Google Searches Can Also Track Intellectual Outbreaks

Simple steps to avoid an epidemic of Media Ecology.

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

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

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

1. An outbreak of Media Ecology activity often is preceded by a discussion of the works of any of a number of scholars, including Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Walter J. Ong, Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, Alfred Korzybski or Suzanne Langer.
   
   This may be followed by secondary discussion of Paul Levinson, Lance Strate, Robert Logan, Joshua Meyerowitz or James Carey. Should you encounter a group discussing any of these authors, immediately change the topic to sports, the weather, politics or religion. A good lead in is: "Yes, technology may have influenced the course of human evolution, but weren't weather patterns, available raw material resources and the ineluctable modalities of warfare more significant?"


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


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


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


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


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

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

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.

Feelings of YouTube Inadequacy

Update Below

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


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

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

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

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

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


Update 6/11/08:

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

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

Had I But World Enough, and Time, This Blogging, Lady, Were No Crime

One thing I've discovered about blogging is that, to be done effectively you have to do it often. If you don't post frequently, you aren't really serious about being a blogger. One problem is that posting takes time and something original to say, both of which I have little.

This doesn't seem to be a problem for other bloggers, like my friend Lance Strate over at his eponymous Lance Strate's Blog Time Passing, where he seems to be able to post something new and interesting almost daily. I can only assume that he has abandoned his other responsibilities and devoted himself almost entirely to his blog. (It's an addiction Lance. You can get help!)

Another problem is that my hit rate is low and I am reluctant to post anything new until I'm reasonably certain that the current post has been given sufficient play. Of course, I fudge on this a little, since my hit rate is so low that a single post would be sufficient for the entire year. I assume that if more people were reading my posts, I would find more time to write posts and more topics to post about. And, if more people then linked to, and purchased from, my Amazon link, I'm sure my productivity would be Dickensian.

A third problem is that I’m not quite sure what my purpose is in blogging. There are as many types of blogs out there as there are bloggers, but what type of blogger am I? What is my personal reason for sharing my writings via the Internet? Let's look at some metaphors for blogging.

Is it a "public dairy," where I record my experiences on a daily basis? Frequent readers of this blog (hi Mom!) have probably noticed that I've posted little information about my personal life or experiences. There are many blogs, that are of a more personal nature, like St. George's University medical student Ishie's A Caribbean M.D. is Good Enough For Me!, which she uses as a way to maintain contact with her family and friends back home. Though open to the world, this blog is really meant to be read by her circle of friends and family. My purpose isn't to make public my personal life, although I have played with the idea of a separate, private blog to share with my posse. Again, its a world and time problem.

Is it a personal “Op Ed” page? Paul Levinson’s blog and yes, Lance’s site, are examples of this, at least among those with a Media Ecology slant. I don’t know if my type of writing is Op Editable as I can’t imagine it ever appearing opposite the editorials of the New York Times or the Washington Post. I don’t speak from the authority granted by public or private service, or from personal expertise on a given topic. At best, I see my posts as comparable to the lighter, non-serious columnists like Dave Barry or Maureen Dowd. (Yes that was a slam.)

Is it a “digital press” where I post news reporting and commentary? Good examples of this is Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory, now hosted at Salon, or Josh Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo on the left side of the political spectrum, or Matt Drudge's Drudge Report on the right. There is no doubt that these blogs now act as a counterpoint to and critique of the reporting of the main stream media, and that they now have a place in the political process of our country. My blog is not necessarily concerned with public affairs, although I do, from time to time comment on current events. This is just a bad habit I picked up in elementary school that I haven't been able to outgrow.

Is it “show and tell?” Maybe my metaphor for blogging is also a result of my early school days. Maybe this is one elaborate "show and tell" where I find something that interests me to bring in as frequently as I can. The key phrase here is "that interests me."

One of the things I like about blogging is that there are no filters, no gatekeepers and no censors. I post whatever I like, grammatical warts and all. I have to admit that one of my purposes in starting a blog was to get “out there” some of the things I’ve thought and written about. Then I go back and read what I've written to see what it is I've been thinking about. If it’s especially good, I might read it more than once. There is even the possibility of recycling older posts for further review and reflection. (What, you’ve never heard of reruns or sequels?) I am my own publisher, editor and reading public. What a rush!

I’d like to think that the thoughts expressed in this post are unique and original to blogging, but I’ve just discovered that there is an entire genre of self-reflexive blogs that have already been here, done this.

Oh well. I’d better quit now before I get hooked!

Postscript to "Cylon Monotheism": Blechman's Communication Appendices (Part 1)

In his blog Lance Strate's Blog Time Passing, Lance answers my questions concerning the monotheism of Cylons on Battlestar Galactic:

"The Cylons are Battlestar Galactica's very own Spartoi, they are the new beings sown from the dragon's teeth, they have a Phoenician/Semitic link”

and

“Human beings are symbols that stand for God. And the Cylons, being monotheists, want to wipe out humanity so that they can take our place as the primary symbols
of God.”

