Your Gut Feeling

The ancient notion of internal organs as cognitive resources has resurfaced in Claudia Dreyfus’s New York Times article, “Through Analysis, Gut Reaction Gains Credibility” (New York Times, August 28, 2007). Dreyfus interviews social psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, an expert on intuitive thinking, who claims that

"My research indicates that gut feelings are based on simple rules of thumb, what we psychologists term “heuristics.” These take advantage of certain capacities of the brain that have come down to us through time, experience and evolution. Gut instincts often rely on simple cues in the environment. In most situations, when people use their instincts, they are heeding these cues and ignoring other unnecessary information."

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

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

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

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

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

By providing intellectual credibility (from the head or the gut?) to this reification of archaic beliefs, Dr. Gigerenzer does a disservice to himself and to subject matter experts in general.

iPhone Unbound!

Recent iPhone/AT&T news suggests additional ways to liberate old technology.

In his New York Times article published this week, Brad Stone describes how a clever 17-year-old with a soldering iron, a few software tools and entirely too much free time has found a way to release the iPhone from the AT&T lock, opening it up to connection to T-Mobile. (“With Software and Soldering, a Non-AT&T iPhone.” New York Times. August 25, 2007.)

This instance of technological liberation is a good introduction to a new service I am offering. Just as clever technologists are finding ways around iPhone/AT&T bondage, I have found ways to liberate other technology for the benefit of all:

• With a simple device, whose details I will post on the internet later today, you can convert any appliance from AC to DC, thereby releasing your household from Con Edison dependency. I think it was Abbey Hoffman who said "Appliances want to be free!" Or maybe he said "Steal this toaster!" I forget.
  
• An amazingly simple set of instructions will allow even a child to change from one channel on any TV set to another. This opens the device up to literally dozens of channels you may not have been aware of. Similarly, those of you who still listen to the radio may be amazed to discover that there are ways to change reception to differing types of music and even talk.
  
• A cheap, easy to apply software patch will allow your computer printer to print in almost any conceivable language. Simple plastic appliqués convert your current keyboard to the alphabet of your choice.
  
• Those of you who use your microwave only to boil water may be amazed to learn that the device can be modified to heat or cook many different types of food. As a first lesson, I will supply a package of specially developed popping corn with a simple set of instructions on how to pop in a microwave. In some cases, this may be as simple as pushing a button.

Future technology enhancement services:

1. Discover additional capabilities of your ten-speed bicycle
2. Scissors, left or right-handed?
3. Your stove can bake and broil too.
4. Shifting car gears.
5. Handy refills let you re-use that old stapler.
6. New bulbs for old: light up your life!
7. Left and right eyes provide binocular vision.
8. Tips for re-oxygenating your own blood without technology. Breathe in, breathe out!
   

Anyone wishing to contract for these or other valuable technology enhancement services, please send me a note via the US postal service. My iPhone is not currently working.

The Synagogue as a Multi-Media Environment

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Father/Son IM on Healthcare

Instant messages are too new to be considered an art form, but the time is near when we should begin to see additions to our culture using IMs as a model. In the interest of being first to contribute to this new art form, I present the following:

