The registration fee is $25, free with membership in the Institute of General Semantics, and to the Fordham University community. You can register online on the IGS website.
The dinner preceding the Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture is $90, and we'll have to close off reservations soon. Again, reservations can be made from the IGS website.
So, I hope you come, this is really going to be a great event. And please spread the word! Okay?
Across the Generations: Legacies of Hope and Meaning
An International Conference
Sponsored by the Institute of General Semantics
Co-Sponsored by the
New York Society for General Semantics
Media Ecology Association
Buckminster Fuller Institute
Viewpoints Research Institute
Taos Institute
Friends of the Institute of Noetic Sciences
Lifwynn Foundation for Social Research
Fordham University
September 11-13, 2009
Fordham University
Lincoln Center Campus
Leon Lowenstein Hall
113 W. 60th Street, Corner of Columbus Avenue
New York, New York
All sessions are held in Pope Auditorium unless otherwise specified.
Friday, September 11
8:15 AM Breakfast and Registration Opens
9:00 AM-1:00 PM Generations of Thought and Action
Moderators: Lance Strate, Fordham University
Eva Berger, College of Management, Tel Aviv
9:00 AM "'Shoot Yourself!' Korzybski Said"
Bruce I. Kodish, Institute of General Semantics
9:30 AM "General Semantics Meets Experimental Literature: The Lifelong Effect of Alfred Korzybski on William S. Burroughs"
Graham Rae, RealityStudio.org
10:00 AM "Space Times Square: A Screening"
Barry Vacker, Temple University
10:30 AM "Building Hope for Global Prosperity in 2050"
Tyler Volk, New York University
11:00 AM "Visions of Marshall McLuhan and Northrup Frye: Alchemy and Synergy"
B. W. Powe, York University
11:30 AM "Meme Splicing and Reversals: A Poetry Reading"
Robert Priest, Now Magazine
12 Noon "The Cybernetics of Change, the Media and the Challenge of Sustainability"
Michael Ben-Eli, Sustainability Laboratory
12:30 PM "New New Media"
Paul Levinson, Fordham University
1:00-2:30 PM Lunch Break
2:30-4:30 PM From the Prehistoric to the Cybernetic
2:30-3:30 PM Moderator: Edward Wachtel, Fordham University
"The Human Form as Symbol in 7000 BC"
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, University of Texas, Austin
3:30-4:30 PM Moderator: Corey Anton, Grand Valley State University
"The World of null-W"
Alan Kay, Viewpoints Research Institute
4:30-5:30 PM Minds and Meanings: A Panel Discussion
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Moderator: Thom Gencarelli, Manhattan College
Panelists: Jerome Bruner, New York University
Kenneth Gergen, Swarthmore College/Taos Institute
Renee Hobbs, Temple University
5:30-7:30 PM Dinner Break
AKML Dinner (reservations required)
In the Lowenstein Hall Atrium
on the Plaza Level, off the cafeteria
7:30-9:30 PM The 57th Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture
Introductory Remarks
Lance Strate, Executive Director, Institute of General Semantics
Martin Levinson, President, Institute of General Semantics
Jacqueline Rudig, Vice-President, Institute of General Semantics
John P. Harrington, Dean of Faculty, Fordham University
Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture
"The Changing Shapes of Lives: Making Meaning Across Time"
Mary Catherine Bateson, Institute for Intercultural Studies
Saturday, September 12
8:15 AM Breakfast and Registration Opens
9:00- 11:00 AM Translation and Technology
9:00-10:00 AM Moderator: Alan Hayakawa, The Patriot-News
"The Hidden Side of Babel: Unveiling Cognition, Intelligence and Sense"
Laura E. Bertone, EVOLUCION/University of Buenos Aires
10:00-11:00 AM Moderator: Milton Dawes, Institute of General Semantics
"When the Map Becomes the Territory: Korzybski and Cyberculture"
Thierry Bardini, University of Montreal
11:00 AM-12 Noon Legacies of Hope and Meaning
Moderator: Allen Flagg, President, New York Society for General Semantics/Vice-President, Friends of the Institute of Noetic Sciences
"Buckminster Fuller"
Elizabeth Thompson, Executive Director, Buckminster Fuller Institute and Jaime Snyder, Co-Founder and Former Executive Director
"Neil Postman"
Janet Sternberg, President, Media Ecology Association
"Alfred Korzybski and Marshall McLuhan"
