A Comment on Asana

So, a couple of weeks ago, I was quoted in an article appearing in the E-Commerce Times, written by Erika Morphy, and entitled Asana Positions Itself for the Enterprise. In case you're not familiar with Asana, you can click on the link to see their website.  Basically, it's software to help you get organized, and especially to help groups and organizations work together on projects.  In their own works, "Asana is the shared task list for your team. The place to plan, organize & stay in sync." It's productivity software, and here's a YouTube video that provides an overview of its features:





Anyway, the E-Commerce article focused on a new product released by Asana called Organizations, which is, in effect, Asana writ large. To quote from the opening summary of the article, which was posted on May 2nd, Morphy writes

Asana has stretched its simple collaboration tool to enterprise dimensions with Organizations, which allows users to network in a way similar to Facebook. "Email seems clunky and old-fashioned to people who are native to social networks," said journalism prof Rich Hanley. "They understand that they communicate in short bursts of information ... that can carry links to deeper content if desired."

And the article itself begins with the following explanation:

Asana on Wednesday announced Organizations, a feature that stakes its claim in the enterprise space.

What is new with Organizations is its scalability; it is designed to support companies of 100 employees or more.

The startup has already carved out a niche among individuals and small groups in the 18 months since its launch.

Asana's original productivity and collaboration application is organized around three panes: On the left are the projects in the current workspace. When people are added to the team's workspace, they get access to all of the projects. The name of the selected project is in the center pane, along with a checklist of tasks for that project. The right pane can be expanded to edit task details like the assignee, due date, and comments.

At this point, a new section begins, with the heading of "All About Organizations," providing more detail about the new product:

An Organization is broken down into Teams, which are listed in the left pane in the Team Browser. Users have a number of options to control the membership and visibility to others.

Organizations also offers a single view of tasks and a single in-box, as well as the ability to search across the entire Organization and save that search.

The free version offers unlimited projects and tasks, as well as unlimited Teams with up to 15 members each.

A premium version lets users designate admins for an Organization, who can configure some security settings, manage users and centralize billing. Admins also can see account activity, remove users from the Organization, and require access to Asana through Google Accounts.

The Asana premium plans allow private projects, public and private teams and unlimited guests, and they come with a higher level of support.

Organizations is available to all Asana users. Over the next few days, existing teams will be able to convert their Workspace to an Organization.

The next section, entitled "A Simple Concept," gets into the fascinating fact that this software was created by individuals who came from Facebook and Google.  At this point, the article features some quotes, but not yet from me:

Asana was launched by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and Google and Facebook veteran Justin Rosenstein.

There are more than a few similarities between Asana and Facebook, said Rich Hanley, associate professor and director of the graduate journalism program at Quinnipiac University.

"Asana is simply applying the concept of a network of friends to a network of colleagues," he told the E-Commerce Times.

"That means teams that need to communicate in real time and keep track of the conversation can deploy techniques that are common in their everyday life to make their jobs more efficient," Hanley said.

"Email seems clunky and old-fashioned to people who are native to social networks. They understand that they communicate in short bursts of information similar to Facebook's news feed that can carry links to deeper content if desired," he explained.

The last section has a heading of "A Powerful Engine," and this is where I come in:

Asana is more than just another productivity tool with social media aspirations, however.

"Asana offers the collaborative power and advantages of cloud storage that Google has been trying to emphasize, combined with the social media expertise of Facebook, to provide a truly effective and efficient alternative to both platforms, one well-tailored to this relatively specialized niche," said Lance Strate, professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University.

"What I wonder is how Microsoft will react to Asana, given the powerful pushback we've been seeing from them against Google," he told the E-Commerce Times.

"No doubt there will be enormous interest in buying out Asana on their part," suggested Strate, "and perhaps also from Facebook and Google -- and maybe even Apple will want to get in on the act."

Now, since I provided my quotes via email, I can share with you the entirety of my comments, so you can see all that I had to say, and get a sense of the larger context of my quotations:

It's often the case that individuals who have gained great success with a big, mainstream project follow it up with one that is more specific and specialized, and this is the case for Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein's move from Facebook, as a kind of "everything" platform, an internet within the internet essentially, to a business and organization-oriented form of productivity software. What is particularly interesting about this move is its similarity not to Facebook but to Google, and in particular to the failed produce, Google Wave. While Google recently folded Google Docs into Google Drive, and has been competing with Microsoft Office in trying to get organizations to switch to a cloud based system, Google has always had some difficulty with the social media aspect of online communication, Google+ being their most successful offering to date, but still not enough to keep Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues at Facebook up at night. Asana offers the collaborative power and advantages of cloud storage that Google has been trying to emphasize, combined with the social media expertise of Facebook, to provide a truly effective and efficient alternative to both platforms, one well-tailored to this relatively specialized niche. What I wonder is how Microsoft will react to Asana, given the powerful push back we've been seeing from them against Google. No doubt there will be enormous interest in buying out Asana on their part, and perhaps also from Facebook and Google, and maybe even Apple will want to get in on the act. If nothing else, this demonstrates how exciting and open-ended this industry is as we find ourselves in the latest internet boom.