Father [1:48 P.M.]: Hi
Son [1:48 P.M.]: Hello
Son [1:55 P.M.]: Oh, the hospital sent another paper. Apparently they didn't get my last one and are threatening to send collection agencies and such.
Father [1:56 P.M.]: ??
Son [1:57 P.M.]: Remember the hospital I went to sent a bill for the ambulance?
Son [1:57 P.M.]: And I sent back the insurance info?
Son [1:57 P.M.]: I doesn't seem as if they got it.
Son [1:57 P.M.]: Or if they did that they registered it.
Father [1:57 P.M.]: The insurance info is your Insurance ID number?
Son [1:57 P.M.]: Yeah
Father [1:58 P.M.]: You should call them up about it and get them to straighten it out before the collection agency sends someone over to break both your thumbs.
Son [2:04 P.M.]: I can't really call them up. I tried earlier and get an automated message system with no way of reaching a human.
Son [2:05 P.M.]: I'm thinking maybe I could change my name, and then they'd never find me.
Son [2:05 P.M.]: It seems easier than dealing with the bureaucracy.
Son [2:05 P.M.]: How about this "Johannasburg Smith"
Father [2:06 P.M.]: How about Jimmy Hoffa?
Son [2:06 P.M.]: They're actually still using my college address from last year.
Father [2:06 P.M.]: The bill is from the hospital?
Son [2:06 P.M.]: Yep.
Son [2:06 P.M.]: $623 just for the ambulance ride.
Son [2:07 P.M.]: The ride was actually less than a mile.
Son [2:07 P.M.]: Which they charged $16 for.
Son [2:07 P.M.]: Just the mileage was $16.
Son [2:07 P.M.]: Then the rest was $623
Father [2:08 P.M.]: I would suggest not using them the next time.
Son [2:09 P.M.]: Is that what hospitals normally charge?
Father [2:09 P.M.]: Hospitals are very expensive places to go
Son [2:09 P.M.]: I suggest not giving our home address or number
Son [2:09 P.M.]: Or they might send collection agencies there.
Father [2:10 P.M.]: No. I'll give your address and phone number.
Son [2:10 P.M.]: Um, please don't give my cell number.
Son [2:10 P.M.]: And quite honestly I don't mind them having my address from last year.
Father [2:10 P.M.]: If you get sick again do you know how to contact the University Health Center?
Son [2:10 P.M.]: Yes.
Son [2:10 P.M.]: I think I'd rather perform surgery on myself than go back to that hospital.
Father [2:10 P.M.]: That's free for you.
Father [2:11 P.M.]: The Health Center I mean.
Son [2:11 P.M.]: But really, $600+ dollars for a ride that's about 8 blocks?
Father [2:11 P.M.]: I'll give them a call and see what I can come up with.
Son [2:11 P.M.]: Do you think there's a case with the Better Business Bureau on this one?
Son [2:11 P.M.]: Because $600 seems more than excessive.
Father [2:11 P.M.]: Did they have the sirens going?
Son [2:11 P.M.]: No.
Father [2:12 P.M.]: Then I agree with you. If they had the sirens, well then...
Son [2:12 P.M.]: Well, then it would have been an ambulance. Without sirens its just an SUV.
Father [2:12 P.M.]: Yeah, but with bright flashy lights on the top.
Son [2:13 P.M.]: Which weren't going on.
Father [2:13 P.M.]: Did they hook you up to an IV in the ambulance?
Son [2:13 P.M.]: No.
Father [2:13 P.M.]: Did they do anything at all?
Son [2:14 P.M.]: No.
Son [2:14 P.M.]: I didn't even lie down.
Son [2:14 P.M.]: I just sat in the ambulance.
Son [2:14 P.M.]: And it drove for 2 minutes.
Son [2:14 P.M.]: It took me about 8 minutes to walk back to the dorm from the hospital when they were done.
Father [2:14 P.M.]: Next time you do that insist on the IV, the flashy lights and the siren. And tell them to take the route via the GW Bridge. At least then you'll get something for your money.
Son [2:15 P.M.]: Yeah. I wouldn't have taken it either except the paramedics wouldn't tell me I didn't need an ambulance.
Son [2:15 P.M.]: I said to them "I still don't feel very well. Do you think I should go?"
Son [2:15 P.M.]: "I can't tell you"
Father [2:15 P.M.]: Have you gotten the bill yet from the paramedics?
Son [2:15 P.M.]: I assume this is it.
Son [2:15 P.M.]: This is separate from the hospital bill itself, which was already paid.
Son [2:16 P.M.]: And I think was cheaper.
Father [2:16 P.M.]: Was it a hospital's ambulance or private?
Son [2:17 P.M.]: The bill says Hosp EMS
Son [2:18 P.M.]: So it must be theirs.
Father [2:18 P.M.]: OK. I'll give them a call and get tough. Believe me, it won't be pretty.
Son [2:18 P.M.]: Which means between a $600 ambulance ride and a $400 medical checkup they're charging $1000 for stopping in a hospital.
Son [2:18 P.M.]: I can tell you what they did in the hospital too.
Son [2:19 P.M.]: I got an EKG, which had the little sticky thingies. That I could understand being a few good hundred considering there were little sticky pads and they connected wires to them.
Son [2:19 P.M.]: Heck, they didn't even take off the sticky pads. I got to keep them, and I'm sure each little piece of glue with a bit of metal in it was worth around fifty bucks.
Father [2:20 P.M.]: That's only in ambulance money.
Son [2:20 P.M.]: So I'm not complaining about that.
Son [2:20 P.M.]: And then I got a throat culture.
Son [2:20 P.M.]: So that's $400 bucks there.
Father [2:21 P.M.]: Sounds good. Did you stay overnight?
Son [2:21 P.M.]: No.
Son [2:21 P.M.]: I got a brief check-up and EKG which took about ten minutes, then I sat in a chair in the hallway next to a sick ten-year old for about 4 hours.
Son [2:22 P.M.]: Then they told me I could go.
Father [2:22 P.M.]: Did you eat anything?
Son [2:22 P.M.]: No.
Father [2:22 P.M.]: Did they give you any medication?
Son [2:22 P.M.]: No, but the doctor told me I had strep throat and gave me a prescription.
Father [2:27 P.M.]: I got a much better deal when I had my procedure for my atrial fibrillation. During the course of an overnight stay which began with an 8AM check-in I received a catheter, an 8 hour "non-invasive" surgical procedure which included full anesthesia, a bed in intensive care and three full meals. When I experienced post-surgical discomfort they provided me with Percoset. I had a wireless heart monitor and an IV drip. The total amount not covered by insurance came to $50. Of course, I didn't have an ambulance ride.
Son [2:27 P.M.]: I'm sure an ambulance ride that actually goes from one borough to the next would be exponentially expensive.
Son [2:27 P.M.]: You'd have to put the bill before Congress and they'd divert money from NASA.
Father [2:28 P.M.]: OK. Let me go. I'll give them a call.
Son [2:31 P.M.]: ok, talk to you later
Son is away at 2:31 P.M.