I think that Lance’s insight that the Cylons are a modern correlative of Cadmus’s dragon's teeth is fantastic!

Before I comment further on Lance’s insights, let me make a few meta-communication comments about these series of posts. I call these Blechman’s Communication Appendices, as in vestigial remnants whose true function no one can figure out, but that can cause a real pain.

Appendix #1: Every cultural artifact has pedagogic content. Lance and I have been having a theological discussion based on a pop-culture artifact, a Sci-Fi program on cable TV that is based on a cheesy Star Wars wannabe from the 1970’s. Just as contemporary Homeric scholars recognize that the Iliad and the Odyssey were cultural encyclopedias for Classical Greeks. (See Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato, Joseph Campbell’s Mask of God series, and, of course, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques.), the products of our culture are also encyclopedias, providing instruction on both the content and the medium itself. Every story, art work or musical composition, we read, view or hear contains a lesson in the ways and mores of our culture.

For example, each song we listen to contains instruction in musicology, as defined by our culture. Even the simplest bubble-gum rock song instructs it listeners in our culture’s rules of rhyme, meter, musical notation and storytelling. Some of us learn the lesson better than others, which explains the difference between a Mozart on one end of the spectrum and, say, me on the other. Some lessons can be taught formally and some can be absorbed by osmosis.

Contrary to Jacques Derrida, as I understand him, there is a meaning in the content of a cultural artifact. It doesn’t reside entirely in the reader. For a society to exist, there must be an agreement of basic premises, a basic understanding of the structure of reality and the meanings of signs within that reality. Symbols have meanings which are defined, but even there, a consensus must be agreed upon for the symbols to have any practical use. I don’t mean that you and I can read the same book or view the same movie and not get different meanings out of the experience. However, there must be a fundamental basis that we agree on without interpretation. Just as we must agree upon the Laws of Gravity, even if we don’t approve of them, there are givens without which no culture could function. Pre-literate, technologically less advanced cultures show these “gravity agreements” in their body of myths which, as Lévi-Strauss pointed out, exist to shore up the consensus of reality by denying contradictions or explaining them away.

Appendix #2: Although there are some restrictions, members of a given culture will decide on the use of a particular medium, based on their existing media and cultural biases. As Lance (quoting Lynn White, Jr.)points out: “an innovation opens a door, it does not command.” Still, different media have different biases and encourage certain beliefs and behaviors. Maybe the phonetic alphabet doesn’t force monotheism, but it lays the foundation for its acceptance. I find it inconsistent that, given the diversity of the twelve planets of the Battlestar Galactica universe and the seeming universality of a phonetic alphabet, no one has thought of monotheism before the coming of the Cylons. Maybe they experienced a more rapid transition from a literate to a secondary orality culture, but that still doesn’t explain the Cylon’s acceptance of one God.

Appendix #3: Vestigial elements of past cultures persist within our own. This appendix is the basis of my soon-to-be 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 no longer think of the heart as the seat of memory and consciousness, 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 can be found in most synagogues on any given Saturday. Within the Jewish Shabbat Service are examples and remnants of multiple media environments. In my congregation, the Rabbi leads the service, but most of the heavy carrying is performed (literally) by the Cantor. The Cantor himself is a bard, a remnant of the oral culture of our ancestors. His chants involve mnemonic devices and multiple repetitions to enhance comprehension and memorization. He chants the manuscript of the Torah from a scroll to a group who, while they aren’t making copies as monastic scribes would have, are responding as members of an oral culture would. At the same time, with all these pre-literate vestiges evident throughout the ceremony, Jews are characterized as the “People of the Book.”

Back to Battlestar Galactica
Lance Strate writes:

Which brings me to a point of great significance for our discussion, the myth of the origin of the Greek alphabet, which McLuhan discusses in both The Gutenberg
Galaxy (and see my previous post on Gutenberg!) and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. According to Greek myth, the alphabet was introduced by Cadmus, who was a Phoenecian, in fact the son of the king of Phoenecia. This acknowledges the Semitic origin of the alphabet, and it follows that the Semites of Phoenecia, traders who sailed all around the Mediterranean, would be the source of the alphabet's dissemination to Greece. The Greeks called it the Phoenecian alphabet, from which is derived the term phonetic. Cadmus was told by the oracle at Delphi to found a town, which became the city of Thebes. Before doing so, however, he was forced to slay a dragon, and then, following Athena's instructions, sowed the dragon's teeth, from which sprung up a race of men called Spartes (Greek for sown"). All of them were armed for battle and savage, and Cadmus tricked them into fighting among themselves until only five were left, the ancestors of the five noble families of Thebes, who took Cadmus as their king.

