transformation promoted by corporate television (use our advertisers' products) begins with sports fx(a), the function of which is to avoid performance enhancing drugs, ie, to remain in a "natural" state. Proceeding through analogous functional areas where drug use is largely ignored fy(b) (entertainment) or is a tolerated aberration fx(b)(News), we arrive at the final iteration where the desired state is acceptance of performance enhancing drugs or products as the necessary state of being f(a-1)(x) (advertising).

The uproar created by sport-related drug use is a function of the relative position of sports in the structure of television programming, not the drug use itself.

Spawn of the Terminator

2008-01-24T12:31:00.000-05:00

The Terminator franchise finds new worlds to conquer

In the recent TV resurrection of the Terminator trilogy, The Sara Connors Chronicles, we are presented with a new type of Terminator. In the movies we've seen Terminators take the form of muscle-bound body builders, slippery liquid-metal meanies and Fergalicious babes. In the Chronicles the newest terminator comes in the form of a teenage high school waif complete with hall pass. Played by Summer Glau, this pubescent Terminator can kick ass with the best of them, but so far has largely refrained from committing mass slaughter, preferring to slink around the Connors house in the buff (perhaps producing a different kind of mayhem.)

This is the true revelation of this latest attempt to cash in on the Terminator franchise: Terminators can come in any shape or size. In fact, if Chronicles does well in the ratings, we can expect to see the following Terminator spinoffs:

Look Who's Terminating
An infant Terminator appears and no one realizes he's a stone cold killer.

Welcome Back, Terminator
A high school teacher seems too good to be true, and in fact, he is. Gives "Sweat Hogs" a new meaning.

Leave It To Bereaver
Pre-teen high jinx as middle America is infiltrated by a juvenile Terminator. Something really new for Ward and June to worry about each week.

The Beverly Terminators
A group of clueless Terminators moves into a California mansion. First episode: They meet the Governator.

I Love Lucite
Terminators can be solid or liquid, why not plastic? A sort of "I Married a Terminator," as a zany female Terminator performs hilarious slapstick executions with near perfect comedic timing and then has some 'splaining to do.

Of course, none of these scripted shows can begin until the writers strike is settled. In the meantime reality-based Terminator shows will have to fill the gap. Old formats take on new relevance when killer robot-based:

Whose End of the Line Is It Anyway?

Who Wants to be Terminated?

Skynet's Next Top Model

Big Brother

And of course,

Survivor

You get the idea.

The Missing White House E-Mail Tapes

2008-01-22T11:20:00.000-05:00

Claims of missing e-mails tapes flies in the face of professional data center practices.

A recent issue of the Washington Post (available here) contains an article about missing White House email backup tapes under the headline “White House Study Found 473 Days of E-Mail Gone.” The article cites White House chief information officer Theresa Payton who stated that “e-mail backup tapes were routinely "recycled" during the first three years of the Bush administration.”

Current discussions in the press about the missing White House email backup tapes operate under the mistaken assumption that enterprise data backup strategies are like home video taping. The White House claims that the backup tapes of emails were inadvertently reused, the way someone at home may inadvertently use a wedding tape to record the Super Bowl. That’s not the way it works.

I have worked in some capacity in information technology for the last 30 years. From the perspective of generally accepted IT practices, Payton’s explanation about the absence of backups for key time periods and especially for a large block of time from between 2003 and 2005 makes no sense at all.

Any professional information technology operation will follow a backup scheme that is some variation of the following:

• You backup your email servers every day, using different tapes for each day. Some organizations back up more than once a day if the volume is large enough or the material important enough.
• At the end of the week you take a master backup of everything and send it off site for permanent storage
• At that point you begin reusing your backup tapes for the new week.

Sometimes weekly backups are kept onsite with monthly backups sent to permanent storage. While it may be possible under these types of schemes to lose some data (though highly unlikely) it is almost impossible to lose a whole year’s worth of data unless the backup procedure has been compromised, or specific orders are given to delete certain information

Furthermore, no IT technician or manager would take it upon themselves to change backup procedures without explicit orders from their superiors. Someone gave the orders to change backup strategy or to destroy specific tapes. The documentation of those orders may be gone, but the people remain.

The White House’s current denial that any backups are missing can be easily verified by a standard technology audit. If I were House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, I would obtain a list of all present and former White House data center technicians, and one-by-one, under oath, I would ask them who gave the order to change backup procedures, or the order to delete certain tapes. I would follow the IT chain of command as far as it goes.

Deletion of data, including presidential e-mails, is a form of industrial espionage. If the White House can’t prevent this sort of terrorism within their own staff, how can they protect us from foreign terrorists?

Meta-Four-Play: McLuhan's Tetrad and Lévi-Strauss's Canonical Formula Part 2.

2008-01-15T23:18:00.001-05:00

In my previous post I suggested that there is a fundamental similarity between Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Canonical Formula. The Tetrad, which is meant to explain the social processes underlying the adoption of a technology, was compared to the Formula, which is meant to explain the logical processes underlying mythology.The premise was that a combination of the two theories would provide easier access to the descriptive capabilities of each.

Step 1: De-objectify the Correlative

One of McLuhan’s assumptions is that there must be human agency in the adoption of any new technology. McLuhan often stated that understanding the biases of technology would enable us to control that impact, to act as stewards of culture change. McLuhan believed that the ivory tower would become the control tower for understanding and controlling the impact of a technology. This often is misinterpreted by critics who describe his work as “technological determinism.” Technology doesn't "act," people do. Oral narratives, and now electronic ones rely on a hero, or concrete human agent to carry forward the narrative. Instead of the concrete actor of a mythic tale, McLuhan gives us an abstract "actor" assumed by the adoption of a particular technology. But, excluding artificial intelligence, only humans can be actors.