When News Becomes Infotainment

I have my own spin on the transition of the television news from "hard news" to "infotainment." What we call “news,” which originated in the print era, is converted to something different by the electronic media. As I noted in my paper, "The Savage Mind on Madison Avenue", it is necessary to consider the structure of all television content in order to understand what print news becomes on TV.

Using Claude Levi-Strauss's structural anthropology triad as a framework for understanding the structure of all television content, I wrote:

"...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, then within the other legs of the triad there are other hidden structures that determine how the particular material is developed and conveyed. If it could be stated that advertisements, by opposing culture against nature, deal with social versus antisocial behavior on a personal level, then I would tentatively suggest that the shows on television are chiefly concerned with social versus antisocial behavior on an interpersonal level, while the news deals with this same general opposition at the public level. Further research is necessary in order to determine the exact parameters of these oppositions."

When I wrote this paper in 1980 it was clear that there was an accepted distinction between the appropriate "realms" of television: fiction, news and advertising. What we have witnessed over the last 25 years is a blurring of boundaries. Fictional programming is now "based on true events"; news content is now presented using the tools and conceits of storytelling; and advertising has now morphed into product placement within a television entertainment show. Regarding product placement, products currently are placed only in fictional settings. How long before advertisers realize that placement in entertainment programming may not have the immediacy of placement within a news broadcast?

Neil Postman might have suggested that this blurring of boundaries, which was appropriated from the print media, was inevitable given the non-discursive biases of electronic media. The boundaries between shows, ads and news, which we are accustomed to take for granted, are shown to be arbitrary and merely differing iterations of the overall structural themes.

The Underlying Assumptions of Educational Technology Implementation

Educators rush to adopt new technologies into their curricula. Shouldn't we ask what unintended consequences accompany new ways of communicating?