Lance Strate, Executive Director, Institute of General Semantics
12 Noon-1:00 PM Non-Aristotelian Mo(ve)ments
Moderator: Bill Petkanas, Western Connecticut State University
"Peirce as the Philoctetes of Media Ecology"
Paul Ryan, The New School for Social Research
1:00-2:30 PM Lunch Break
Gabriel’s Bar and Restaurant (one of NY’s finest) on 11 West 60th St. (less than a block away) is offering a special prix fixe lunch for conference registrants for $22 (includes appetizer, entre, and dessert; drinks are extra)
2:30-3:45 PM Breakout Sessions
A. Meaning and Hope – Room 506
Moderator: B. W. Powe, York University
"Still Hoping: A Reflection on the Cultural Revolution of the 1960's"
Edward Tywoniak, Saint Mary's College
"In an Age of Extension: Technology as Surgery/Ecology as Mind"
Linda Alford, University of Toronto
"What’s Next: Beyond Electronics—A Speculation On a New Media Age"
Eugene Marlow, Baruch College, City University of New York
"Making New Meanings"
Allen Flagg, Institute of General Semantics/New York Society for General Semantics/Friends of the Institute of Noetic Sciences
B. Science, Health, and Sanity – Room 508
Moderator: Suzanne Schick, Borough of Manhattan Community College
"Human Personhood and Psychology’s Narrative Perspective"
Vincent W. Hevern, Le Moyne College
"From Telegraph to Email: Preserving the Doctor-Patient Relationship In a High-Tech Environment"
Susan M. Wieczorek, University of Pittsburgh
"It's a U-Shaped World: A Batesonian Prescription for Promoting Public Health"
David J. Waters, Purdue University
"The Toxic Aftermath of 9/11: An Update"
Donna Flayhan, State University of New York, New Paltz
C. The Open Society and Its Enemies – Room 510
Moderator: Thierry Bardini, University of Montreal
"Solace in Symbols: Discovering Cultural Meanings in Symbolic Propaganda"
Brian Altenhofen, Fordham University
"Hate, Twenty First Century American Style: The Holocaust Museum Shooting and Our Post World War Two Generation's Message of Hope and Meaning"
Marleen Barr, Fordham University
"Experiment in Democracy"
Steve Keane, Institute of General Semantics
"Literacy and Democracy in Russia"
Yulia Golobokova, Fordham University
4:00-5:15 PM Breakout Sessions
A. Generations of Hope and Meaning – Room 506
Moderator: Bruce I. Kodish, Institute of General Semantics
"The Earth Charter as Invitational Rhetoric: Welcoming Participation to Declare our Responsibility to Future Generations"
Mary Pelak Walch, Florida Gulf Coast University
"Using the Earth Charter and Contemplative Practice to Develop Narratives That Promote Intergenerational Care"
Maria F. Loffredo Roca, Florida Gulf Coast University
"Defining the 20th Century and Impacting the 21st: Semantic Habits Created through Radio and Song"
Susan L. Cook, Metropolitan State College, and Karen Krupar, Metropolitan State College
"Teaching Children"
Michael Aaron Green, Janis Aaron More and Darrel Dean Cook, Institute of General Semantics
B. Popular Songs vs. The Facts of Life: A Roundtable – Room 508
Moderator: Brian Cogan, Molloy College
Panelists: Milton Dawes, Institute of General Semantics
Thom Gencarelli, Manhattan College
Gary Kenton, Marist College
Robert Priest, Now Magazine
John Watts, Morethanmusic
C. Applying General Semantics to Screwed-Up Organizations: A Workshop – Room 510
Moderator: Ben Hauck, IGS, NYSGS
Workshop Leader: Bob Eddy, Institute of General Semantics
5:30-7:00 PM Dinner Break
7:00-10:00 PM Praxis: Musical Performance and Screenings
7:00-8:00 PM Thus Spoke the Spectacle
Moderator: Jackie Rudig, Alverno College
Performers: Eric Goodman and Mike Stevens
8:00-10:00 PM Morethanmusic
Moderator: Robert Berry Francos, FFanzeen Publications
Performer: John Watts
Sunday, September 13
8:15 AM Breakfast and Registration Opens
9:00- 11:00 AM Time-Bindings
Moderators: Janet Sternberg, Fordham University
Martin Levinson, Institute of General Semantics
9:00 AM "The Legacy of Edward T. Hall"
Harvey Sarles, University of Minnesota,
9:30 AM "Playing with Bateson"
Corey Anton, Grand Valley State University
10:00 AM "Chronemics: Time-Binding and Personal Time Construction"
Tom Bruneau, Radford University
10:30 AM "Combat Cuties: A General Semantics Look at Photographs of Women Soldiers in Israel"
Eva Berger, College of Management, Tel Aviv