Hidden within the Tetrad’s four part exposition, “enhance, obsolesce, retrieve and reverse,” is the assumption that someone enhances, someone obsolesces, someone retrieves and someone reverses. That someone can be an individual, an oligopolic group or a large-scale organization. It is the unthinking adoption of a technology which is of concern, not necessarily the technology itself. The problem is that in analyzing a technology, we focus on the concrete object of the technology, rather that the metaphor it represents. To modify T.S. Eliot, in order to understand the underlying metaphor of human agency that any technology represents, we need to “de-objectify the correlative.” Once we focus on the technology metaphor, rather than the technology itself, we are in a position to predict how that technology will influence human agency.

This may explain our fascination with robots in our science fiction tales and the “undead” in our gothic tales. These stories reveal our thoughts about what happens when human agency is eclipsed. This is true whether the narrative focuses on the cultural/technological (Terminator, Matrix) or the natural/supernatural (vampires, zombies.) Like the mediating figures of mythic tales that can function across boundaries, robots represent the literal embodiment of human agency in the form of artificial intelligence. As such, they have the potential to extend human potential as well as the capability to eclipse it. When the supremacy of human agency is threatened, the story always takes place in a dystopia.

Step 2: Defy Logic

According to Lévi-Strauss the purpose of mythology is always to reconcile the inevitable inconsistencies of a culture’s body of beliefs. His Canonical Formula is a tool to explain the way mythology works. Such an analysis is necessary because the reasoning taking place within a myth defies what we understand as logic. It is not linear thinking, but rather a metaphoric leap of faith that finds connections where there aren’t any and achieves the reconciliation of the irreconcilable. As Eric Csapo puts it,

“The solution is never logical, strictly speaking, but it imitates logic. If the problem were capable of a purely logical solution, there would be no need to have recourse to myth. But myth can do what logic cannot, and so it serves as a kind of cultural trouble-shooter. Rather than thinking of it as a kind of placebo which creates the mere impression of solution to a problem, it may be regarded as a mechanism for relieving anxiety.” (Csapo, 2005, p.226)

McLuhan also stated that his Tetrad was not a logical technique:

“The whole point about my tetrads is that they are analogical. That is there are no connections between any of them, but there are dynamic ratios.”

So, to continue the comparison, if the purpose of myth is to reconcile incompatibilities in or inconsistencies a culture, perhaps it could be said that the purpose of a tetrad is to reconcile technological incompatibilities, that is, to reconcile incompatible human activities under the influence of technology.

Next post: Breaking down the formula

Notes:

Csapo, E. 2005. Theories of Mythology. p.226 (Blackwell Publishing)

McLuhan, M. Letter to the Editor in Technology and Culture, Vol. 17, No.2, p.263

Four Play: McLuhan's Tetrad and Lévi-Strauss's Canonical Formula

2008-01-07T10:26:00.000-05:00

It is, perhaps, an unspoken assumption in Media Ecology that there are no differences in the intellectual capabilities of peoples of different ages or technological achievement. By this I don't mean differences in sensory balances, which may be determined by the particular technologies or media of communication available, but rather that there are no differences in the basic structure and capacity of the human mind.

McLuhan, via his Laws of the Media, asks us to consider what a technology or medium of communication enhances, what it obsolesces, what it retrieves and what it reverses into if pushed to an extreme. McLuhan claimed that exploring an innovation in this fourfold way is the best methodology for describing its impact on a culture. In his discussion of the Tetrad McLuhan wrote:

“A four-part analogy is a figure-ground structure. (In a metaphor there are two figures and two grounds in ratio to one another.) Apropos the four-part structure which relates to all human artifacts (verbal and non-verbal), their existence is certainly not deliberate or intentional. Rather, they are a testimony to the fact that the mind of man is structurally inherent in all human artifacts and hypotheses whatever.” (The Laws of the Media, p. 120)

McLuhan noted that all technologies, as extensions of human capabilities, are essentially metaphoric in structure. He suggested that the nature of these metaphors can be revealed by answering the four questions codified in his Laws of the Media Tetrad. “From a structural ‘point of view’ a metaphor has four terms which are discontinuous, yet in ratio to one another.” (Ibid)

One problem I have had with McLuhan's Tetrad is that the value of the analysis arrived at seems to depend on the creativity of the analyst, rather than the technique itself. Perhaps Claude Lévi-Strauss's approach can be used as a tool to "level the playing field" and make Tetradic analyses available to everyone.

In his studies of kinship systems, totemism and mythology, Lévi-Strauss has demonstrated that there existed a complexity of thought and a subtlety of mind in so-called “primitive” societies that is equal to our own. Levi-Strauss proposed that the structures underlying cultural institutions can be codified as a series of ratios. While presented as a logical formula rather than a series of questions, his Canonical Formula, f_x(a) : f_y(b) :: f_x(b) : f_(a-1)(x), also represents a four-fold approach to analyzing cultural artifacts. Just as the enhancing impact of a new technology in McLuhan’s Tetrad flips into its opposite when pushed to the extreme, Levi-Strauss asserts that within the structure of a myth, an initial condition f_x(a) is pushed to its opposite, or “transforms” into f_(a-1)(x).

In the course of his analysis of the myths of the Tupi Indians, Lévi-Strauss moves spiral-like through multiple mythic variations and multiple opposing pairs and by proceeding A to B and B to C, etc., demonstrates internal consistencies within the mythic system that aren't immediately apparent to an outside observer. In other words, Lévi-Strauss provides a useful tool for analysis regardless of whether you wish to extrapolate the function of the method to the deeper structures of the human mind or not.

I find Lévi-Strauss's methodology completely compatible with McLuhan's Laws of the Media. Where McLuhan asks us to consider what a technology or medium enhances, obsolesces, retrieves and reverses into, Lévi-Strauss will start with a pair of opposites "A" and "B", but in the course of his analysis will present examples of what he calls " A' " (A prime) and " B' " (B prime) as recursive iterations of the original pair.