I am currently attending the 2007 Campus Technology Conference in Washington, DC. Discussions of the use of educational technology have circled around faculty resistence to change, objectives in employing technology in the classroom, and effective deployment of new technologies within classical teaching environments. The emphasis of the conference is on understanding the goals of using of technology in education, the metrics that can be used to assess those goals, and the methodology for achieving those goals. The repeated theme is "It's the pedagogy, stupid!"

There are multiple sessions exploring the latest technologies and their potential use in the classroom setting. Key areas of concern include managing change, developing an achievable technology vision and ensuring reliability of the technology infrastructure. An underlying narrative of so-called "digital literacy" runs throughout all conference presentations.

As I sit and listen to various panels concerning the adoption and impact of technology in an academic setting, it occurs to me how much this conference could benefit from a Media Ecology perspective. So far, there has been no discussion of how the introduction of any significant technology may create a paradigmatic shift that may ultimately affect the very definition of what teaching (and learning) is. We would benefit from a discussion of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. How to deal with the winners and losers of the new technology environment has not been addressed. Several of Neil Postman's works, like Technopoly and Teaching As A Conserving Activity would be of use. The relative biases of the new technologies have not been examined. A session on Harold Innis's The Bias of Communication and Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage might shed some light. There are a number of narratives being promulgated that attempt to define the course of technological innovation in an educational setting. So I would also add an exploration of Claude Levi-Strauss's notion that the structure of the stories we tell each other is of greater importance than the actual content. Add a copy of The Savage Mind to the list.

What I am suggesting is that a technology conference that isn't grounded in the fundamentals of Media Ecology is not dealing with root cause issues of technology change, but only the symptoms. In other words, as campus technology professionals and educators rush into the adoption of such things as Blogs, Wikis, IM, e-mail, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook as part of their curriculum, shouldn't we first ask the question of what unintended consequences might accompany each of these new ways of communicating?

Comments Re: The Problem of Myths

Some reactions to my recent post concerning the similarities between myth and advertising, with my response below:

Duane writes:

I was with you until you got to the part about advertising. I wouldn't necessarily disagree with the basic facts you present, just the sweeping conclusions. You seem to be elevating modern advertising to a level rivaling the oral storytelling culture of the past. I am much too cynical to buy that.

Advertisers are tasked with tapping the human subconscious at the lowest level. They do not provide us with heroic icons or examples of what is truly "good." They often attempt to exploit various emotional insecurities to make a buck. It is a deliberate attempt on their part to create a sense that we are, in one way or another, deficient, and that by shelling out our pay, our perceived deficiencies can be eliminated, or at least covered over.

Successful advertising appeals either to our vanity or to our proclivity for materialism. Images of happy, successful people are presented, which do indeed constitue a trivial form of mythology -- slim waistlines, wrinkle-free foreheads, sleek autos, perfectly functioning nuclear families, full heads of hair, six-pack abs, and so on. These ads speak to us at the most superficial level. By creating a myth of what is "good," we are left feeling inadequate, and break out the checkbook as a means to procure a fix to our insufficent lives. Cynical? Sure. So, while I might accept your central premise that modern advertising creates and conveys modern myths, it tends to direct itself primarily to the weaker aspects of human nature, unlike the ancient myths, which attempted to cover the entire spectrum of human psychology and behavior.

and Ashtoreth writes:

This was an interesting article - and an interesting comment following. I do not agree either that modern advertising constitutes myth, nor that the ancients were simple, nor that structure is more important than content.

Your assertion that advertising, this pseudo myth you name with no sustenance, enables us to live in 'culture not nature' makes me think of the folly of Aristotle and other philosophers who strove to separate man from nature and thus further from the philosophies that grounded truth in nature arguing that we are an intrinsic part and its cycles and mysteries.

Culture is relative and transparent. It can and is transformed, absorbed and washed away. Archetype is not. Myth helps us to deal with the chthonic, when we are dragged into the underworld. An awareness of myth gives us a guideline through the darkness, to embrace it and honor it as a rite of transformation.