I really thought the point about Asana picking up where Google Wave failed was an important one. Perhaps you remember all the buzz that was generated before its release, and while it was in beta? Everyone was clamoring for an invite back then, and afterwards, pffffttt! That's why I see Asana as stepping on Google's toes much more than Facebook.  And it does show how new media entrepreneurs can continue to get mileage out of simple variations on a theme. Of course, all the productivity software in the world won't do your work for you, at least, not so far...

Not Quite Paperless

Media ecology scholars such as Marshall McLuhan spoke about how the electronic media environment brought about the end of the print era, and back in the sixties and seventies when McLuhan was sharing such observations there was a great deal of doubt, because television seemed to be co-existing relatively well with print media. Sure, the introduction of television resulted in the demise of the general interest magazine, but that medium found a new niche in specialized topics, just as radio had readjusted to the new media ecosystem by focusing on playing recorded music, or news and talk formats. And yes, the number of newspapers did decline to the point that most towns and cities only had one daily, but the newspaper medium itself remained well entrenched. And the medium of the book retained its high status and general popularity, although bestsellers were pushing other titles out, and the pocket book format was gradually declining (replaced to a large extent by the trade paperback).

But holding aside the very significant questions regarding whether we have become a postliterate culture, whether people are reading as much or as deeply as they were before, it is certainly clear that to the extent that we all are still reading, we are spending much less time on print media, and spending much less money on print media. Print media industries were coasting along in slow decline up until the financial collapse of 2008, and it was that disruption that revealed the vulnerabilities in the print business model, and led to a much more drastic shakeout than what was going on before.

The financial downturn was followed by the introduction of the iPad in 2010, which may well have been the final nail in the coffin for print media. Of course, this was preceded by the introduction of the Kindle in 2007, which led off the revolution. But the iPad knocked the ball out of the park (sorry but it is baseball season so please forgive my metaphoria). Simply put, when we read documents, we hold them much closer to our eyes than when we look at a desktop computer screen, which is why we may still have trouble reading off of a computer even with the high quality of contemporary screen technology, and the same is true of the laptop computer, unless you were to awkwardly hold it up to your face. The key element was the removal of the keys, the keyboard that is, making the tablet a medium we can read while keeping it about the same distance from our eyes as we would a print medium.

Of course, publishers have been scrambling to convert their publications to electronic form, and this has met with some success. As McLuhan observed, one medium can become the content of another, and print media are, in part, the content of computer media, meaning that the material qualities of print disappear, and its non-material form becomes part of the content of digital media, as a potential stylistic element.

So, years ago folks started to talk about a paperless society, and others pointed out that with computers and printers, we were actually generating more paper documents than ever before. And this was true for a time, but in the big picture it was a brief transitional period I would venture, and now we are genuinely reaching the point where pulp is becoming little more than fiction.

But there still are limits to this transition. A French television commercial posted on YouTube last month makes for a humorous comment on the one aspect of life where going paperless can be problematic:





So, beyond the humor, there is the larger point that toilet paper is a cultural convention, admittedly one we don't like to talk about too much, at least not past the age of 8.  But it is worth noting that for most of human history, there was no such product, and people used alternative methods, and it is not entirely clear that our own practice is the best that anyone's come up with, or the last word in human hygiene (I wonder what they use on the Starship Enterprise?). You can read a bit about it in the Wikipedia entry on toilet paper, or the History of Toilet Paper website. 

The only point I want to make is that, from these sources we can learn that toilet paper was introduced in 1880. And this follows a major revolution in the manufacture of paper itself in the mid-19th century. From the time paper was invented in China in the 2nd century up to this point, the writing surface was made from linen, making it more expensive and more difficult to manufacture than today's product. It was during the 19th century, spurred on by a shortage of linen, that the alternative method of producing paper from wood pulp was introduced, and widely adopted by the end of the century, resulting in a revolution in publishing. And while paper was sometimes used for toileting purposes going back to ancient China (according to Wikipedia), the specialized product sold in rolls (a retrieval of the scroll from antiquity?) did not exist until the late 19th century.

It is perhaps worth adding in this context that both McLuhan and Walter Ong noted the parallel between Freud's psychosexual stages of oral, anal, and genital, and the media ages of orality, literacy, and electricity. And there are some characteristics common to both the literate mindset and the anal personality type.

In any event, all this is a connection worth noting, at least in passing, as we know that whether it's paper, print, or even electronic media, this too shall pass...

Google Glass iMenagerie

Back on February 4th, I posted an entry under the heading of An i for an Eye that included some discussion of Google's Project Glass. Just to refresh your memory, here's a video showing the current state of the technology, which was posted last month:



As you can see from the title of the video, the emphasis is on the camera function, although elements of Google search are also incorporated. This is a bit more modest than the original vision (sorry for the pun) Google had presented (as I noted in my An i for an Eye post), but in any event, it was back in February that Google released more details about the project. Here are some excerpts from a short article on it in Deutsche Welle, where Google Glass is described as "a smartphone-like product that is controlled by voice commands":

Controlled by voice commands, the small set of eyeglasses project information unobtrusively to a tiny display screen attached to a rim above the right eye. The glasses run on Google's Android operating system for mobile devices.

Google Inc. first sold the glasses to computer programmers at a company conference last June where Google co-founder Sergey Brin first demonstrated the device. The company first began developing the glasses in 2010 as part of a secretive company division now known as Google X.