11:00 AM "How Just is Our System of Justice? Some Challenging Insights Into American Law and Lawyering"
Frank Scardilli, United States Court of Appeals
11:30 AM-12 Noon A Legacy Apart: Screening and Discussion
Moderator: Elizabeth Thompson, Buckminster Fuller Institute
"Drop City: A Documentary in Progress"
Thomas M. McCourt, Fordham University
12 Noon-1:00 PM The Future of Memory
Moderator: Lance Strate, Fordham University
"The Holocaust in 1,000 Years: Moving Into the Future"
Pier Marton, Washington University
1:00-2:30 PM Lunch Break
2:30-3:45 PM Breakout Sessions
A. Of Maps and Territories – Room 506
Moderator: Jacqueline Rudig, Alverno College
"Encountering Resistance: Locative Media, Cultural Informatics, and the Gentrification of the Lower East Side"
David J. Walczyk, Pratt Institute and Ken Petricig, Columbia University
"'I Don't Understand Your Map:' Children's City Maps & City Territories"
Lewis Freeman, Fordham University
"How Past, Present, and Future Live Together in Hope"
Hillel A. Schiller, Institute of General Semantics
"V A S T …Great in Extent or Range," Milton Dawes, Institute of General Semantics
B. Popular Culture and Symbolic Ecologies – Room 508
Moderator: Robert Albrecht, New Jersey City University
"Transforming Soccer Talk in America: The Misapplication of a Formulaic Announcing Methodology"
Aaron J. DeNu, George Washington University
"The Day Michael Jackson Died"
Ben Hauck, Institute of General Semantics/New York Society for General Semantics
"Semantics, General Semantics, and Ecology in Frank Herbert's Dune"
Ronny W. Parkerson, Institute of General Semantics
"Generations of Information and Misinformation: General Semantics and Cultural Memory"
Bill Petkanas, Western Connecticut State University
C. Philosophical Investigations and Non-Aristotelian Perspectives – Room 510
Moderator: Paul Lippert, East Stroudsburg University
"The Logic of Free Will"
Richard S. Messing, Philosophical Counselor
"Bridging the Gap Between Nagarjuna and the University Rhetoric Class: A Guide with Assignments"
Tim Lyons, University of Colorado at Boulder
"How to Get an Aristotelian to Think Outside the Box"
Marla Del Collins, Long Island University
"The Limits of Rationality: a Meta-Analysis"
Blake Victor Seidenshaw, Fordham University
4:00-5:15 PM Breakout Sessions
A. Visual Communication and Image Culture – Room 506
Moderator: Al Auster, Fordham University
"Visual Arguments"
Gerald J. Erion, Medaille College
"The Method of the Medium is in Motion: A Response from a TV Producer Challenging and Embracing Amusing Ourselves to Death 25 Years Later"
Matt Quayle, NBC Universal, CNBC
"The Death of Television"
Margot Hardenbergh, Fordham University
"User-Generated Content: Damaging Visual Language"
Ekaterina Alexandrova, Fordham University
B. Art/Symbol/Technology/Ecology – Room 508
Moderator: Kathy Liepe-Levinson, Hunter College, City University of New York
"Time-Binding in the Lakota Sun Dance: Oral Tradition and Transmission of Generational Wisdom in the Modern World"
Ronan Hallowell, New Roads School
"The Word’s Influence on Painting and Artists Through Generations of Art History"
Lana Deym Campbell, Institute of General Semantics
"The Art of the Animated GIF"
Peter Schmideg, Illumination Gallery
"Privacy and Disclosure in the Blogosphere"
Marian Kozhan, Fordham University
C. Time-Binding as a Human Activity – Room 510
Moderator: Laura E. Bertone, EVOLUCION/University of Buenos Aires
"Traditions and Heritages"
C. A. Hilgartner, Hilgartner & Associates
"Context Matters"
Patricia L Huff, Digital Prospectors
"Transmitting Culture: Telling Family Stories"
Martha A. Bartter, Hilgartner & Associates
"The Pro’s and Con’s of Time-Binding"
Lloyd Gilden, Lifwynn Foundation for Social Reserach
5:30-6:00 PM Concluding Program and Reception
About the Participants:
Robert Albrecht is the author of numerous articles on the relationship of media and culture in both Latin America and here in the United States. Albrecht is the recipient of an Organization of American States Fellowship for study in Brazil as well as the Carlos Vigil Prize for his publications in Latin American popular culture. While a doctoral student in the Media Ecology program at New York University, he served as Arts Editor to ETC. He worked for several years as a music and drama workshop leader with children in Jersey City public schools. Albrecht currently serves on the editorial board of several communication journals and teaches theory and media history courses in the Media Arts Department at New Jersey City University in Jersey City. His book, Mediating the Muse (Hampton Press, 2004) was the winner of the Media Ecology Association's Dorothy Lee Award for outstanding scholarship in the area of cultural ecology. Albrecht is also a musician and poet and has recently released a CD entitled Song of the Poet.