So, if f_x(a) translates generally as "the enhancing function (x) of a technology on (a)," and f_y(b) is "the obsolescing function (y) of a technology on (b)," and f_x(b) is "the retrieving function (x) of a technology on (b'), the f_(a-1)(x) is the reversal of (a) into (a-1) or (a') in terms of its effect on the previous enhancement (x).

McLuhan's Tetrad attempts to discern the structural metaphor of the enhancements of human capabilities and can itself be viewed itself as a type of mythic narrative. Interpreting the Tetrad's terms, enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval and reversal, as ratios within Lévi-Strauss's Canonical Formula may provide a systematic way to analyze technological change.

Intelligent Design

2007-12-25T19:48:00.000-05:00

Whither Goest Thou Today?

To: All Users
From: Intelligent Design Support Center (AKA IDSC)
Subject: Reality (Version 2008)

As of 1/1/2008 the present version of Reality 2007 will be superseded by Version 2008. This update of Reality is now open source and therefore not copy protected. You can now create your own Reality. As a consequence, idiosyncratic reality testing must now be conducted at your discretion. All forks to alternate realities will be at the user's risk and expense. To minimize conflicts, Reality Version 2008 can be networked in order to permit multiple realities.

Reality (2008) supports the following:

You can have your cake and eat it, too. Calories consumed count only at the user's choosing.
Once you've made your bed, you don't have to sleep in it. You can sleep in someone else's bed.
You can go home again. If home doesn't exist in your current reality, V2008's windows allow you to go into someone else's home. When leaving one reality for another, please turn off the lights and lock up.
Beauty is no longer restricted to the eyes of the beholder. It now includes the nose, ears, and forehead. In addition, beauty is no longer just skin deep, but now extends to underlying muscles as well.
Undelete Function: Errors, omissions, faux pas, etc. can now be corrected by issuing the "OOPS" command. This command does not apply to forgotten birthdays or anniversaries, sports events or pregnancies.

There has been considerable confusion concerning the ultimate physical structures that have constituted Versions 1905 and higher. Especially noted has been the lack of macro-level analogies to illustrate sub-atomic activity and the difficulty in dealing with events on a cosmic scale.

IDSC has therefore decided to revert to the structure of Reality Version 400 BCE. All elements will once again be constituted from some combination of earth, air, fire and/or water. The substance of space beyond Earth's atmosphere will be composed of "aether" and all distances in outer space will be traversable within a human lifetime. This revision does not restore spontaneous generation or a geocentric cosmology.

Bugs In Reality Version 2007

Many users have called our attention to so-called bugs in previous versions of Reality, including war, disease, death, poverty, male pattern baldness, and the presence of human life on Earth. IDSC would like to make it clear that these are features of Reality, not bugs.

Note: Due to increased use of our Reality Support Hot Lines, we are forced to limit free phone support to the first ninety days of life. Support after that time will be available at a nominal charge. Increase support staff and additional phone lines should reduce call-in waiting time from the current 1-2 millennia to just a few hundred years. Subscribers will also be entitled to periodic revelations as well as our quarterly manifestations.

On Paul Levinson and the FCC

2007-12-19T12:02:00.000-05:00

A contrarian stance on media consolidation points out the failures of our Fourth Estate.

My friend and fellow blog critic Paul Levinson (author of Digital McLuhan, The Soft Edge and more recently The Plot to Save Socrates) has an interesting but seemingly counterintuitive post on his blog, Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress. Under the title “FCC Ends Longstanding Ban on Cross-Ownership: Good!” Levinson applauds the FCC’s recent decision to lift cross ownership rules and allow media companies to own both print and broadcast news outlets in the same market:

So why am I applauding the 3-2 FCC ruling - a great example of even a broken clock being right twice a day?

Two reasons:

1. Media concentration is becoming less of a threat to diversity of communication in the age of the Internet. Plainly, there are many more voices on YouTube and countless other web sites than a decade ago, and the net result is even if every major broadcast medium were owned by the same organization, Americans would still have more variety in communication than ever before. The Obama Girl videos and Ron Paul's candidacy are two examples of profound developments in media that had nothing to do with broadcasting - and, in the case of Ron Paul, was actively opposed by mainstream media.

2. Even more importantly, even were the Web not providing unprecedented diversity in media, the FCC relaxation of ownership standards would be a good thing. The FCC is an affront to the First Amendment, and its injunction that Congress shall make no abridging freedom of speech or press. Much as I dislike media concentration, I see government regulation as a far worse threat to our freedom. You don't bring in a snake (the FCC) to control a rat problem (media concentration) - because, obviously, the snake can then slither around and bite you.

So to summarize Levinson’s argument, the multiplicity of alternate information sources on the internet make cross ownership of traditional media insignificant, and, FCC regulation of media ownership is contrary to the First Amendment anyway.

For those of us who are disciples of Laurence Lessig and Robert McChesney, Levinson’s stance is problematic. Clearly, the current concentration of media ownership is a contributing factor to our dysfunctional political system and quite possibly a key enabler in the attempt of the Republican Party to overthrow the Constitution. What good do First Amendment protections do us if the administration blatantly ignores the Constitution anyway? I also worry about the continuing independence of the Internet. The debate over net neutrality underlines fears that major corporations may find ways to choke off the freedom of the internet, rendering internet diversity moot.

While accepting the validity of these concerns, I think that Levinson has identified a significant trend in our information culture. Whether due to media concentration, “Beltway Village” mentality, or just plain laziness, it is apparent that the majority of our Fourth Estate have not been doing their job. As Stephen Colbert pointed out in his now famous White House Correspondence Dinner address, journalism is not stenography. Political blogs have moved in to fill a void left by the non-functioning traditional media press. At the very least, blog writers have required the traditional media to justify their ineptitude.

In addition, blog authors’ willingness to challenge conventional wisdom and deficient journalism practices has had a positive impact on the current election cycle. Though marginalized by the mainstream media, Presidential wannabees like Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich and Chris Dodd have been able to use the internet to their advantage.