It rather sickens me that you could imagine let alone postulate that advertising even touches that. When I faced brain surgery several years ago, I steadied and prepared myself by meditating on the myth of the Babylonian goddess Inanna descending into the underworld to gain the knowledge of life and death; her descent and her return. Do you think advertising had any part in this?

To even suggest this is to trivialize life and human existence. It is to suggest a wasteland, an existential nightmare which would be truly meaningless if it were true, but it is not.

Since the dawn of commerce, people have hawked their wares. That does not make it myth.

Advertising has more in common with brain washing than myth. And with the advent of viral marketing and fake advertising, it becomes even more insideous, deceitful and corrupt in its attempts to override our minds and control our impulses in the direction they want. That is like comparing poison with milk.

When I saw the picture of the first person to purchase an I-phone on the Internet, I knew it was a creation for viral transmission and reaction. The image played on the heroic, but was devoid of it. It hinted at achievement, but had nothing to do with it. It suggested reaching for the extraordinary and for a moment possessing it, but instead described the utmost banality.

The lad was set up to look like he was an Olympic runner clearing the finish line at a race, or perhaps the one carrying the torch representing a sacred flame. If it were not so perverse, it would have been funny. Instead, it represented a fellow making a mockery of all this to purchase an over-priced piece of consumer electronics he did not need that is already yesterday's news.

Perhaps people like yourself would seek to use the elements of myth and archetype to trigger reactions in people to make them hunger to spend money they do not have, digging themselves into servitude to billion dollar corporations who then turn around and tell them to dream smaller, want less, and go carbon-free while they fill up their private jets.

Myth opens the door to connection to that which makes us whole, to what is true and sacred, and which allows us to experience the mysteries of life, death and renewal with dignity and inner power.

Advertising does not do this. Advertising is not myth.

Thank you Duana and Ashtoreth for your comments. You both raise valid objections to my assertions and you point out a key problem with the type of analysis I am attempting.

I must admit that I am torn regarding the place of advertising in our culture. On one hand, I do believe that, with all the focus groups, psychological analyses and cultural “thefts” advertisers coopt to use as regular tools of their craft, they are armed with unique tools to penetrate human consciousness and to master the psychic processes that classical mythology has represented.

On the other hand, my personal reaction mirrors yours, Ashtoreth, in abhorrence of the apparent ends of advertising: to make us more pliant; to make us more materialistic; to render us more self-conscious, not about our moral strengths or shortcomings, but about body odor, physical conformity and social acceptance. This is one reason why, when I earned by MBA I chose not to use it to go into advertising.

However, I think you both may be missing a key point that I’m trying to make. Advertising as technique is separate from advertising as content. Classical myths don’t always teach us how to strive for our higher selves. One could imagine a militaristic, totalitarian society where the mythology promotes violence and genocide. Classical mythology can support the egocentric notion that elevates one society above all others and justifies all kinds of atrocities. Read The Iliad carefully and you will see both men and Gods behave in ways antithetical to our modern sensibilities.

My purpose in discussing advertising is not to critique its apparent ends, but to reveal the nature of its scope and power. I am an optimist, and I believe that while advertising on one level is despicable, on another level, in spite of themselves, advertisers are performing a necessary function in our culture. Beyond notions of physical afflictions, social inequities and personal conformity, advertising provides hope. Hope that there are solutions to our problems, hope that there is an underlying logic to the buzzing, blooming chaos of our mass culture, hope that human beings can prevail against inimical forces of nature. That these hopes are expressed in the form of deodorants, household cleansers and body paints is lamentable. That the purpose of advertisers in their own minds is to make us pliable, insecure and acquisitive is repulsive. But advertising wouldn’t be effective at all, wouldn’t sometimes be powerful and moving, wouldn’t strike so often a “responsive chord,” if it didn’t provide a necessary structure and narrative for our culture.

I have also used Joseph Campbell’s notion of the heroic cyclic to understand incidents in my life and put into context my own personal narrative. I am not disputing the brilliance of his analysis, or its usefulness in comprehending the stories we tell ourselves. I think that there is a deeper level to mythology, that for mythic tales to survive at all over time they must correlate to fundamental intellectual processes.