Ekaterina Alexandrova is an MA Student in Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. At the age of 19, Ekaterina began her journalism career as an intern for a TV news program in Russia. The same year, she continued as an anchor and a producer for a daily news show. After a while, it occurred to her that she was skipping too many classes at the School of Journalism in St. Petersburg State University, so she quit her job to dedicate more time to her studies. Instead of becoming a good student though, she started to write for a local newspaper and ended up working there as a deputy editor-in-chief. In addition, after she once appeared as a guest on a youth TV program on Russian National Channel Five, she couldn't help but join the crew as a part-time producer. Shortly, she found herself being done with print and assumed a full-time editor-in-chief and co-anchor on the program. When it occurred to her again that because of her job she was barely attending any classes, she realized she actually graduated years ago. Still frustrated with her academic achievement, she entered a postgraduate Media and Communications program at the University of Westminster in London. Habitually not concentrating on her studies, she kept working and flying back and forth between countries. The only way to stop this nonsense was to enter a school across the ocean, which she did. So, at the age of 27, Ekaterina finished her journalism career and finally started to be a good student. Although, it has to be said that working on TV did permanent damage to her personality.
Linda Alford completed her PhD studies at OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), University of Toronto. Her research interests include understanding the effects of participating in online and wireless environments on group phenomenon in a global context. Her recent doctoral dissertation is entitled The Effects of Online and Wireless Environments on the Human Sensorium.
Brian Altenhofen is an MA student at Fordham University. His academic interests lie within the realm of epistemology, psychology, and the collectively agreed upon cultural cues. He is writing his thesis on the connection of power and happiness according to Thomas Hobbes and Aristotle respectively and television advertising. He mostly enjoys playing and watching sports in his down time.
Corey Anton is an associate professor at Grand Valley State University. He is the author of Selfhood and Authenticity (Winner of the Media Ecology Association's 2004 Erving Goffman Award). His many publications can be found in journals such as Communication Theory, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Human Studies, Semiotica, ETC, American Journal of Semiotics and Atlantic Journal of Communication. He currently serves as the Editor of the journal Explorations in Media Ecology, serves on various editorial boards, and is a trustee on the Board of Directors for the Institute of General Semantics, a member of the Media Ecology Association's Board of Directors, and a Fellow of the International Communicology Institute.
Al Auster teaches in the Communication and Media Studies Department of Fordham University at Lincoln Center. He is the author of five books, the latest of which is thirtysomething: Television, Women, Men and Work (Lexington, 2008).
Thierry Bardini is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, Canada, where he co-directs the Workshop in Radical Empiricism. He holds a degree in agronomy (ENSA Montpellier, 1986) and a PhD in sociology (Paris X Nanterre, 1991). His second book entitled Junkware: The Coming of Homo Nexus is forthcoming in 2010 by the University of Minnesota Press. In 2000, he published Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, via Stanford University Press.