As the device is hands-free, Google Glass is supposed to make it easier for people to take pictures or record video wherever they are. Wearers can also conduct online searches by telling Google Glass to look up a specific piece of information.

Google also posted a YouTube video Wednesday showing people wearing the glasses while skydiving, riding a rollercoaster, dancing, skiing and even swinging on a trapeze.

The mass-market version of Google Glass will cost less than $1,500, but more than a smartphone.

It does sound pretty cool, doesn't it? Of course, it also sounds like it will feed directly into our "almost infinite appetite for distractions" to quote from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisted, a quote that Neil Postman invoked in his Foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death.  

But holding such considerations aside for the moment, as well as Postman's most basic question, to what problem is this a solution? (the problem of having to hold a camera and/or mobile device with your hands), back on February 25, I was asked to respond to a practical inquiry. This was for Mike Daly's Today's Burning Question feature for the Adotas website.  Specifically, it was, Today’s Burning Question: Marketing Implications Of Google Glass, and here's how Daly introduced it:

Another day, another screen size!

On the heels of Google’s unveiling of new details about Google Glass, we asked our panel of movers & shakers: “How will online marketers capitalize on the impending availability of Google Glass?”

and here's my response:

“Google Glass will open up an entirely new world of first-person video that will radically transform the art of filmmaking and video production, journalism, public relations, and advertising and marketing. It will take a bit of time to adequately explore the possibilities of this new medium, and for audiences to become accustomed to the perspective, but ultimately it is a point of view that better suits the electronic media environment in that it puts viewers at the center of the action, rather than positioning them in an objectively distanced manner, as outsiders looking in (the point of view associated with reading and print media). As such, Google Glass is well suited for capturing the look and sound of an environment or surrounding, as opposed to smaller products that might be better displayed by more traditional camera-work, using for example close-ups, two-shots, etc. The strength of this new medium lies in providing a virtual sense of place, a sample of the experience of actually being there, and this will have immediate and enormous relevance for the travel and tourism industry. Google Glass is well suited for presenting a walk-through of an unfamiliar locale, a tour of a resort or hotel’s rooms and facilities, a vacation spot’s attractions, theme park rides and recreational activities, and modes of transportation such as a cruise ship or train.” – Dr. Lance Strate, Professor of Communication and Media Studies and Director of the Professional Studies in New Media program at Fordham University.

You can read the other responses over on the Adotas page. But maybe to return to Huxley and Postman's point about distraction, and other concerns regarding new media, this next video handles the subject with great humor, and while the title, How Guys Will Handle Google Glass, led me to believe it might be a little to racy for this family-oriented blog, let me assure you that it is rated PG at worst:

And to return to a more serious mode, here's one more video, this one having been posted just a few days ago, CNET Top 5: Best uses for Google Glass. The first couple are not very impressive, but kudos for bringing up the negative effects in the midst of discussing some reasonable benefits that this new gadget might have to offer.

One last note that no one seems to be bringing up is the potential benefits the technology might have to offer to people with disabilities, particular vision impairment. If you could use the device as a hands free magnifier, and use voice commands to control the level of magnification and other factors, there would be no more need for bifocals and progressive lenses. And individuals with macular degeneration, like my mother, could switch back and forth between a very high magnification for reading to something better suited for moving about.

Oh, and let me conclude by noting that the title of this post is of course a play on the title of the Tennessee Williams drama, The Glass Menagerie, with the ubiquitous small i for internet prefix added on, to invoke a little pun on imaginary, because, after all, what this is all about is speculation, and the products of imagination. And if you don't care for my neologism, all I can say is that people living in Google glass houses shouldn't throw iStones...

Keep Calm and Don't Panic

One of students in my Introduction to New Media class at Fordham University, Kevin Levin, brought this popular bit of internet culture to my attention, the Keep Calm and Carry On poster. I don't know how I missed it!

This came up in regard to our class discussion of memes, itself a concept made popular by the internet, so let me say a few words on that topic (and if you've heard me go on about this before, feel free to skip ahead).

As you may know, the concept of the meme was introduced by British scientist Richard Dawkins in his 1974 book, The Selfish Gene.  There, Dawkins made the novel argument that evolution is driven by genes rather than organisms, that genes are biological replicators, and organisms are mechanisms by which genes reproduce themselves. That reverses the more common view that genes are the mechanism by which organisms reproduce themselves. This view, I might add, while intriguing, has been solidly criticized and, in my view, disproved by the arguments put forth by Terrence Deacon in his recent book, Incomplete Nature.

In any event, Dawkins mostly was writing about genes, but also threw in a chapter on the concept of ideas having a life of their own, being in effect self-replicators. To follow his line of thought, the idea of memes spread from his thoughts to his book, and then reproduced itself when I read it, the copy or offspring of the idea taking up residence in my brain. And whenever I tell someone else about memes, assuming they haven't heard about it before, it's replicated itself once more, again and again and again.

This idea did not become popular, though, and therefore was not a terribly successful meme itself, until the internet. Once email became popular, and people started forwarding interesting items to a bunch of other people, and they in turn forwarded the item to still more, and so on and so on, all with the forwarding history accumulated within the email, so you can see how the message has spread, and maybe even have your item sent back to you after several forwards, only then could people actually see the spread of ideas at work and relate it to the concept of the meme.