We can debate whether advertising is benign or malignant. What I am calling attention to is its deeper structure and offering a possible analysis for why it persists in our culture at all.

The Problem With Myths

The problem that continually arises when trying to properly interpret a culture's mythology is the definition of the word "myth."

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

The term "myth" for Claude Levi-Strauss has a different meaning. Myths are stories because, in an oral culture, storytelling is the means by which cultural information is transmitted from one person to another and across generations. The mythic heroes and monsters, magical activities and impossible events are memorable because they need to be to preserve the information being transmitted. With our modern sensibilities, we look at the absurdities and inconsistencies of fairy tales and myths and assume we have discovered evidence that "primitive" thought processes are illogical and immature when compared to modern thought.

In his series "Mythologiques", Levi-Strauss has suggested that myths are not important because they present archetypal images; myths are important because they demonstrate an externalization of human thought processes. Levi-Strauss assumes that since we are all members of the same species, that the thought processes of less technologically advanced peoples are the same as our own, just applied to different objects. By interpreting the logic of myths, we can understand how the mind works.

It is also assumed that individual myths that have been passed down to us may be incomplete. In order to understand the "message" we must contrast and compare multiple variants of the same tale. The true message of a myth is revealed when one is familiar with its place in the total cultural context that generated it. That's why saying that the Superman myth, for example, is the basis for all of our culture's archetypes is misleading. Superman(1948) is not Superman(1960) or even Superman(2007). If you doubt this, I direct your attention to the site http://www.superdickery.com/ for an alternative interpretation of the Superman myth.

The reason I focus in on advertising is because of the vast body of examples advertising supplies. Advertisements are constantly changing, constantly reflecting current cultural conditions, and self-validating through sales trends.

It may be possible to arrive at valid conclusions concerning our culture using just the five Harry Potter movies or the Superman series. However, the possibility for individual influence on the "message" is far greater with artistic control centralized in one person or a small group than in a much broader body of work.

Advertisements work over space the way myths work over time. Mythic stories survive over time because they resonate with the population. An individual advertisement may have a much shorter shelf life, but because it has to be distributed throughout a large population, it must also resonate to be effective.

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.

Culture vs. Nature: Women and Advertising in the New Media

As the new media liberate traditional advertising, women may want to reevaluate their roles.

It may seem that economic factors and competition from new media are forcing advertisers to reevaluate how to get their messages across; to engage in product placement and other tricks to penetrate the clutter. In fact this is just the tail wagging the dog. It has always been inevitable that the "content" what we call "ads" would move from the confines of the 15 or 30 seconds spaces between the old content presented by traditional electronic media or the column inches of traditional print media to become involved in every aspect of our lives. Advertising in general wrestles with the same types of concerns that structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss discerned in the mythology of "primitive" South American Indians. That is, in a context relevant to our modern sensibilities, ads are really dealing with an opposition between nature and culture. In doing so, they provide structure to our lives, disseminate guidelines for how to look and feel, and mandate what rituals to perform to be fully human.

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

We still can't see that modern advertising, in all its manifestations, performs the same functions in our modern culture that The Iliad and The Odyssey performed in ancient Greece, or that the tales about frogs and honey bees and jaguars performed for native South Americans. In doing so, advertising explains and reconciles the contradictions that must inevitably exist in the lexicon of a complex culture, or deny that those contradictions exist. To help better grasp this concept, I’d like to ask the following question: Why do women in our culture wear makeup?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Light Blogging This Week

Update below

This week I am attending "Slice of Life," a medical educators' conference in Salt Lake City and at the same time working on a piece about the movie "1408" where I wonder what it would have been like if Stephen King had written Metamorphosis:

"I was warned not to go into this evil motel room. Now I can't check out. If only I had listened."

Anyway, if there is anything of import to Media Ecology at the conference, you'll read it here first.

Update:
Well, my trip to the conference was done in by Wednesday night's thunder storm. After sitting six hours on the JFK runway, the flight was cancelled. Meanwhile, my luggage managed to make it to Salt Lake City the following day. Something is not right when your BVDs have been to Salt Lake City and you haven't.

