I'm Binding My Time

'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?

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.

On Jay Rosen's "A Blog is a Little First Amendment Machine"

Main stream media journalists are about to be blogged to death.

I would like to call attention to a piece written by New York University professor Jay Rosen in today's Huffington Post, "A Blog is a Little First Amendment Machine," where he discusses the impact that journalistic blogging has had on the main stream media, and the potential it has to set a new agenda for newsgathering in the future. Rosen writes:

The most famous words ever written about freedom of the press are in the U.S. Constitution: "Congress shall make no law..." But the second most famous words come from the critic A.J. Liebling: "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one." Well, freedom of the press still belongs to those who own one, and blogging means practically anyone can own one. That is the Number One reason why blogs--and this discussion--matter.

With blogging, an awkward term, we designate a fairly beautiful thing: the extension to many more people of a free press franchise, the right to publish your thoughts to the world. Wherever blogging spreads the dramas of free expression follow. A blog, you see, is a little First Amendment machine.

Rosen notes that the blog "Firedoglake" showed up the MSM at the Scooter Libbey trial, and showed everyone else how real journalism is done:

Firedoglake got handed a golden opportunity by the reluctance of big news organizations to spend money on the information commons. At the Libby trial, there was no broadcast, no taping allowed. No posted transcript for anyone to consult. Thus the most basic kind of news there is--what was said in court today--was missing.

Converging on Washington, the team from Firedoglake felt they represented people back home who wanted to know everything. And so they decided to live blog the trial. Typing at fast as they could, they produced the only blow-by-blow account of the trial available to the public. They also provided expert interpretation because they knew more about the case than most of those being paid to cover it. In fact journalists covering the trial began to rely on Firedoglake's accounts because it had the most complete coverage.

Although I have used the blog format to publish rich media-based papers (See "The Savage Mind on Madison Avenue" and "The Heart of the Matter" through the links above), blogging, so far, is largely an analog for text-based print media. Many bloggists, like Joshua Micah Marshall over at Talking Points Memo, have experimented with reporting via video inserts in their blogs. While interesting in its attempt to incorporate rich media, the blog remains largely print-oriented. I can imagine a new type of blog coming along at some point in the near future that combines the best parts of traditional blogging with YouTube and Facebook.

A number of years ago Apple Computer produced a think piece about what the computing experience of the future might be like. A man enters an office that contains a leather-bound book on a desk. There are no wires, no keyboard or monitor. The man opens the book to reveal a fully interactive touch screen. A small "personal assistant" (I think he was called an “avatar”) appears on the screen to inform him that he has messages and to assist with whatever tasks he needs to perform. Though obviously animated, the avatar represents a realistic CGI depiction of a small human being. All interaction initially is through speech, although the man is able to call up a chart and change its contents, both by spoken words and by touching the screen. The personal assistant could also call any real person the man wanted to talk to, and he or she would appear, in video, on his book-screen. I don't know if this short film has found its way to YouTube. If anyone has seen it, please let me know.

I think the future of blogging lies along a similar path. Most blogs are conveyed by writing now, but blogging will be delivered by speech and pictures in the future. The cost barriers to producing video continue to fall, and the capability to produce professional quality work is being honed on YouTube as we speak.

If my vision of the blogging future is correct, it suggests certain dangers. As Neil Postman noted, it is the nature of television (that is, image and sound communication as opposed to print communication) to degrade news reporting and political discourse to the point that we are "amusing ourselves to death." For example, it is the height of irony that critics of Al Gore’s Assault on Reason still focus on his manner and appearance rather than his argument. If increased bandwidth and transmission speeds allow bloggists to emulate the output of the broadcast media, what will prevent them from following the same path?

Rosen notes that in blogging there is strength in numbers:

On March 20th of this year, the Justice Department released 3,000 pages of documents to the House Judiciary Committee, which was investigating why a group of seven federal prosecutors were fired last year, a scandal that continues to make headlines today. Over at TPM Muckraker.com, a investigative site started by the political blogger Josh Marshall, the guys who work for Marshall were wondering how they were going to sort through those 3,000 pages to see if any clues turned up. And then they realized: "We don't have to. Our readers can help."

The Judiciary Committee had put the document dump online in the form of PDF files. And so Marshall's guys asked readers to pick a PDF and read through the documents. "If you find something interesting (or damning), then tell us about it in the comment thread below," they wrote. Readers finished in a day or two and made some intriguing finds. The significance is obvious: potentially hundreds or thousands of hands available to work on a single story.

This is the “open source” approach to journalism research. Blogging reverses the media flow from "one to many" into "many to one." Blogging in the future may also incorporate aspects of video conferencing, with real time content delivery and response. This ability will allow the blogging information commons to emulate the give-and-take environment that Postman lauds in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Conversations won’t be limited to 30 or 60 minute timeslots, and all participants will have the ability to post questions and get responses. Instant recall of any video or audio piece from the internet "memory well" will hold speakers accountable for what they say and do and what they have said and have done.

As a bloggist myself, I heartily agree with Rosen's assessment. The main stream media doesn't know what's hitting them and when their reading and viewing public disappears almost entirely, they will still be scratching their heads in consternation and wonder.