At that point, folks starting talking about memetics as the science of memes, and also invoked the more familiar term for self-replicating genetic matter, the virus.  The idea of a computer virus became well known in the early days of the internet, as connectivity was the key to the spread of such malware (to use a newer, and less metaphorical term). The computer virus, however, was not simply a replicator, but rather a program that also carries out functions that are unwanted and harmful, like deleting your hard drive or transmitting  information from your computer to some other location. A program that does nothing more than replicating itself is called a worm, which, while not actively harmful, could crash systems by filling up all available memory and data storage capacity. But despite the fact that there is more to computer viruses than replication, the metaphor of the virus got picked up as an alternative to meme, especially in the adjective form of going viral, viral marketing, etc.

 

Now, as a media ecology scholar, I have to add that the concept of the meme, while popular, is problematic. In one sense, there is nothing new about studying the spread of ideas. There is a longstanding research area known as diffusion of innovations, sometime social diffusion, and it is closely related to ideas such as two-step flow theory in mass communication (the idea that ideas spread by the mass media do not directly influence the attitudes, opinions, and behaviors of individuals, but instead are mediated by influential individuals referred to as opinion leaders), by the sociological study of rumors, not to mention studies of folklore , and also research into social networking.

So there is nothing new about memes except for the biological metaphor, and the metaphor itself is problematic.  Genes are a logical construct, a way of talking about the behavior of actual genetic material, you know, chromosones, and those amazing double helix molecules of DNA. In other words, genes are not real, in the sense that DNA is real, which is to say that they are not concrete phenomena. The only sense in which genes can be said to exist is insofar as they are based on a material medium (in this case, the medium is the molecule), they don't exist in a vacuum, in the ether, as an ideal form as it were.

But when it comes to memes, as they were originally presented by Dawkins, and as the idea has been picked up by others, the material basis that is taken for granted in regard to genetics is either overlooked, forgotten, or simply thrown out of the window. So in memetics, the talk typically is of ideas having an existence independent of any physical phenomenon. This is where media ecology is essential, because we need to remember that there is no content without a medium. Indeed, we need the medium to begin with, to provide the raw material out of which to form the content.

Now, let me just pull back a little and say that this does not mean that nothing interesting has come from the discussion of memes. It can be useful, it's certainly a compelling metaphor, and I myself have used the term on occasion. But it needs to be used with caution, and understanding of the larger context.

A further complication has been the appearance of meme generators, which I assume are connected to the sudden rise of Pinterest in the social media world to a position only surpassed by Facebook and Twitter. Of course, Facebook itself also has a lot to do with it, so even if you're only on Facebook, you may have noticed an explosion of these visual images plus text, all very formulaic. For example, there's the still from the first Lord of the Rings film, where the original line in the movie was, "one does not simply walk into Mordor," and here are some generated memes:

You get the picture, I'm sure. And as for memes having a material basis, it's clear that these types are entirely based on the specific medium of personal computers and the internet, and would not exist in this way without them. The Keep Calm and Carry On meme has also existed in similar form, and well before the advent of meme generators, which after all simply make it easier and more accessible to do the kinds of things that folks have already been doing with Photoshop (and that has been made famous by sites like lolcats). So here are some variations on the the Keep Calm theme:

And on and on and on.  Now, when it comes to the study of rumors and folklore, one of the most fundamental, and interesting questions, is where did it begin? Who started the ball rolling? How did it spread? Well, in this instance, there is an answer, and it is quite fascinating, involving as it does an accidental find, a kind of revival, and the power of the internet. It's all explained in this video that my student Kevin turned me on to, that I want to share with you now, The Story of Keep Calm and Carry On:





And to be fair, here's the write-up from YouTube:

 To find out more about Barter Books visithttp://www.barterbooks.co.uk to download the 'Keep Calm' iphone app visit http://bit.ly/keepcalmapp

A short film that tells the story behind the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster. Its origins at the beginning of WWII and its rediscovery in a bookshop in England in 2000, becoming one of the iconic images of the 21st century. Film, music, script and narration by Temujin Doran. http://www.studiocanoe.com/index.php?... Concept and production by Nation. http://www.wearenation.co.uk/

Now, what I want to emphasize at this point is how very, very British this all is. Stiff upper lip, and all that. I mean, it sums up much of what is distinctive about English culture, the emphasis on rationality, determinism, sheer grit. Keep calm and carry on indeed! 

The downside is that it makes one a bit stiff, overly formal, and quite a bit repressed. That is the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant stereotype, and while we here in the United States are not as extreme as the Brits, we do tend to share in that cultural trait, even if we're Catholic or Jewish, from varying ethnic backgrounds, and even non-white. You don't have to be a WASP to love this behavior pattern, but it is associated with affluence and being a member of the social elite, or trying to be part of that class. Personally, I admit to having some of that sensibility, and oft times wishing I had more, but I'm also grateful that I have the freedom to move back and forth between that type of behavior and other alternatives.

I should also note that the current fascination with Keep Calm and Carry On clearly involves a bit of irony. The propaganda value of the poster and saying are clear enough, and folks today cannot and would not take it as seriously as it would have been taken back during the Second World War. To take a page from Neil Postman, the poster originally had a bit of an Orwellian cast to it, but now is used in a Huxleyian mode, as an amusement. 