So we arrive at a chicken and egg question. Given current and pending concentration of our traditional mass media, if the internet didn’t exist would it have to be created? Paul Levinson would say “yes.” His theory of “media remediation” suggests that no medium impact is inevitable or irreversible. If the internet didn’t exist, the need to fill the journalism void would have precipitated other responses. Given recent United States history, I am not as sanguine.

I believe that America is on the cusp of a transition from a Republic to an Empire. In times of political crisis, some types of temporary intervention in the normal evolution of media ownership may be necessary. For example, the FCC could issue a temporary ruling restraining media consolidation until the net neutrality issue is resolved.

If we, and not our technology, are ultimately responsible for the health of our media ecology, measured interventions are appropriate.

Sakai and Social Networking

2007-12-05T22:16:00.000-05:00

I'm attending the 2007 Sakai Conference in California this week. The Sakai Foundation, a consortium of colleges and universities, oversees the creation of a new “open source” course management system (CMS).

For those of you not connected to an academic institution (Anyone? Anyone?), a CMS such as Blackboard, WebCT, ANGEL, Desire2Learn and now, Sakai, provides university faculty with computer network resources to design and manage their classes.

Within the confines of their particular university's network professors can post their syllabi online, conduct discussions or chats, run quizzes and other evaluation tools, disseminate copies of their course materials and maintain their grade books electronically.

What Sakai brings to the equation is control. True to the “open source” movement, the Sakai code is completely completely free. This means that not only can any individual or institution take the code and do anything they want with it (use it, sell it, change it) but any corporation could do the same. Meanwhile, Sakai members provide staff and resources to develop the product, approve enhancements and correct bugs.

The open source movement, as compared to corporate software development, benefits from many, many eyes surveying the product and providing suggestions. The process provides for speedier product updates and better, more error-free code. Those of us whom Microsoft still sees as guinea pigs for their latest software (Vista anyone? Anyone?) can appreciate this.

Twice a year those institutions involved in the Sakai initiative gather at some appropriate location to share their knowledge and experiences.

But Sakai and open source software isn't what I want to talk about in this post. I want to draw your attention to an article that appeared this past Sunday in the New York Times Week in Review, available here and to the letter to the editor I submitted which is available here.

The article by Alex Wright, Friending, Ancient or Otherwise, discusses the new ways of social networking enabled by such online sites as MySpace and Facebook. Wright writes:

The growth of social networks — and the Internet as a whole — stems largely from an outpouring of expression that often feels more like “talking” than writing: blog posts, comments, homemade videos and, lately, an outpouring of epigrammatic one-liners broadcast using services like Twitter and Facebook status updates (usually proving Gertrude Stein’s maxim that “literature is not remarks”).

In the course of his examination of social networking, Wright quotes my friend Lance Strate who has taking to social networking in a big way (1,335 MySpace friends!) and intends to teach a course on the subject at Fordham University this fall:

“Orality is the base of all human experience,” says Lance Strate, a communications professor at Fordham University and devoted MySpace user. He says he is convinced that the popularity of social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric patterns of human communication. “We evolved with speech,” he says. “We didn’t evolve with writing.”

Lance's own blog, that, for reasons I can't fathom, he has titled "Lance Strate's Blog Time Passing" can be accessed here. His MySpace site is here. When Lance first posted notice of his contribution to social networking I offered this comment, which I later modified for submission to the New York Times:

My take on the social networking phenomena is that it represents a retrieval, though sped up to electric speeds, of the culture of correspondence of the 18th and 19th centuries.
I don't quite see how a system of communication based on messages like this, typed into the internet, can reflect the biases of oral cultures, but maybe that's what happens when letter writing is pushed to the extreme and flips into its opposite.

To which Lance replied:

I understand your point, Bob, but part of the distinctive quality of correspondence is the length of time that it takes the message to be delivered. Speeding up the interaction restores some of the immediacy of face-to-face interaction, which is why people tend to fall into conversational modes online, rather than draw on formal letter-writing. And letter-writing was a very pure kind of literary activity, where handwriting was the closest thing to a sense of presence, whereas in social networking we have profile pictures, we also have picture albums that others can check out, and potentially there are sound recordings available as MP3s, and video uploads. It is a multimedia environment that represents something much closer to physical presence than letter writing.

As a model media ecologist, Bob, you know that retrieval is one of McLuhan's four laws of media, but it's probably the most problematic one of all. and yes, you could say that e-mail obsolesces (another law) telephone conversations and retrieves letter writing, but I don't think that begins to cover the enormity of the social networking phenomenon. web 2.0, as it is sometimes referred to, is about adding more flexibility and interactivity to the original world-wide web, which was about making the internet more like a mass medium such as publishing, the internet having been a way to make electronic communications more flexible and interactive. it's been a real information war, as our friend Doug Rushkoff has argued. now, what would Levi-Strauss have to say about that?

And to which I responded:

I can't presume to speak for Levi-Strauss, especially concerning the new media social networks, about which, I believe, he has not stated an opinion.

However, if I did presume to put words into Levi-Strauss's mouth, I might suggest that social networking as it is manifested in places like MySpace and Facebook is neither social nor networking in the classic anthropological sense. It may represent the illusion of social networking, just like Second Life presents the illusion of life. It may be next to (ie "meta") social networking, the way metaphysics is "next to" physics.

Native oral cultures exist within three general systems: kinship, mythological and taboo. Kinship systems, as defined by structural anthropologists, are systems of the mutual exchange of goods and women that define social hierarchies and social obligations. Mythological systems operate to overcome or deny the inherent contradictions that exists in a culture's explanation of the world, thereby reinforcing and maintaining the assumptions, interpretations and belief systems of that culture. Taboo systems define what is touchable and what in untouchable in the environment. All these systems allow their participants to create and maintain categories into which they can divide the concrete elements of their particular environment.

The New York Times article mentions that you have 1,335 MySpace friends. That makes me think of the old joke about Chicago's Mayor Daly who would throw parties and invite 10,000 of his closest friends. Surely our definition of "friends" must change as the number approaches the thousands.