However, I was able to watch the morning's proceedings, which were webcast. The keynote speaker, Geoff Norman of McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, discussed a topic of interest to Media Ecologists: Which type of illustration is more conducive to a medical learning environment, a still image or an animated one? Dr. Norman's research suggests that in most cases an animated image is distracting; medical students who study a static image of human anatomy perform better on tests. Via email I posed the following question:

In evaluating your test results, how do you allow for the fact that students who do better on static vs. animated views do so because our education system has better equipped them to interpret static views? Future generations, the so-called "digital generation" may test differently.

Dr. Norman's response is that we seem to be hard wired that way and we shouldn't blame our educational system.

I have my own preconceptions about how we are hardwired. It is possible that Dr. Norman's test subjects favored still images because their education provided them with more experience interpreting them than animated images. As schools adopt more interactive media, the balance may shift.

Time Flies Like a Socratic Dialogue: On Paul Levinson’s The Plot to Save Socrates

The literary convention of time travel has changed over time.

Paul Levinson’s The Plot to Save Socrates has been out in a paperback trade edition for a while and so it is an appropriate time to consider how the metaphor of time travel has been expressed in literature and the media. The Plot to Save Socrates offers a new way of telling time travel stories, one that is very much bound in the current communication environment of the Internet and encompasses role-playing games, multitasking and hypertext. In order to appreciate this change we must first put aside the language we use to describe time change narratives.

Just as our continuing use of the word “station” to signify radio and television frequencies betrays the original conception of “communication” as physically moving from one train station to another, the use of the term “time travel” suggests that we move through time the way we travel through space. It uses a linear metaphor to describe movement through the fourth dimension. Since you can go forward and backward in space, why not the same in time?

For want of a better term, let’s replace “time travel” with “time shift.” We then can see how portrayals of time shifting in our literature and mass media have been bound by this linear, spatial metaphor.

Time shifting has been accomplished by self hypnosis, pimped-up horseless carriages, rays of light, phone booths, portals of various types, FTL space ships and getting hit on the head. The usual technique is to employ some device to move physically from Time A to Time X. A protagonist travels to the past or future the way he would travel to Bejing or Poughkeepsie. He stays a while, either can or cannot change the future or betray the past, and then he returns to his point of origin to survey the results. Sometimes he becomes his own grandfather. Sometimes he falls in love with a contemporary resident, but then looks at a penny and returns involuntarily to his own era. Sometimes he steps on a butterfly.

The metaphor of time shifting employed by a given author has been largely determined by the dominant medium of communication of his era. In the industrial age, when print was the dominant medium of communication, time shifting was obtained by jumping in a vehicle and driving to the past or future. Time was a highway and we could ride it all night long. In the early electronic age, when television dominated, you could travel through time by passing through a portal (screen) or being converted into a beam of light. In our current computer era, at least according to Levinson, you shift through time in hops, skips and jumps and you do it while sitting in a chair. In other words, you “hypertext” your way through time.

The Plot to Save Socrates defies the “A to X back to A” structure of most time shifting tales. Instead of being a good traveler and spending a decent interval in Time X, the story moves continuously back and forth and up and down through time. Levinson’s characters don’t pay a proper visit to a different time, they jump all over history. They assume the identities of real historical characters and they gladly risk changing history at will.

Levinson uses the old medium of print to suggest how the new media can change our assumptions about time and space. Thus The Plot to Save Socrates offers, albeit covertly, a new metaphor for the literary tradition of time travel. Time is not a highway, it is a web. You don’t travel linearly, you click and jump.

8th Annual Media Ecology Convention, June 6 Proceedings

Here is the recording of June 6 proceedings. Most of this is in Spanish, but it does include a clip of Neil Postman, of Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall and of Thomas F. Gencarelli's presentation.