But it's not either/or, I hasten to add. Nowadays, we can have our cake and eat it to, be ironic and be ironic about being ironic, which is almost like being serious, except we're being serious while being ironic at the same time. It's nonlinear, non-Aristotelian, as Korzybski would have it, and what some would term postmodern. But media ecology scholars understand that to mean that it is a product of the electronic age.

So, anyway, after seeing that video, it hit me that the motto used by the science fiction humorist Douglas Adams for his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Don't Panic, comes from the same sensibility.   If you're not familiar with the work, it started as a BBC radio program, then was turned into a series of novels, then into a TV miniseries (again BBC), and then adapted into a motion picture somewhat less than faithfully. The film is ok, but the novels and recordings are brilliant comedy, in my opinion. Sadly, Douglas Adams was taken from this world much too soon. 

In case you're not familiar with the Hitchhiker's Guide, and I can't imagine why you wouldn't be, I was pleasantly surprised to find over on YouTube the BBC television adaptation, so here is the first 9 minutes for your viewing pleasure. But if you're the impatient type, the bit about Don't Panic comes up during the first 2 minutes:





So yes, it's very British humor, and that was always very apparent, but I have to confess that the very British quality of the phrase Don't Panic simply never occurred to me until I watched the video about Keep Calm and Carry On.  Maybe I'm just a little slow on the uptake, maybe it's just that Don't Panic is more common to our shared Anglo-American culture than Keep Calm and Carry On? 

Or maybe there is something altogether universal about Don't Panic after all, as it never quite pays to lose your cool, at least not to that extent. But, on the other hand, there is something that seems to be unavoidably specific to Keep Calm and Carry On. Funny how much difference it makes to take similar sentiments and phrase them in negative and positive terms. To avoid the negative seems universal, to promote a positive comes across as particular.

Well, all this speculation is perhaps more than you care for, and maybe it's just me, but I won't worry about it. No, I think I will just keep calm, don't panic, and keep on carrying on...

Plato's Passover

Apart from its other potential benefits in areas such as ethics and spirituality, religion can lead to important insights associated with a media ecology perspective. 

For example, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman mentions how he learned about the Ten Commandments of Moses as a child, presumably in Hebrew School, and was particularly taken with the Second Commandment's prohibition against graven images of any kind, independent of their content, which in practical terms can be said to be the first historical expression of a media ecology approach.

For Walter Ong, as a Jesuit priest learning about religious traditions, he explains how a big breakthrough came for him when he realized that the emphasis on the visual sense, which has it roots in the literate culture of ancient Greece, is not present in the literate culture of ancient Israel, and that a high degree of residual orality persists in Jewish religious tradition, to this day. The visualism that first started to coalesce in Greece and Rome did not fully come to dominant western culture until after the printing revolution begun in the 15th century, but from that point on, it is integral to all that is, or was, distinctive about modern western culture.

Now, Ong and Postman, along with other media ecology scholars such as Marshall McLuhan, have identified Plato's Phaedrus  as including the first form of scholarship in the field of media ecology, insofar as that dialogue includes some discussion of the differences between speech and writing as modes of communication. That discussion is supplemented by further observation in Plato's Seventh Letter.

So now, with all that in mind, I was particularly interested to see a blog post entitled Plato, the Haggada and the Art of Reading written by Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo of the David Cardozo Academy in Jerusalem. The post appeared on March 14, in advance of the Passover holiday, and begins like this:

Now that Jews all over the world will once again assemble around the Seder table and read the Haggada—the story of the exodus from Egypt—it may be worthwhile to put some thought into the art of reading.

In The Phaedrus (275a-278a) and in his Seventh Letter (344c), Plato questioned—and in fact attacked—the written word as being completely inadequate. This may explain why philosophers have scarcely written about the art of writing, although they extensively engaged in that very craft!

It is well known that Plato used to write in the form of dialogues, and it is clear to anyone reading these conversations that his main purpose in doing so was to hide the characteristics of the texts. He worked for years on polishing this literary form. Cicero maintains that Plato actually died at his writing table at the age of eighty one. “Plato uno et octogesimo anno scribens est mortuus.” (1)

The footnote reads: "Cicero, 'On Old Age,' Section 5." And let me note at this point that within the dialogue, it is Socrates who takes this position, and there is at least some question as to whether these are arguments made by Socrates, who left us no written works and appears to us as a champion of orality. Is Plato a reporter, in this sense, relating what Socrates said, or is Socrates just a literary character, a mouthpiece for Plato's own thought? Whether the truth lies more in one direction or another, we can assume that the concerns expressed were those of Plato, but also note the irony that he did in fact put them into writing, or else we would never have known about them.

Okay, back to Rabbi Cardozo...