So Levi-Strauss might argue that the internet based "social networks" do not meet the requirements of the traditional social networks of oral societies, and so must be something else. We call them social networks the way we first called the automobile the "horseless carriage" or the radio the "wireless."

My own impression is that social networks have more to do with "I" than "Thou" and so represent, not social networks, but rather personal expression. We think we are communicating with other people, but we are really carrying on an elaborate conversation with ourselves.

Which brings us back to Sakai and the open source conference. There is some heresy spreading at the conference that the goal of Sakai, that is, to emulate the functionality of existing CMS's, is "rear view mirror" thinking. Many university faculty are moving beyond the limitations of course management software in the design and conduct of their courses, taking advantage of the vast array of social networking tools available on the internet. Many require their students to start a blog about the class. Some actively incorporate use of Facebook or MySpace into their syllabi. Some predict that to survive and compete against commercial competitors Sakai's course management software must evolve to take advantage of the capabilities of Web 2.0, the fully realized internet.

Sakai open source software development and MySpace-type social networking. Neither could exist without the internet. Both take advantage of the self-reflexive, self correcting characteristics of "many to many" communications. Both represent a new metaphor of social interaction that is still in its infancy.

We may yet witness the formation of elaborate kinship systems, based not on tribal relations but network connections. We may participate in the creation of a new mythologic system, one whose narrative explains the social networks that have come into being and hides whatever internal contradictions arise. And we may or may not become aware of a new set of taboos that appear as if by magic to help us maintain our new categories.

In short, we see the beginnings of what Marshall McLuhan called the elaborate social infrastructure brought about and sustained by any new medium of communication, in this case, the internet.

My Blogging Milestone (Part 5): What Dick Cheney and I have in Common

2007-11-26T16:28:00.000-05:00

Updated below

In conjunction of the Associated Press’s report that Dick Cheney has been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, here is my slightly updated May 27 post concerning my own AF:

If your heart is pounding, it may not necessarily be love. Or in the case of Dick Cheney, oil.

I was at dinner with my family in 2001 when my heart started beating rapidly. No, it wasn't because we were having meat loaf for dinner. It turned out that I was experiencing an episode of atrial fibrillation, which is defined by the American Heart Association as follows:

Atrial fibrillation is a disorder found in about 2.2 million Americans. During atrial fibrillation, the heart's two small upper chambers (the atria) quiver instead of beating effectively. Blood isn't pumped completely out of them, so it may pool and clot. If a piece of a blood clot in the atria leaves the heart and becomes lodged in an artery in the brain, a stroke results. About 15 percent of strokes occur in people with atrial fibrillation."

Atrial fibrillation, or "afib", is more likely to occur in the elderly, or in patients whose heart has been compromised by illness or surgery. I don't fit any of the regular profiles, and as my cardiologist said, other than the afib, I have the heart of an eighteen-year-old (the bad news is he wants it back!) Since that initial episode, I have taken a variety of medications in an attempt to control my afib episodes and I have undergone two cardiac ablations:

Radiofrequency ablation may be effective in some patients when medications don't work. In this procedure, thin and flexible tubes are introduced through a blood vessel and directed to the heart muscle. Then a burst of radiofrequency energy is delivered to destroy tissue that triggers abnormal electrical signals or to block abnormal electrical pathways.

After my second ablation failed to completely curtail my heart's fibrillation, my perplexed cardiologist suggested that I have a "mutant" heart. I'm still waiting for the super powers. As these two "non-invasive" procedures have only been partly successful, I remain on beta blockers and blood thinners to control the worst of the symptoms.

I relate this information, not to solicit sympathy (although I am accepting any and all donations), but rather as an introduction to a piece I wrote concerning the heart as a metaphor that I presented at the 2005 Media Ecology Association Convention, and a version of which I have posted at The Heart of the Matter.

As I was lying on my back after my first ablation (you must remain still for eight hours after the procedure), I began to think about the heart, an organ which most of us take for granted. That didn't help me get to sleep, so I began to think about the heart as a metaphor. It occurred to me that the heart, as related in popular culture, performs functions other than the pumping of blood.

The metaphor of the heart is not about the circulation of blood or the regulation of physical health. As portrayed in popular culture, the heart is the site of emotions, of certain deep thoughts that correspond to the true beliefs of an individual. The heart is also portrayed as a source of wisdom that can be tapped if we pay attention to it.

This did succeed in making me drowsy, but I was able to begin a line of thought about the reason why conceptual metaphors, like that of the heart, persist in our culture, despite changes in dominant media forms, social structures and languages.

Heart Songs: When Janis Joplin (1999) sang “take another little piece of my heart” , she wasn’t discussing cardiac ablation. The references to the metaphoric heart are the rule rather than the exception in most music, popular, classical or traditional. Singers admonish us not to “break my heart,” or to have pity on an “achy, breaky heart.” Even Bob Dylan, who generally avoided the romantic traditionalism of music lyrics in his use of metaphor could tell us “I gave her my heart, but she wanted my soul.” (1967)

The Poetry of the Heart: Nor was Emily Dickenson concerned with anatomy when she wrote:

The heart asks pleasure first
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering.

Imagine if we substituted the word “brain” for the “heart” in Dickenson’s poem. How would we react to the poem if we change that one word?

Heart Literature: To the protagonist of Antoine de Saint Exupery’s classic, The Little Prince, the heart was a perceiving organ, not a biological pump:

"One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes."

How would we react if the quote was: “One sees clearly only with the brain. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.” This one change makes the quotation seem ridiculous. Clearly the metaphoric associations for the brain differ from those of the heart.

In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austin’s Elizabeth Bennet rejects a marriage proposal with a heartfelt reply:

"Do not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart."

Elizabeth also uses her heart as an input device:

"(she) found the interest of the subject increase, and listened with all her heart; but the delicacy of it prevented further inquiry."