McLuhan felt there was an important insight in this myth, relating to the association between the alphabet and the military. The significance of the teeth is that they occur naturally in a line, looking relatively identical, and therefore are the body's analogues to the letters of the alphabet (alphabet as extension of the teeth); teeth also have much to do with the consonants of the alphabet, as the action of tongue in relation to teeth results in different sounds (e.g., "s" and "t"). Of course, teeth are
sharp, they are natural weapons, and again they resemble an army of men, at least an orderly one of the sort made possible by the alphabet.

So, do you see where I'm going with this? The Cylons are Battlestar Galactica's very own Spartoi, they are the new beings sown from the dragon's teeth, they have a Phoenician/Semitic link It's not a question of whether the Cylons have the alphabet, or alphabetic literacy. The Cylons are the alphabet sprung to life, they are what you reap when you sow the dragon's teeth. They are the alphabet as it evolves into the printing press, and mechanization takes command, giving rise to mass production, the multiple, identical copies that, ultimately, are written in the letters D-N-A, so send in the clones. As letters on a page, the Cylons naturally worship a divine Author-ity. Looking at it from this angle, Battlestar Galactica is very media ecological.

As manufactured copies of twelve prototypes, Cylons are a modern sci-fi analogue to the dragon’s teeth. Created by humans to serve humans, Cylons represent the unintended consequences of human hubris. “Hubris” from the Greek, meaning “exaggerated self pride or self-confidence (overbearing pride), often resulting in fatal retribution [italics added].” (from Wikipedia.)

Lance’s connection of Cylon’s with Cadmus’s dragons teeth illustrates the operation of these Appendices. The notion of infinitely repeatable robot copies is something we take for granted. The Greek myth of the dragons teeth, while not perceived on the conscious level, may help us to understand why the Cylons are adversaries and how the best intentions of their human creators can have unintended consequences.

Cylon Monotheism: Religion in Battlestar Galactica

There have been a number of recent posts concerning this season of SciFi Channel's "Battlestar Galactica." Over at his blog PaulLevinson.net, Paul writes:

"The opening sequence of episodes in the Fall were among the best of anything I've ever seen on television. Picking up perfectly from the stunning events at the end of the second season, the first shows this past Fall put BSG easily in the company of the best of Star Trek.

The last few minutes of the season finale on Sunday were similarly superb. We'll be talking all summer about how those four people - four! - on Galactica could really be Cylons, and who the fifth still unidentified Cylon really is.”

And in his blog Lance Strate's Blog Time Passing Lance notes that:

“A wonderful touch is that the Cylons are religious--they talk about God, truly believe in God, and their aggressive and violent actions are rooted in their religious convictions.”

I concur that Battlestar Galactica is wonderful, both as Sci-Fi and as television drama of any kind. However, I find the Cyclon's religious affectations confusing and troubling within the total context of the show.

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

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

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

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

In a 1977 Issue of ETC: The Journal of General Semantics, in an article titled "Alphabet, Mother of Invention," Marshall McLuhan and Robert K. Logan speculate on the possible origin of monotheism:

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

Perhaps Cylons, while surely literate, as robots are not subject to McLuhan's and Logan's media assertions. One could argue that Battlestar Galactica is not media ecological at all, and therefore need not adhere to the tenants of ME. The humans of BG can develop an advanced civilization without the benefit of alphabetic literacy, or, if their alphabet is phonetic, they can retain their polytheism in spite of it.

Religious robots, while intriging, remain a problem, especially self-ordained monotheistic robots. I believe that the depiction of Cylons as monotheistic in the absence of human mortality or alphabetic literacy can only be seen as a true leap of faith on the part of Battlestar Galactica's creators.

Welcome Media Ecology Bloggers!

(Updated below)

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

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

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

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

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

From the Kenyon Review: On Steiner's 'New Literacy'

Lance Strate and his recent book, Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study, get a nice mention from Jerry Harp in the current Kenyon Review online discussing a George Steiner essay that appears in their Winter, 2007 issue.

I think Harp is wrong to conflate Jacques Derrida's deconstructionism with Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism "the medium is the message." My reading of McLuhan is that he was very concerned with the demeaning of meaning that the electronic media represent and which Derrida's work celebrates. Though McLuhan was pegged as a "media guru," implying that he was in favor of the changes being wrought by the new media, he was not necessarily an advocate of the brave new world that electronic media were creating. If anything, McLuhan believed we must understand how new technology upsets our existing sensory balance so that we can devise methods to counteract it.

Most misunderstood, perhaps is McLuhan's meaning of the term "global village." Common understanding has been that a "global village", whether brought about by television, or more recently by the World Wide Web will somehow result in a era of good feeling and common understanding. As McLuhan and Neil Postman have both pointed out, the increase in communication seems to have resulted in more people returning to tribal norms as a source of identity, which often has lead to an increase in violence and intolerance.