Marleen S. Barr is known for her pioneering work in feminist science fiction and teaches in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. She has won the Science Fiction Research Association Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction criticism. Barr is the author of Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond, Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction and Genre Fission: A New Discouse Practice for Cultural Studies. Barr has edited many anthologies and co-edited the special science fiction issue of PMLA.
Martha A. Bartter is Professor Emerita of English at Truman State University, with a Ph.D from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY. She is the author of The Way to Ground Zero, (Greenwood Press,1988), editor of The Utopian Fantastic (Greenwood Press, 2004), and was Associate Editor for American Literary Publishing Houses, 1900-1990: Trade and Paperback, Volume 46 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography; and American Literary Publishing Houses,1638-1899, Volume 49 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Parts 1 and 2 (Detroit, MI: Bruccoli Clark, Gale Research Co.,1986). She is a member of Science Fiction Writers of America, International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts, Science Fiction Research Association, etc., and author of a number of book chapters, articles, essays, and reviews.
Mary Catherine Bateson is a writer and cultural anthropologist, current president of the Institute for Intercultural Studies in New York, and a visiting scholar at Boston College's Center on Aging and Work. She was educated at Radcliffe (BA 1960) and Harvard (PhD 1963). She was Dean of the Faculty at Amherst College 1980-83. From 1987 to 2002, Bateson was Clarence J. Robinson Professor in Anthropology and English at George Mason University, becoming Professor Emerita in 2002. She has taught at Harvard, Northeastern, Amherst, and Spelman College, as well as overseas in the Philippines and Iran. Bateson's original research interest was in linguistics but more recently she has been interested in how women and men work out individual adaptations to culture change. She is currently exploring the ways in which lifelong learning modifies the rhythms of the life cycle and the interaction between generations. Her books include With a Daughter's Eye (1984), a memoir of her anthropologist parents Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson; Composing a Life (1989); Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way (1994); Full Circles, Overlapping Lives: Culture and Generation in Transition (2000); and, most recently, Willing to Learn: Passages of Personal Discovery (2004) Among the many honors that she has received is an honorary doctorate from Fordham University in 1994.
Michael Ben-Eli is an international consultant on management and organization, focusing on strategy development, organizational design, sustainability, and change management. He graduated from the Architectural Association in London and later received a PhD from the Institute of Cybernetics at Brunel University, where he studied under Gordon Pask. He was a close associate of R. Buckminster Fuller, with whom he collaborated on projects involving research on advanced structural systems and exploration of issues related to the management of technology and world resources for the advantage of all. Dr. Ben-Eli pioneered applications of Systems Thinking and Cybernetics in management and organization. Over the years he worked on synthesizing strategy issues in many parts of the world and in diverse institutional settings, ranging from small high technology firms to multinational enterprises, manufacturing companies, financial institutions, health care and educational organizations, government agencies, NGOs, and international multilateral organizations. In recent years, he has been working primarily on issues related to sustainability and sustainable development, focusing on helping inspire leaders in business, government, community, and youth accelerate a peaceful transition to a sustainable future. He is founder of the Sustainability Laboratory
Eva Berger is Dean of the School of Media Studies at The College of Management Academic Studies, in Tel Aviv, Israel. She also has served as a consultant to public and private organizations, and written programs of study for Israel's school system. Dr. Berger was a member of the Israel Film Council from 2000-2006, and an advisor to Israel's Educational Television on children's programs. She holds a BA in Film and Television from Tel Aviv University, and an MA and PhD in Communication (Media Ecology) from New York University.
Laura Bertone was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she started working as a conference interpreter as soon as she finished the Teachers' Training College. She then settled in Paris where she worked as an AIIC professional conference interpreter for twenty years. There she obtained her PhD in Linguistics from Paris University VIII in 1983 and carried on her research. She returned to Argentina in the mid-nineties and set up a consulting firm – EVOLUCION - devoted to improving communicational processes. She is a certified teacher of general semantics, a former Trustee of the Institute of General Semantics, and a Visiting Professor at the Master's Degree Program in Translation and Interpretation - School of Translators – Faculty of Law, University of Buenos Aires. She is the author of numerous articles mainly on linguistics and education, co-author with Patrick Lagadec of Voyage au Coeur d'une Implosion, Paris-Eyrolles, 2003 - and its translation Ruptura y Reconstrucción. Lo que la experiencia argentina nos enseña, Buenos Aires : Evolución, 2003, and author of En torno de Babel Bs. As.: Hachette, 1989 and of The Hidden Side of Babel, Evolucion, Buenos Aires, 2006, the latter being the winner of the first Samuel I. Hayakawa Book Prize in 2009.