References to the heart as a metaphor can be found almost everywhere you look in literature, regardless of the period, the language or the genre surveyed.

Heart Movies: A brief scene from the highly successful Lord of the Rings illuminates the portrayal of the metaphor of the heart in many films and on television:

Aragorn: No news of Frodo
Gandalf: No word. Nothing.
Aragorn: We have time. Every day Frodo moves closer to Mordor.
Gandalf: Do we know that?
Aragorn: What does your heart tell you?
Gandalf: (meaningful pause) That Frodo’s alive. Yes. Yes, he’s alive.
(The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 2004)

What if Aragorn had asked Gandalf: “What does your brain tell you?” It just doesn’t sound right.

In each of these examples, the metaphoric heart stands in for aspects of cognition that we resist assigning to the head. One would expect that in our computer saturated era, the heart would lose traction as a site of cognition.

For any non-metaphoric heart that is in AF for more than 48 hours, an electrical shock will often bring back a regular beat. If not, there are a variety of drugs (none of which worked for me). Another option is a cardiac ablation which involves snaking a thin wire from a vein in the groin up to the heart and applying a cauterizing jolt of electricity to the offending nerve.

With his history of heart ailments, it is not surprising that Cheney would develop atrial fibrillation. While not life-threatening itself, the irregular heartbeat can be unpleasant, and as the AP reports:

...if the irregular heartbeat continues, it eventually can cause a life-threatening complication -- the formation of blood clots that can shoot to the brain and cause a stroke.

What's unusual about Dick Cheney's AF is that I thought he was already on a defibrillator, which usually would control any AF symptoms. It will be interesting to see, as the story develops, if the White House doctors explain how Cheney's defibbed heart can go into afib.

UPDATE: It has also been noted that this irregular heartbeat is not the only type of a fib that Cheney has been involved in.

My Blogging Milesone (Part 4): The End of the American Republic

2007-11-14T14:47:00.000-05:00

The recent Pakistani constitutional crises provides me with an opportunity to reiterate some political observations concerning our own democracy.

Those of us who were required to take civics classes in high school learned that our constitution provides sufficient checks and balances to fend of the aspirations of a would-be king or a monolithic political party. The salient point of my June 14th article was this: the enduring legacy of this radical neocon Republican era may be the formulation and proof of the idea that our constitutional form of government can be overthrown from within.

Republicans in the Nixon and Reagan eras nipped away at Constitutional safeguards; the present Bush/Cheney administration neocons have swallowed them whole. While we may have weathered the current crisis, the anti-democratic institutions are still in place to try it again some time in the near future.

So here once again is my recipe for overthrowing the American Republic:

Subvert the news media: It is clear that the major media outlets, and their journalists and editors, have been compromised in various ways. Not only have they become self-editing, but also the administration is adept at playing the news cycles. News organizations focused on the bottom line have closed overseas bureaus, cut experienced staff, depleted research resources and pandered to the gossip mongers. Without a truly adversarial Fourth Estate, this administration has led us into war, politicized public agencies, committed any number of felonies and thumbed their noses at the other branches of government.

Stack the courts with anti-Constitutional judges: This is not an issue of left or right or conservative or progressive. This is an issue of upholding and defending the Constitution, as it was intended by the Founding Fathers. Republican appointees who put party above the Constitution allow the Republic to fail.

Distract the public: This may be contingent on #1. The main stream media fill their airwaves and pages with non-news trivia. These modern bread and circus pageants distract the population from understanding and pursuing the own best interests.

Cripple the military: The Iraq adventure has accomplished two key things. It has severely stretched our professional military and it has depleted our national guard resources, both in manpower and material. It has also allowed the creation of a large private army that is loyal to their corporations ahead of their country. The Romans had their Praetorian Guards. We have Blackwater.

Another unintended consequence of the occupation in Iraq is the filtering of any senior military opposition to the administration's agenda. Military yes-men have risen to the top, the naysayers have taken early retirement.

Weaken the middle class: With more of us scrambling to meet our financial obligations, fewer of us have sufficient time to devote to investigating political wrongdoing and participating in its correction.

Game the political process: Republicans have been adept at filling local election positions with those key players who can help stack the deck in their favor. Control of local election oversight positions has been used to influence election rules, purge voter lists and swing close contests to their party. Districts have been gerrymandered to ensure reelection of the incumbent.

The current takeover attempt has failed due to corruption and incompetence spread throughout all three branches of our government. It isn't too hard to imagine a future in which a more competent, less corrupt cabal of political radicals succeeds where their predecessors failed. The blueprint for a future successful takeover of the United States has already been created for them.

What would a Media Ecology patriot do?

Clearly the field of Media Ecology has a lot to offer in the analysis of what is happening in our society, if not a solution to the problem. Championed by Terry Moran as a part of the NYU program in Media Ecology, the impact of propaganda on our public discourse has always been a key aspect of Media Ecological analysis. Neil Postman's Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk and Amusing Ourselves to Death, provide us with cogent arguments concerning the degradation of public discourse brought on by the sloppy use of language and unthinking acceptance of broadcast media-based news programming.

Other key Media Ecological figures like Lance Strate and Paul Levinson have provided a solid foundation in the Media Ecology tradition concerning the various attacks on our Constitutional rights and the impact of media biases. A hint: Media Ecologists are pro civil rights and anti media biases.

So what should an ME patriot do? Clearly analysis must be balanced by action, and I'm happy to say that among the honors granted annually by the Media Ecology Association is an award for the best example of Media Ecology praxis. Following the lead of Strate and Levinson, Media Ecologists should make greater efforts to publish in the various popular print media and make their presence known in broadcast and new media. Now more than ever, Media Ecologists should participate in the election cycle, lending their expertise to any candidate who champions the Constitution over party politics. This would include fact checking, media production skills, technology assessments and yes, practical approaches to counteracting propaganda and political dirty tricks.

