Will Revolutionary Geeks and User Generated Content Topple the Ayatollah?

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.

Things Come in Fours

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.

Random Thoughts

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?

On Paul Levinson and the FCC

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

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 1000th Visitor

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.

My Bad: My Other Blogging Milestone (Part 2)

(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!"

Humpty-Dumpty at the New York Times

As the New York Times attempts to navigate the unfamiliar waters of the internet, they risk "swimming with the fishes."

Today the New York Times abandoned its efforts to create a two-tier access system for its website. The article announcing this capitulation can be found here.

Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com, noted that they didn't anticipate the amount of traffic to their site that would be generated by Google, Yahoo and the like. Many would-be subscribers were getting around the firewall by using these search engines. Projections for revenue growth favored advertising over pay-per-view.

Had the New York Times consulted any Media Ecologist at the start, they would have been told that attempting to control access to some of their content by charging a monthly fee ignores the nature of the internet as a communication environment. In reality, the Times is not competing for subscriber dollars, they are competing for subscriber eyeballs. With many other free information sources, it didn't make sense to pay a fee to the New York Times. In addition, the Internet environment has changed the relationship of publishers and readers. As Marshall McLuhan noted, in the age of print newspapers people didn't read their newspaper, they submerged themselves in it as in a warm bath. The difference with the internet is that the reader wants to respond, to publish, to interact and to critique the press. Rather than entering a warm bath, the internet reader dives headfirst into the news pool and swims with the correspondents school.

In discussing the nature of an existing media environment when threatened by a new configuration, McLuhan wrote:

“The structural features of environment and anti-environment appear in the age-old clash between professionalism and amateurism, whether in sports or in studies. Professional sport is environmental and amateur sport is anti-environmental. Professional sports foster the merging of the individual in the mass and in the patterns of the total environment. Amateur sport seeks rather the development of critical awareness of the individual and most of all, critical awareness of the ground rules of the society as such. The same contrast exists for studies. The professional tends to specialize and to merge his being uncritically in the mass. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is uncritical and unaware.”[1]

Substitute “journalism" for “sports” or “studies” and we can begin to understand the new information environment fostered by the internet. It is interesting that most major media outlets are dismissive of web-based journalists as biased and amateurish at the same time that they have abandoned many of the most fundamental journalistic practices. Mainstream media journalists are not generally self-critical, nor do they adequately fulfill their responsibility as a fourth estate, holding politicians accountable. As agenda-setters, news and broadcast editors substitute sensationalism for substance. When bloggers and other “amateurs” rightly question the professionalism of the mainstream media, they are subject to ad hominem ridicule rather than confronted on the merits of their criticisms.

The mainstream media are broken. The New York Times, trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again, has tried to recreate the old media environment, but has only succeeded in making it the content of the new. Citing Humpty-Dumpty, McLuhan noted:

“The impact that resulted in his fall brought into play a massive response from the social bureaucracy. But all the King’s horses and all the King’s men could not put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. They could not recreate the old environment, they could only create a new one. Our typical response to a disrupting new technology is to recreate the old environment instead of heeding the new opportunities of the new environment. [2]

For example, I worked as a financial analyst at CBS News in the early 1980’s when it was a cost center, but still the jewel in the corporation’s crown. I participated in cost-cutting moves intended to make CBS News generate a profit, just like other CBS divisions. Prior to this, CBS News was based on a print model where certain standards of journalism were acknowledged, if not always adhered to. 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 that have little to do with real journalism.

Established blogs such as Daily Kos, Eschaton, and yes, the Drudge Report have demonstrated how hanging onto a story neglected by the mainstream media can bring it to the foreground. Glenn Greenwald has shown how a little fact and precedence checking using Lexi-Nexus can go a long way. The live bloggers at Firedoglake.com set new standards for real time reporting.

As the New York Times attempts to navigate the unfamiliar waters of the internet, they risk ending up "swimming with the fishes." They would profit by embracing the critiques of the digital natives already working there, rather than rejecting them.

________________________
[1] McLuhan, M. “The relation of environment to anti-environment” in Marshall McLuhan – Unbound (04), W. Terrance Gordon, ed. (Corte Madera, CA: Ginko Press, 2005), p. 8-9

[2] Ibid, p. 9-10

Where Have I Been?

I'd like to be able to say that I gave up my super powers and have been off at my Fortress of Solitude these last few weeks with Lois Lane as a way of explaining the absence of posting on this site.