Tom Bruneau constructs new communication theories. He has worked in the areas of silence, silences, and silencing; empathy; and, chronemics ( the study of time, timing, and tempo in human communication). His major areas of teaching have been in the areas of nonverbal communication and intercultural communication.
Jerome Bruner is a University Professor at New York University. He teaches principally in the NYU School of Law -- mostly on the relation between law, culture, and mind. Professor Bruner has spent many years studying and writing about the interaction of mind and culture. He has taught principally at Harvard, Oxford, and New York University and was one of the founders of the "cognitive revolution." He received his PhD from Harvard in 1941 and has since been awarded many honors including the Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association and the International Balzan Prize. His former students now occupy distinguished professorial chairs in America, Europe, and Africa. His most recent book is Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (2002).
Lana Deym Campbell was born as Countess Svietlana Deym von Stritez, scion of a 13th Century feudal Czech-Austrian family recorded in the Gotha Almanac, a part of the Habsburg Empire. The Deyms were known as Austrian Ambassadors, artists and art supporters of many greats throughout history, including Beethoven and Mozart. In addition, her uncle (brother of grandmother) Rene d'Harnoncourt was the first director of MOMA (Museum of Modern Art, NYC), and her cousin Anne d'Harnoncourt was Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art until her recent death in '08. Lana's artistic family was a large influence on her art. Another influence was her exposure to many cultures and languages, as she grew up in South America and later lived in Germany, Austria, and London. An early inspiration was Salvador Dali, who upon meeting her in Cadaques, Spain in the summer of 1970, called her "one of the most talented persons he had ever met." Lana pursued art education in 1978 from the National Academy of Fine Arts, NYC, where she studied anatomy, drawing and painting under the foremost social realist painter of the USA, Harvey Dinnerstein, and other notable painters, such as Colleen Browning and Serge Hollenbach. She excelled at the Academy, winning the Dr. Ralph Weiler Prize and the William Auerbach-Levy Prize, judged by known artists & critics. Her painting was featured on the cover of the Academy's annual publication in 1978. She studied Old Masters in Florence Italy. She is an avid devotee of philosophy as well as advances in science, physics. She is also a poet and a scriptwriter. In Rhode Island, she practices Kung Fu, meditation and has been an activist for social causes and the environment. In New York, Lana exhibited at the National Academy of Fine Art and the National Arts Club. In Rhode Island, her work has been represented by Lenore Gray and has been shown by the Bert Gallery, the Pawtucket Arts Center, the Newport Art Museum, the Z Gallery and other venues. Recently her paintings were featured in the Southern New England Film Art and Music Festival, SENE. She has been auctioned online at Sotheby's, NYC, where she is represented by Keisha Hayle, of the Kish Galleries in NYC. She has a large online following of her paintings at
Brian Cogan is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Molloy College in Long Island, New York. He is the author, co-author and co-editor of numerous books, articles and anthologies on popular culture, music and the media. His specific areas of research interest are punk rock, comic books, media ecology and the intersection of politics and popular culture. He is the author of The Punk Rock Encyclopedia (Sterling 2008), co-author with Tony Kelso of The Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Media and Politics (Greenwood Press 2008) as well as co-editor with Tony Kelso on an anthology from Lexington Press, Mosh the Polls: Youth Voters, Popular Culture, and Democratic Engagement (Lexington 2008), about youth culture and political involvement. Dr. Cogan is also the co-author, along with William Phillips, of the Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal Music and Culture (Greenwood Press 2009). He has written about these topics for publications such as the New York Post, Chunklet, Go Metric, Punknews.org and Muze.com. He is currently working on a new project, a history of punk in film over the last thirty years.
Darrel Dean Cook graduated from the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, 1977, with a BA in Sociology with emphasis on Comparative Religions. Dean began studying General Semantics in the late 1970s with one of Ida Rose's students, Charles Davis, and after a year, he met and began studying with Ida Rose until 1982. He owned and operated a successful small business in Seattle until 2000 and retired in 2002. Currently he resides with friends in Bisbee, Arizona.