To repeat: Our contemporary neo-cons have succeeded in introducing the idea that the our Constitutional form of government can be subverted from within. The immediate threat may be abating, but the danger remains.

When future historians attempt to pinpoint exactly when the United States ceased being a constitutional democracy, they could do no better than to choose the years between 2000 and 2008, in other words, the second Bush administration. This may prove to be the era when the seeds were planted that led to the end of the American Republic and the beginning of the American empire.

My 1000th Visitor

2007-11-06T14:31:00.000-05:00

If you look to the left you'll notice that my sitemeter has just registered my 1000th visitor. Whoever you are, if you contact me offline, I will congratulate you personally.

And to mark my 1000th visitor, what could be more fitting than to continue my revue of my past posts to this blog. So, here is My Blogging Milesone (Part 3)

A recurring theme of this blog is the impact of media and technology in our everyday lives. While we are aware of new technologies like cell phones and iPods, we tend to take for granted established technologies like the phonetic alphabet, the printed word and much of broadcast media.

One thing I've always wondered about (and this builds on Paul Levinson's anthropotropic theory) is why editing in cinema works. Anyone who has recorded their child's birthday party and then tried to watch it from start to finish appreciates how film editing techniques compress time while delivering the essence of the experience.

I can see how the transition from silent films to sound, from black and white to color and possibly from two dimensions to three reflect the evolution of the film medium towards the normal human way of experiencing reality. How does the montage, the various types of edits, the use of close-ups, long shots, etc reflect our natural way of experiencing reality?

There is obviously an influence of literary narrative in film editing. We don't experience reality as it is portrayed in books either. However, except when we sleep, or are under the influence of any of a number of chemical stimulants or depressants, we mostly experience reality continuously. No cuts, no edits, no montages.

Maybe film editing represents not how we experience reality, but how we remember that experience. The technique of film editing is so much a part of our experience that we often are not aware of how conventional it is. But is it a language we've learned in the same way we learned our mother tongue, or a second language? Is "language" the proper metaphor for the experience? Do we say "the language of radio" or "the language of literature" in discussing the nature of these media? Obviously both have their particular ways of portraying reality, sometimes superceding reality and common sense, as Orson Well's "War of the Worlds" and almost any book by a neocon pundit demonstrate. But is describing film as a "language" a helpful or harmful metaphor?

Another recurring theme is the transition from a print culture to one of secondary orality. An interesting article in the Spring 2003 Hudson Review, "Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture" by Dana Gioia treats rap as the beginning of oral poetry of our culture:

"The most significant fact about the new popular poetry is that it is predominantly oral. The poet and audience usually communicate without the mediation of a text. Rap is performed aloud to an elaborate, sampled rhythm track. Cowboy poetry is traditionally recited from memory. Poetry slams consist of live performance—sometimes from a text, more often from memory. To literary people whose notion of poetry has been shaped by print culture, this oral mode of transmission probably seems both strikingly primitive and alarmingly contemporary. It hearkens back to poetry’s origins as an oral art form in preliterate cultures, and it suggests how television, telephones, recordings, and radio have brought most Americans—consciously or unconsciously—into a new form of oral culture."

and

"As readers turn into viewers and listeners, they naturally approach the new poetry in ways conditioned by television and radio. This epistemological change, to quote Neil Postman again, affects the “meaning, texture, and values” of literary discourse. Not least important, it transforms the identity of the author from writer to entertainer, from an invisible creator of typographic language to a physical presence performing aloud. Performance poetry and the poetry slam, for instance, owe at least as much to the tradition of stand-up comedy and improvisatory theater as they do to literary poetry. Roland Barthes, a creature of print culture, saw the world as a text and announced “the death of the author.” Anyone attentive to the new popular poetry sees the antithesis—the death of the text. American culture conditioned by electronic media and a celebrity culture based on personalities has given birth to a new kind of author, the amplified bard."

Our literate assumptions about what poetry is blinds us to the importance of rap and other oral forms as the new way to "make" poetry and the fact that these new forms have more in common with the original sources of poetry than with the traditional literary poetry. Imagine Homer rapping the Iliad or the Odyssey!

A third recurring theme is an explanation of the field of Media Ecology. Among some of the propositions I have considered in explaining my view of Media Ecology are the following:

Media Ecology is a meta discipline.
Media Ecology is itself a medium which contains all other disciplines as its content.
The purpose of Media Ecology is to make manifest the unconscious assumptions of a culture, assumptions which may have largely been determined by the tools the culture uses to express itself.
The goal of Media Ecology is to free humans from that unconscious bondage and allow them to make choices concerning their tools, to use their tools rather than letting their tools use them.
As such, Media Ecology would appear to contain a literate bias in that it seeks, through a logical analysis, to bring to the foreground what was hidden in the background.
Media Ecology seeks to replace ritual with logic and impulse with discernment.

Neil Postman would have freely admitted this, have promoted the practice of Media Ecology as a methodology, in our electronic age, to return to the literate values of the Enlightenment. However, as Marshall McLuhan demonstrated, the path to Media Ecological enlightenment can be pursued through the use of probes and aphorisms as readily as through logical discourse. In fact, McLuhan's methods may illustrate ways to find shortcuts to the true impact of technology on our culture.

The Bionic Woman Meets James Joyce

2007-10-26T21:33:00.000-05:00

I'm taking a brief respite (or am I giving my readers a brief respite?) from my reviews of past postings to ask an important mass cultural question. In considering this question, I don't mean to give the impression that I watch this particular television program, or any television other than public broadcasting for that matter.

On this week's Bionic Woman, Jaime Sommers attended "Stanwich College" in order to track down a dealer in "neuro control" chips. Jaime pretended to be a neuroscience major, because, after all, anyone can fake expertise in a complex field like neuroscience if they just read a book or two. But that’s not really what bothered me, after all, even Jaime pointed out the impossibility of this.