Or, I could say that I have been hard at work on my long awaited, much anticipated paper on Marshall McLuhan and Claude Levi-Strauss, otherwise known as Claude Levi-Strauss's contribution to Media Ecology.

Or perhaps I am demonstrating pure McLuhanism by eliminating any content so you can appreciate the medium of blogging itself.

The truth is that family and work-related matters have completely occupied my time and I just haven't been able to keep this blog going. I'm off to a conference next week, and then a business trip the week after, so I doubt that my contribution rate will increase in any meaningful way until mid August.

Of course, the muse may speak to me at any moment and something will show up. So, for those of you faithful readers who check this blog regularly, (hi Mom!), hang in there. I'll be back.

Spiritual Laryngitis

I have not posted since the tragic events that occurred last Monday in Virginia for a number of reasons. Since frequent posting seems to be the life’s blood of blogging, I think it is appropriate and necessary to explore why I haven’t posted.

The first reason might be called spiritual laryngitis. Like Melville’s Billy Budd, my first reaction to any severe emotional shock is loss of voice. I mean this quite literally. It is not only that I am not sure what to say, but also that I am quite unable to say anything at all. I sweat and strain, but my larynx remains frozen. As the parent of college-age children, my identification with those left to mourn is strong. I truly identify with them and the senseless loss they are experiencing. So the primary cause of my inability to speak is grief.

Second is the foreboding sense that this has happened before, and, quite likely, it will happen again. Our country has neither the political will to control gun availability, nor the compassion towards the mentally ill to fully support appropriate treatment. My paralyzed reaction to this disaster, my shock in the face of the incomprehensible, is also due to latent, inexpressible anger.

In terms of typing a post to this blog, this paralysis extends to that part of my brain that allows me to compose my thoughts for writing and enter them into my computer. What is the appropriate thing to say in the face of disaster? How do you express sorrow in a mass medium?

The bios I have read and seen of the killer describe him as a silent, withdrawn individual, one who appeared have something in common with another Melville character, Bartleby the Scrivener. Bartleby brooded in silence and chose, in his despair, to end his own life. The Virginia Tech killer’s self-immolation required, for reasons we may never fathom, the inclusion of 32 innocent lives and the wounding of any equal number of others.

One way you don’t express your sorrow was illustrated by NBC this past week. NBC’s decision to air the VT killer’s video was not due to a lack of other ways to deliver the newsworthy content of the recordings. There has been quite a bit of controversy over the appropriateness and/or newsworthiness of airing the killer’s self-aggrandizing video. It was not speechlessness that required the airing of the tape. It was competitive, commercial considerations which trumped a sense of decency, an acknowledgement of the damage such a viewing might cause, both to the families of the victims, and to the country at large.

In reacting to this tragedy we tap more deeply the sense of astonishment and outrage we experienced during the Don Imus imbroglio. Imus, who certainly has not ever experienced speechlessness, turned his mock but racist ire toward non-public, innocent Rutgers students. Accomplished young women all, they didn’t deserve such treatment for the sake of Imus’s ego or his radio ratings.

Here, I think, lies the key to the impact this event has had on many of us who have no direct connection with the Virginia Tech population. They were innocent. They were not the cause of the killer’s grievance and should not have been part of his ghastly personal catharsis. That we could react as a nation in horror of these events shows that we can still distinguish between fiction and reality, even if both are delivered to us in a mediated form.

It was also an instance of one of the major gatekeepers of television succumbing to the biases of the medium itself. Neil Postman noted that:

“What is not televisable doesn't exist on TV... What gets on the news are those things for which you have film footage.”(1)

While the medium of television may have a bias toward the visual, the human gatekeepers of the medium could choose not to succumb to it. One of Postman’s gift to his students of Media Ecology is the mandate that we must adopt a moral stance to the impact of media and technology on our society and we must speak out.

Thus in the space of one week I experienced outrage to the killings at Virginia Tech, which left me speechless, and outrage to NBC’s decision to engage in exploitation journalism, which gave me back my voice.

(1) Postman, N. "TV Has Culture by the Throat: A Conversation With Neil Postman." U.S. News and World Report, December 23, 1985. p. 58.

The 'Savage Mind' on Madison Avenue

My 1980 article, The 'Savage Mind' on Madison Avenue: A Structural Study of Television Advertising, is based on a series of live presentations I gave in the 1970's where visual aids were essential. It first appeared in print in the Spring, 1980 issue of ETC: A Review of General Semantics. I've created a separate blog for this article to which I added recordings of the original television commercials and a few extra graphics.