Susan Cook received her PhD in l997 from the University of Denver, has taught at five universities, and has been Associate Professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver since l994. She has been the Director of the Applied Communication graduate program at the University of Denver, and the Director of the Public Relations Degree program at Gonzaga University. She has published numerous articles on human communication, online communication, health and well-being, and online teaching. completed community-related healthcare for HealthOne, conducted a multicultural audit of HealthOne facilities in Aurora, CO, and completed consulting with Coors Brewery regarding a conflict resolution program and its assessment.
Milton Dawes has over the past 35 years, given seminar-workshops to organizations, colleges, students, professionals, and others, in America, Canada, and Australia. He has presented papers at 5 International Conferences on General Semantics. Dawes brings to his seminar-workshops experiences gained from his many involvements. He draws on a wide range of skills and experiences from his diverse interests to enliven his work, and is a former member of The Jamaica National Dance Theatre Company, member of the Jamaica Pistol Team to the Pan American Games in 1967, musician in a 60s Jamaican rock and roll band, and others. Many of his articles on general semantics practice has been published in ETC. Others can be found at
Marla Del Collins holds a PhD in Arts and Humanities in Education, Department of Culture and Communication, an MA in Educational Theatre, Department of Music and Performing Arts Professionals, New York University, and a BFA. in Dramatic Arts from the Creative Arts Center, West Virginia University. Her mentors were Virginia Woolf scholar Mitchell Leaska, and education visionary Neil Postman. She is currently a tenured associate professor of human communication studies at Long Island University specializing in dynamical systems theories as they relate to all aspects of human discourse, creative process, experiential learning and emergent curricula models. She also conducts interactive seminars in communication skills and creative problem solving through her consulting practice, Dragonfly Dynamics. She has published peer reviewed articles in Negotiation Journal, Women and Language Journal, Journal of Human Communication, Journal of the Illinois Speech and Theatre Association, and New Dimensions in Communication. Her books in the works include Dragonfly Tales, A Primer for the 21st Century (making dynamical systems of interpretation, including general semantics, easy to understand as told through the adventure parables of a fish and dragonfly), and In Quest of the Holy Male (time-travel thriller documenting the creative process as a generative form of order among other amazing discoveries about the human conditions). As a professional thespian and published playwright she holds membership with Actor's Equity, Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists; and she is also an associate member of the New York Dramatist Guild. Her tenure at the Stella Adler Studio of Dramatic Arts afforded her the opportunity to apprentice with Stella Adler. She is a member of the Actors Studio and studied at the Theatre Institute with Lee Strasberg. She also apprenticed with Uta Hagen at the HB Studio, and studied Shakespeare with Mario Siletti at the National Shakespeare Conservatory. Her one-woman play Houses of Jasper Streets of Gold (celebrating a legacy of three generations of Irish-American working women), was published in Ais Eire Journal (1979), and performed at Joseph Papp's Public Theatre, Celebrating the 100 Year Anniversary of Sean O'Casey, Walter Bruno Theatre at Lincoln Center, American Place Theatre, Labor Theatre, Town Hall, The Project Theatre, Dublin Ireland, and at various community theatres and institutions of higher learning (1979-89). Her one-woman play, The Lovers and Others of Eugene O'Neill (profiling the life and times of Eugene O'Neill from the perspective of the predominant women in his life), was highlighted in O'Neill's People (1995); produced at the International Conference on O'Neill's People, sponsored by the Eugene O'Neill Society, Suffolk University, Boston (May 1995), produced at the Arts and Letters Festival, East Stroudsburg University (1994), and The Black Box Theatre, New York University (1993), and is up for consideration for the next issue of Best American Short Plays, Applause Publishing.