What bothered Plato was that he believed the written word would fall prey to evil or incompetent readers who would do anything they want with the text, leaving the writer unable to defend or explain himself. He feared the text would take on a life of its own, independent of its author, as is indeed characteristic of the written word. Even more interesting is his observation that a written text actually becomes a “pharmakon”—a drug that can either heal or kill, depending on how it is applied. It may even be used as a prompt, but will ultimately lead to memory loss since it will make the brain idle. Years later, Immanuel Kant wrote along similar lines, saying that the “script” wreaked havoc on the “body of memory.” (2)

This second footnote reads: "Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in Pragmatischer Hinsicht, Suhrkamp, STW 193, Frankfurt am Main, p 489-490." The point about memory is well-taken, of course, and speaks to the fundamental notion of use it or lose it. But beyond memory is the gradual erosion and loss of mnemotechy, of mnemonic techniques that were developed in oral cultures, and continued to be used and supplemented in scribal cultures. That's on the technical side, but Rabbi Cardozo points to a different aspect of memory:

However, according to Plato, this means far more than just losing information, or being deprived of the skill of memorizing. For him, real knowledge was a matter of “intrinsic understanding,” demanding a person’s total presence within what he reads or says. Only that with which I totally identify and which has become united with my Self can be called knowledge and is in-scribed in my whole personality. That which I have simply read or learned superficially is not really knowledge.

This is an important point as well.   We learn, memorize, internalize with our whole body. Ong refers to the Jesuit scholar Marcel Jousse who used the term "verbomotor lifestyle" to refer to this involvement of the whole body. In Jewish tradition, in praying and also in studying Talmud (which Ong mentions), individuals daven, a Hebrew word with the connotation of rocking back and forth, although the denotative meaning is pray. One of our most important prayers, the V'Ahavta (which comes from the book of Deuteronomy) begins with, "And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." In other words, with complete involvement of body, mind, and spirit. And getting back to the point about memory, McLuhan's colleague, Edmund Carpenter, noted that we use the phrase, learning by heart, where heart is a metaphor for the body—it's not just a mental activity.

Alright then, it's time now for Rabbi Cardozo to apply this understanding to the Jewish observance of Passover:

Unwittingly, Plato touched on a most fundamental aspect of the Jewish Tradition. We Jews are called “the people of the book.” But we are not; we are the people of the ear. The Torah is not to be read, but rather is to be heard. It was not written in the conventional sense. It was the Divine word spoken at Sinai, which had to be heard and which afterwards, out of pure necessity, became frozen in a text, but with the sole intention of being immediately “defrosted” through the art of hearing. This, then, became the great foundation of the Jewish Oral Tradition. 

This brings up some interesting points about what went on with God and Moses according to the Torah. My understanding is that God wrote the Torah down on stone tablets, typically depicted as the Ten Commandments, but the Torah has 613 laws all told, plus the narrative that makes up the Five Books of Moses. Traditionally, it's said that the entire Torah was delivered in this way, but whatever it consisted of, the story has it that Moses threw the tablets down when he saw the Israelites worshiping the golden calf, so that they were broken into fragments, then went back up the mount, and the second time around God dictated them and Moses wrote them down in his own hand.

But there's more! By the time of the Roman conquest of Judah, which they renamed Judea, there were two groups vying for dominance . One, the Sadducees, who were members of the upper class, including the priests who controlled the Second Temple, only acknowledged the written law as found in the Torah as a document. The other group was the Pharisees, from whom Rabbinic Judaism emerged, and who have been unfairly maligned within the Christian New Testament (especially given the fact that much of what Jesus says in the New Testament is essentially an extreme Pharisaic position). The Pharisees argued that in addition to the written Torah, God also gave Moses the oral Torah, which is the tradition of oral interpretation of the written text. This allowed for much greater flexibility, and from this comes the document known as the Talmud, which is a written record of that oral tradition.

But note that it is an oral tradition quite different from the oral tradition we associate with oral cultures, but rather an oral tradition that responds to a written text. The answer to Plato's criticism that a text cannot answer questions is this act of interpretation. That is the role of the teacher, and that is what is meant by a rabbi, or in eastern tradition a guru, someone who can speak for, answer for, and interpret a text.

All right now, let's return to Rabbi Cardozo and the distinction between seeing and hearing:

Reading entails using one’s eyes and, as such, the act remains external. The words are not carved into the very soul of the reader. Rabbi Yaakov Leiner, son of the famous Ishbitzer Rebbe, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner, and one of the keenest minds in the Chassidic tradition, speaks about seeing. He makes the valuable observation that sight discloses the external aspect of things while hearing reveals the internal. (3) One must hear a text, not read it. This is the reason why the body of Torah consists of minimum words and maximum oral interpretation.

Footnote 3 reads: "Rabbi Yaacov Leiner, Beis Yaakov: Rosh Chodesh Av." And this is a very important point. Vision gives us exteriors. Voice comes from inside us, with the breath of life, so that the interior is exteriorized, and then internalized again through the act of hearing.

Now, let's return to Rabbi Cardozo and the question of the Talmud as oral tradition:

Still, does the open-endedness of the Torah not present the opportunity for anyone to read his own thoughts into the text and violate its very spirit? The Jewish Tradition responded to this challenge with great profundity. It created an ongoing oral tradition in which unwritten rules of interpretation were handed down, thereby securing the inner meaning of the text while at the same time allowing the student to use all of his creative imagination. Even after the Oral Torah was written down in the form of the Talmud, it remained unwritten, as any Talmud student can testify. No other text is so succinct and “understaffed” in written words while simultaneously given to such vast interpretation. The fact that the art of reading the Talmud can only be learned through a teacher–student relationship, and not merely through the written word, proves our point. Only when the student hears his master’s oral interpretation of the text is he able to read it, because the teacher will not only give him explanations but will also convey the inner vibrations that were once heard at the revelation on Mount Sinai. This is the deeper knowledge that the teacher received from his masters, taking him all the way back to the supreme moment at Sinai. In that way, the student can free himself from a mechanical approach to the text. He will hear new voices in the old text, without deviating from its inner meaning. This will give him the courage to think on his own and rid himself of prejudice. The text, then, is not read but heard.