One of the problems faced by anyone working within a rich media environment is that many traditional academic outlets are still largely print oriented. Anyone who has had to convert audiovisual material to print will attest to the fact that something gets lost in the translation. As we move deeper into Walter J. Ong's era of secondary orality, this problem will only get worse.

I always felt the textual descriptions I created of the television ads I used in my study didn't do justice to the originals. In order to better capture my original intention I needed a venue where I could accompany my discussion with the actual recorded examples. After a thirty year delay, the rich media environment of the blogosphere (with some assistance from YouTube) has made this a reality.

The Blogging Double Bind

(Updated Below -- Updated Again)

You may have noticed that I've added advertising to this blog. I have applied to become an Amazon Associate. Assuming I am approved, I will receive a small percentage for all sales that click through the ads posted on the left. Reading through the Amazon rules and regulations it appears that I can't game the system by clicking through for my own purchases. I must rely on you, my loyal readers, to click on the boxes to the left and purchase thousand or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise from Amazon.

My purpose is to earn enough revenue to retire and begin living the style of life to which I'd like to become accustomed. Unfortunately, I am caught in the blogging double bind. In order to generate traffic, I need to post new material on a frequent basis. If I retire, I can assume that traffic on this blog will decline and therefore ad revenue will fall off.

As a student of the effect of advertising on our culture, I should point out that by making a purchase through Amazon you are not just purchasing a book or DVD. You are purchasing a place for yourself as part of that corporate entity called "Amazon." Putting on the Amazon corporate mask connects you with the power and identity of something much larger than yourself, just like wearing the Nike "swoosh" or the Coca Cola "Coca Cola." When you show off your copy of Lance Strate's recent book, Echoes And Reflections: On Media Ecology As a Field of Study, you can say that it's not just any copy of the book. It is a copy you purchased on Amazon.

I can prominently feature any authors, books or DVDs I discuss in my postings and generate some sales. Let's see. For a $25 book I will earn about $1. So if 1000 readers click through and buy Paul Levinson's latest book, The Plot to Save Socrates (in hard cover of course), I will earn at least $758 (the percentage I earn rises with volume of sales in ways I don't quite understand).

UPDATE: I have been told that I shouldn't get my hopes up for generating substantial revenue, that the title of this post should really be "Sense and Non-Cents."

This is a shame. I was hoping to become one of those people who earn substantial income while working at home in my pajamas.

In light of this, I think that it make sense to mention in this blog only books that retail for $100 and above. That limits me pretty much to coffee table books and some textbooks, mainly medical.

UPDATE II: I'm in! I'm officially an Amazon Associate! You can start clicking away while you finish reading this update. I'll wait.

A Tetrad on Blogging

Here is one take on a blogging tetrad:

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’m sure there are many other ways McLuhan would have analyzed blogging using his tetrad tool.

Welcome Media Ecology Bloggers!

(Updated below)

I've added two prominent Media Ecologists to my list of "other blog sites." Both Paul Levinson and Lance Strate are among the original founders of the Media Ecology Association and many-times published authors. Both are public intellectuals who champion the Media Ecological approach to media analysis and social commentary.

Paul's site, simply called "Paul Levinson the blog", is actually more of a portal, leading to other Paul Levinson blog sites, to descriptions of his Media Ecology and science fiction works and a comprehensive history of his career and multiple media-based productivity. Scholarly articles, books, podcasts, YouTube links of his television appearances and much more all are here. Of particular note, Paul is releasing his science fiction novel, The Silk Code in the form of podcasts, performed by Shaun Farrell. Also available is the first chapter of his latest novel The Plot to Save Socrates, performed by the author himself.

Lance Strate is new to blogging, and states in Lance Strate's Blog Time Passing that "The Unexamined Blog is Not Worth Blogging." Well, maybe. Lance comments that blogging may be the highest form of narcissism, and while I tend to agree, I wish I had said it first on my blog. Anyone who has read my blog regularly (Hi Mom!), knows already that I take my narcissism very seriously.

Lance's most recent writing (outside of blogging) is Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology As a Field of Inquiry. Using the echo as a metaphor for all media, but also as a window into the thought processes involved in autism, Lance lays deep foundations for the study of Media Ecology, and any regular readers of this site (Hi Mom!) would profit by a reading. If you don't have the time to read it at the moment, I recommend buying it anyway.

Update: By posting these comments I in no way oblige Paul or Lance to cross-link to this blog. No, not at all. Really.