MEA 8th Convention June 6 #1 from Robert K. Blechman on Vimeo

8th Annual Media Ecology Convention, Friday Night Proceedings

Although I wasn't able to attend this year's Media Ecology Convention in Mexico City, I did watch and record whatever I could. Here is the recording of Friday nights proceedings, including Eric McLuhan's presentation (sorry that I missed the beginning), the Awards Ceremony, and Lance Strate's speech.








I have recordings of some of the other general sessions which I will post shortly.

MEA 8th Convention Friday Night from Robert K. Blechman on Vimeo

Rise and Fall of a Constitutional Democracy: The United States

The United States can't be conquered by military invasion or technological devastation. It can be conquered by an idea.

While it may be true that the United States can never be defeated by an external foe, the neo-con Republicans have demonstrated how it can be conquered internally. These Republicans are truly radicals, not conservatives, who favor a unitary executive over checks and balances. The current administration's neo-cons seem to have failed in their attempts to subvert the United States Constitution and institute a 1000 year reign. Next time they may succeed.

How to overthrow the Republic

Neo-cons have demonstrated the several areas that must be controlled in order to take over our Constitutional government. Among these are:

1. Subvert the news media: It is clear that the major media outlets, and their journalists and editors, have been compromised in various ways. Not only have they become self-editing, but also the administration is adept at playing the news cycles. News organizations focused on the bottom line have closed overseas bureaus, cut experienced staff, depleted research resources and pandered to the gossip mongers. Without a truly adversarial Fourth Estate, this administration has led us into war, politicized public agencies, committed any number of felonies and thumbed their noses at the other branches of government.

2. Stack the courts with anti-Constitutional judges: This is not an issue of left or right or conservative or progressive. This is an issue of upholding and defending the Constitution, as it was intended by the Founding Fathers. Republican appointees who put party above the Constitution allow the Republic to fail.

3. Distract the public: This may be contingent on #1. The main stream media fill their airwaves and pages with non-news trivia. These modern bread and circus pageants distract the population from understanding and pursuing the own best interests.

4. Cripple the military: The Iraq adventure has accomplished two key things. It has severely stretched our professional military and it has depleted our national guard resources, both in manpower and material. It has also allowed the creation of a large private army that is loyal to their corporations ahead of their country. The Romans had their Praetorian Guards. We have Blackwater.

Another unintended consequence of the occupation in Iraq is the filtering of any senior military opposition to the administration's agenda. Military yes-men have risen to the top, the naysayers have taken early retirement.

5. Weaken the middle class: With more of us scrambling to meet our financial obligations, fewer of us have sufficient time to devote to investigating political wrongdoing and participating in its correction.

6. Game the political process: Republicans have been adept at filling local election positions with those key players who can help stack the deck in their favor. Control of local election oversight positions has been used to influence election rules, purge voter lists and swing close contests to their party. Districts have been gerrymandered to ensure reelection of the incumbent.

The current takeover attempt has failed due to corruption and incompetence spread throughout all three branches of our government. It isn't too hard to imagine a future in which a more competent, less corrupt cabal of political radicals succeeds where their predecessors failed. The blueprint for a future successful takeover of the United States has already been created for them.

Our contemporary neo-cons have succeeded in introducing the idea that the our Constitutional form of government can be subverted from within. When future historians attempt to pinpoint exactly when the United States ceased being a constitutional democracy, they could do no better than to choose 2007. This is when the seeds were planted that led to the end of the American Republic and the beginning of the American empire.

You heard it here first.

Rock, Paper, Video: Ray Bradbury Interprets Fahrenheit 451

An author is not always the best interpreter of his own work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, is Ray Bradbury an early Media Ecologist? One could say that all writers of speculative fiction are practicing speculative Media Ecology. In Bradbury’s case, he could predict that a new social environment would be created by the adoption of a new medium of communication without fully grasping the influence of electronic media. He certainly got it right in his later work, The Martian Chronicles, where the Martian environment completely transforms human settlers into new Martians. It is significant that by the end of Fahrenheit 451, the TV-addicted culture has destroyed itself in war and the secondary orality rebels move to rebuild society. Their ultimate supremacy signifies the ascendancy of secondary orality, not its defeat.