Given our visualist tradition in the west, we tend to assume that reading means reading silently to ourselves, which transforms us into isolated individuals. Reading out loud binds us together as an audience and community, it creates a relationship, whether it is teacher-student, parent-child, or from a religious perspective, God and humanity. Interpretation, an open approach to meaning-making, is linked to a social, relational approach to understanding, and in some sense in constructing our view of the world, our reality.

At this point, you might be asking, what does all this have to do with Passover. And well you should ask because here is what Rabbi Cardozo has to say:

Jewish law states that even if one is alone on the Seder night, one must pronounce the text of the Haggada and not just read it. He must hear himself, explain the text to himself in a verbal way, and be in continuous dialogue with himself so as to understand and feel what happened thousands of years ago. Plato alluded to this matter without fully realizing why his own teachings never came close to receiving the treatment they perhaps deserved. They are read too much and heard too little.

 As someone who has made a career in higher education, I must note that this has profound implications for education in general, and Postman emphasized the importance of a balance between the spoken and written word that was achieved in the classroom, and how reliance on electronic technologies for teaching might disrupt that balance. If nothing else, it is a point to consider, as is the point about reading out loud even if we are by ourselves, to enter into a dialogue with ourselves.  And from a religious point of view, we are never completely alone, are we?

In that respect, Rabbi Cardozo continues with a discussion of the spiritual dimension of all this:

This may be the difference between the Divine word and the human word. The Divine is a dimension where words have no spiritual space. Human words are too grounded in the text. The Divine word goes beyond these textual limitations and can find its way only through the act of listening, because it is through this particular one of our senses that we are able to hear the “perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore.” (4)

The footnote reads: "Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976) p. 8." The reference to spiritual space in this passage is quite interesting. Whether the space is sacred or profane, writing fixes and freezes language in space. While space is perceived through all the senses, it is most closely connected to vision. Visual space is distinct from acoustic space, a realization central to McLuhan's media ecology (and that of Carpenter as well). But sound is best understood with respect to time rather than space. Sound is an event, a happening, as Ong reminds us, sound is ephemeral and only exists as it is going out of existence. And Ong too notes the intimate connection between the oral-aural world and the sacred.

Rabbi Cardozo concludes with the following:

When we read the text on the Seder night, we should be aware that it only provides the opening words. The real Haggada has no text. It is not to be read, but is rather to be heard. And just as with the Torah, we have not even begun to understand its full meaning. We are simply perpetual beginners.

This is a wonderful sentiment, that we are all learners, all seekers. Jack Goody makes this point about religious understanding in oral cultures, that it is about being a seeker rather than about adhering to fixed dogma. Put another way, the sacred text and the oral tradition are media environments, and as environments they are too vast to fully comprehend or map, but they are open to ongoing exploration.

Rabbi Cardozo ends his post with, "moadim le-simcha," which means happy holidays, and I would like to return the sentiment to him, "chag sameach" (another Hebrew phrase meaning happy holiday), and happy holidays to people of good will of all faiths and beliefs.

To Go the Distance for Autism

You may remember last year's post on this topic, Going the Distance for Autism?  And perhaps you also heard about the latest estimate reported by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, that puts the autism rate at 1 out of 50 children, up from 1 out of 88 just one year ago! When my daughter first was diagnosed, almost a decade and a half ago, the rate was only 1 out of 1000, although soon after it was revised to 1 out of 500!

I should add that whatever the rate is nationwide, it's always much higher in New Jersey, where I live. Part of the reason may have to do with the environment and all of the heavy industry that the state was associated with. But another reason is that New Jersey offers the best services and schools for children with autism, so many families move here when one of their children is diagnosed.

The statistics are shocking! Unbelievable! But terribly, tragically true! And don't forget that children with autism will grow up to be adults with autism. It's a social time bomb about to go off. And I don't think even Obamacare has much in the way of provisions for that eventuality. But whatever problems adults with autism may have to deal with, or that we as a society will have to deal with on their behalf, they will be intensely magnified if they don't get the help they need, beginning in early childhood, as they are growing up.

So, while there are many different ways in which the problem needs to be addressed, one of most important things that anyone can do to help is to support the specialized schools that give children with autism the best chance of leading happy and productive lives. A group of these schools in the New Jersey/New York Metropolitan Area have banded together to raise money for autism education through the annual Go the Distance for Autism fundraiser.

You can help too, if you're so inclined, by visiting my daughter Sarah's page. Just click here. But I'll also share with you what it says over on her page.

Sarah's First Day at EPIC and Sarah Today

Sarah turned 17 a few months ago. Unlike other girls her age, she isn't looking forward to high school graduation, or looking at colleges. She isn't talking about boys, or fashion, or athletics, or any of the many things that teenagers care for. She doesn't talk on the phone or update her status on Facebook or go hang out with her friends.

