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.
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.
“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).
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’.
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"!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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!