Jaime’s dorm roommate, a "science expert," is having a problem writing a paper about James Joyce's short story "The Dead." "Oh, that's easy," Jaime says. Then, explaining what's going on in the story, Jaime continues, "Joyce was saying that the dead are all around us and we can't escape them. Almost exactly the opposite of his book, Ulysses, which is all about life and sex and humor." Say what?

The girls agreed to swap homework assignments to play to their strengths. This is okay because Jaime works for a top secret government agency that has her do things a lot worse than cheat on college work. What I want to know though is if anyone besides me disturbed by the fact that the bionic woman wants to be a Joyce scholar? (Disclaimer: I majored in English Literature in college with a concentration in Herman Melville and a minor in Joyce. My senior paper, "Melville's Quarrel With God," still has them rolling in the aisles back at my alma mater.)

You don't have to channel surf very far to find dubious mass media takes on political science, physics, and biology on the one hand, and time travel, paranormal, and extraterrestrials on the other. It's not bad enough that television shows have co-opted all the real and imaginary sciences, now they have to assimilate English literature as well?

Let’s not have television characters portray scholarly aspirations unless they are hunting vampires, navigating through star gates, or enabling Lex Luther to kill Superboy. Let’s keep our clear demarcation between high and low cultures and between super heroics and scholars in residence.

By the way, Jaime Sommers got an "A" on her Joyce paper. James Joyce, who will always be with us, has decided to take a long sea voyage with Herman Melville.

My Bad: My Other Blogging Milestone (Part 2)

2007-10-16T22:18:00.000-05:00

(Updated below)

Well, according to my blog host's count, I haven't posted 68 entries to this blog, I've posted 89 (including the last post celebrating my 68th posting milestone.) This is an opportunity I've let slip by. Not having properly celebrated my 68th post, I am now at a loss about how best to celebrate this, my 90th entry.

I had some thoughts about the new Beatles homage movie "Across the Universe" and how the incorporation of song lyrics into our stories and our lives is symptomatic of a culture entering secondary orality, but that's a topic for another day.

I was going to comment on the how the recent excesses of the Republican noise machine regarding a 12-year-old beneficiary of SCHIP coverage illustrates McLuhan's tetrad. In other words, what has been a highly effective propaganda machine has been pushed past its limits until it has reversed into its opposite, that is, anti-propaganda. That also doesn't seem appropriate.

I know. I'll continue my rerun summary of previous posts!

Some of my posts have constituted blatant efforts to circulate new thought memes into the blogosphere in the hopes of coining the next cultural catch phrase and thereby achieve my 15 minutes of fame.

Thus, in my December 13, 2006 post I celebrated the inclusion of a comment I phoned into Air America Radio:

Announcer: The following is an actual call to Air America Radio.

I think we liberals tend to celebrate and then say "OK. We're done. Let's go back to our own private lives." I think we need to be wary of conservatives, or radical conservatives, or fascists. The structures are still there for them to come back. And next time they come back they'll be smarter and they'll have taken into account the mistakes they made this time.

I didn't receive any callbacks after those commercials ran their course, nor did I receive any residuals.

On January 4, 2007 I reissued my 25-year-old claim that the content of television broadcasts conform to a classic structural dichotomy of culture vs. nature (or social vs. anti-social), and having settled that, implied that we move beyond content analysis and criticism to examine the medium itself:

Within this schema, news broadcasts fall somewhere in between shows and ads in terms of entertainment value vs. propaganda, while shows and ads may have little or nothing to do with the objective world, dividing their productions in terms of their intention to entertain or propagandize. (This is not to say that no show ever has propagandistic intentions, or that no advertising executive ever wishes to entertain. But in general, each is more concerned with the demands of his own domain. Program producers must attract an audience, and advertisers must sell their products.)

It could be stated that if the hidden structure of advertising has to do with an opposition between culture and nature on a personal level, then within the other legs of the triad there are other hidden structures that determine how the particular material is developed and conveyed. I would tentatively suggest that television programming is concerned chiefly with "social versus antisocial behavior on an interpersonal level," while the news deals with this same general opposition at the "public" level. Within this perspective, the various legs of the triad always favor the status quo, since the definition of what constitutes antisocial behavior depends on who is defining social or acceptable behavior.

Part of the reason Fox News is so disturbing is that they continually violate the supposed boundaries between news, entertainment and advertising propaganda.This is why the current concentration of media ownership is so pernicious. As part of a major media conglomerate, Fox News can frame their news reports according to their own views of social vs. antisocial public behavior and so they slip down the television triangle both toward propaganda and toward entertainment. Just as foods which are fit for consumption even though "rotten" (alcoholic beverages for example) constitute a special exception to general culinary rules, news which has become propagandized, or created largely to entertain, constitutes a violation of the traditional definition of news and requires adjustments in how we consume reality.

Whoops. There's that Republican noise machine again. For the complete discussion of this, see my paper, "The Savage Mind on Madision Avenue," posted here.

Finally, at least for Part 2 of this series of reruns, there is my attempt to interpret blogging itself in terms of McLuhan's Laws of the Media:

Blogging enhances “many to many” communication. As a medium, blogging allows me to get my message out to many without the need of access to television, radio, print or film production facilities. Blogging also allows me to receive messages from many sources.

Blogging obsolesces one to one or many to one communications. Telephone chats and television binges are replaced by blogging connections.

Blogging retrieves the habits of 18th letter correspondents or diarists. Though this varies widely, at the minimum blogging requires that we capture and express our thoughts via the keyboard. Some bloggers go much further than that.

When pushed to an extreme, blogging reverses into total narcissism. I write only to myself, for myself. I put myself into the blogosphere, and seeing my own image, become entranced.

I think this blogging tetrad holds up pretty well, especially the part about total narcissism.

Well, on to Part 3!

UPDATE: My Bad Again!

One of these days I'll figure this blogging stuff out. It seems that I have only published 68 (now 69) blogs, with 22 other drafts in the works. Many of these drafts may never seen the light of day. So in the immortal words of Emily Latella, "Never Mind!"