Because Sarah has autism, we don't have to worry about her going out with other teens, about where she might be going and what she might be doing. But we do worry about what will become of her, about how she will get along as adult, especially when we're no longer around to take care of her. And we worry about her seizures, which come every so often despite the medication she takes. And we worry about her when she's not feeling well, and can't tell us what's wrong.

We worry, but we know that Sarah has made great progress over the years, and continues to do so, working hard with the help of her teachers at EPIC School.

Now, as a 17-year-old, with the help of her teachers at EPIC School, she is learning how to use money, wash dishes, send a text on a cell phone. With the help of her teachers at EPIC School, she goes to Target to practice making a purchase on her own, and goes out to lunch with her classmate Gina every Friday, and orders her own meal. the help of her teachers at EPIC School, she takes part in a supported work program in the community, unpacking boxes, putting clothes on hangers, doing office work. the help of her teachers at EPIC School, Sarah is learning what she needs to know to be a productive citizen, take care of herself to the best of her ability, and live a fulfilling life.

With you help, EPIC will continue to help children with autism like Sarah, children who desperately need the intensive type of assistance that only these kinds of schools can provide. With your help, EPIC will be able to launch an adult program for children like Sarah, for when they turn 21 and age out of the educational system. With your help, Sarah and her classmates will have a chance to live happy and productive lives, which is all that any of us can ask for. With your help. Won't you help?

Having shared that with you, once again you can visit Sarah's page to donate or participate, and any support that you can give, not matter how much, is greatly appreciated. And, of course, please do so only if you are able to, financially and otherwise. Thank you!

Piece of Pi

So, today is Pi Day, being 3-14, and more so, Palindromic Pi Day, being 3-14-13! That's certainly an interesting bit of memery (memeosity?), given that this special occasion was all but unheard before Y2K (remember Y2K?). My guess is that with the millennium, much more attention was paid to dates with interesting numerological qualities, like the recent 12/12/12, the last of its kind until the next century! 

Pi Day also reflects something of a technological mindset, that is a digital sensitivity brought about by the ubiquity of computers, smart devices, and internet connectivity, and the type of techie competence that makes this brave new world go round. Not that there's anything wrong with it, mind you!

But lest you think that it's all math and science and tech, and no art and music, please allow me to remind you that such separations are artificial, and did not exist in antiquity, certainly not among the old Greeks who gave Pi it's name, or rather initial (although ∏ wasn't actually assigned to the value until the 18th century). 

In fact, there are some folks who attempted to turn Pi into a musical composition. Here's one by Michael Blake:





Rather lovely, don't you think? By the way, here's a Pi Chart:

 

A rather amusing visual pun, don't you agree? And guaranteed to give you Pi strain, er, I mean eye strain.  Speaking of strain, let's trade an eye for an ear, but first, listen to what the composer of the piece I'm about to share, Carlos Manuel, writes about it over on YouTube:

There has been many attempts to make a conversion of the digits of Pi to musical notes, but I noticed that the methods used were pretty unrealistic. What they were doing was to convert the 10 digits of the decimal system in 10 notes, and then play them. Of course that doesn't make any sense because our musical notation has 12 notes! So I converted the digits of Pi to the duodecimal system (Base 12), and made a program to play it. Here are the results.

And here they are:



Quite the contrast with the previous piece of Pi, don't you agree? Did you listen to it in its entirety? Well, you might ask, what if you dialed Pi to a 1,000 places as a phone number, and added a bit of extra rhythm in the background? The results are not too bad:






And here's a rather interesting YouTube lecture combined with another take on Pi melodies by one Professor Philip Moriarity (no shoot, Sherlock!):





We may all be coded somewhere in Pi! What a conclusion! Now, here's a rather sweet version, with a synthesized, classical feel that I'd associated with Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman of Yes:





 In the write-up, the composer suggests that, because Pi existed before the human race evolved, and for that matter before life itself originated, this is the oldest song that you might ever hear!  Whether you believe that or not, one thing is for sure, that Pi music can take many forms:





Well, this is just a sampling of the many versions of musical Pi that are out there. But how about something from the movie Pi. No not, Life of Pi, but the 1998 film ∏ written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. Here's the trailer:





Now, there's some media and formal cause for ya (note the plug for the book by Marshall and Eric McLuhan, easily ordered from the box over on the right). So anyway, I hope you had a happy Pi Day!

And what's left to say, but...  3.141592653589793238462643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128 4811174502 8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196 4428810975 6659334461 2847564823 3786783165 2712019091 4564856692 3460348610 4543266482 1339360726 0249141273 7245870066 0631558817 4881520920 9628292540 9171536436 7892590360 0113305305 4882046652 1384146951 9415116094 3305727036 5759591953 0921861173 8193261179 3105118548 0744623799 6274956735 1885752724 8912279381 8301194912 9833673362 4406566430 8602139494 6395224737 1907021798 6094370277 0539217176 2931767523 8467481846 7669405132 0005681271 4526356082 7785771342 7577896091 7363717872 1468440901 2249534301 4654958537 1050792279 6892589235 4201995611 2129021960 8640344181 5981362977 4771309960 5187072113 4999999837 2978049951 0597317328 1609631859 5024459455 3469083026 4252230825 3344685035 2619311881 7101000313 7838752886 5875332083 8142061717 7669147303 5982534904 2875546873 1159562863 8823537875 9375195778 1857780532 1712268066 1300192787 6611195909 2164201989 

et cetera...