Aaron DeNu holds a position in communication and technology management at The George Washington University in Washington, DC, where he supervises the development and implementation of communication, marketing, and new media strategies for students, alumni and their employers/contractors. He previously served as a consultant in New York City for a company offering educational technology solutions in such areas as change management, instructional design and sales strategy for clients in the private, public and governmental sectors. Aaron was Jesuit-educated at Fordham University in New York City, where his Master of Arts degree coursework (under the direction of Dr. Lance Strate) provided insight into communication and media ecology. His master's thesis focused on "Interface Technologies." Aaron completed additional graduate coursework at Harvard University and his academic presentations also extend to Boston College. Aaron's undergraduate degree was from Wilmington College in Ohio, where, as an Academic All-Ohio, collegiate soccer player, he majored in computer science and history. He is currently enrolled in graduate coursework in linguistics in George Washington University's Anthropology Department in Washington DC
Bob Eddy was the corporate Personnel Director for Levi Strauss' 26,000 employees, holds a BS and MBA. from UCLA, served as a Lieutenant, Senior Grade in the Navy, co-founded the Leeds & Northrup Development Institute, published articles in Training & Development Journal and Training Magazine, holds Beta Gamma Sigma and Mensa honors, led Drexel University's Continuing Education Advisory Board, won the National Bureau of Standards' presentation award, and was selected by the students as Rosemont College's first Facilitator of the Year.
Gerald J. Erion is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Medaille College in Buffalo. His work covers topics in ontology, philosophy of mind, and moral philosophy; he also writes on philosophy and popular culture, and his current research includes a project on visual argumentation.
Allen Flagg is a trustee of the Institute of General Semantics, Chair of its Education Committee, and winner of the 2008 J. Talbot Winchell Award. He is the President of the New York Society for General Semantics, and Vice-President of the Friends of the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
Donna Flayhan is Associate Professor of Communication and Media at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Flayhan's areas of expertise are in both cultural studies with an emphasis in media ecology and public health with an emphasis in toxins, toxic synergy, and public policy. Working on Gulf War Syndrome in the 1990s, Flayhan was a contributor and signatory on the "1999 Consensus Statement" on Gulf War Syndrome and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (Archives of Environmental Health) that has since become the standard definition used around the world. In 2004 Flayhan moved to New York to work on the Toxic Aftermath of 9/11 founding The Lower Manhattan Public Health Project. Flayhan's expertise in toxic synergy and acceleration of disease states has gained international acclaim and she has presented her work in a variety of forums including the Council of Europe (Warsaw, Poland 2007). Flayhan appeared in the A&E Documentary 9/11's Toxic Dust (2007) explaining the illnesses emerging in the toxic wake of 9/11. Flayhan continues to work on educating Medical Professionals and the general public on the health implications of the most toxic urban disaster (9/11/2001) in world history.
Robert Barry Francos came to General Semantics through his degree at NYU in media ecology under Neil Postman. His involvement in music writing and photography goes back further, since the very early punk movement (ask, and he’ll tell you stories) and continues on to singer-songwriter, folk, jazz, and yes, even some punk. He published an early music magazine, FFanzeen, from 1977 to 1988, and has been involved in media since, including a very popular blog (ffanzeen.blogspot.com) and the “Quiet Corner” column for one of the longest running fanzines (jerseybeat.com). He has also been the official unofficial photographer for Media Ecology since 1991, and for the Institute of General Semantics’ fall gathering as of last year. Robert is a New York native, but has recently relocated to Saskatoon.
Lewis Freeman (PhD, Columbia University) teaches in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University's Rose Hill campus in the Bronx. He received the 2008 Urban Communication Foundation Prize for Translational Communication Research for his work on children's conceptions of cities. He is a communication consultant, the former Director of the Speech Program at Columbia University, and currently serves on the boards of the Eastern Communication Association and the New York State Communication Association. He is interested in social structure and social forms at a macro level and social interaction at a micro level. His book, Sitcom Society (Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008) examines the symbolic representation of social class and social mobility in situation comedy and the conspicuous absence of social structure and social processes in the manifest content of sitcoms. His theoretical perspective follows from the work of Georg Simmel and others who examine underlying social forms to gain insight into individual social interaction and identity formation.
Thom Gencarelli is the Chair of the Communication Department at Manhattan College in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, New York. He is the Vice President of the Media Ecology Association and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute of General Semantics. He is currently working on a book about language and cognitive development, and his music CD with his ensemble, Bluerace, was released this past June.
Kenneth J. Gergen is a Senior Research Professor at Swarthmore College, and President of the Taos Institute. He is internationally known for his writings on social construction, culture and technology, and relational theory and practice. Among his major works are Realities and Relationships, The Saturated Self, and An Invitation to Social Construction. His latest work, Relational Being, Beyond Self and Community, develops a relational ontology of being, redefines the nature of psychological process, and applies these views to practices of education, therapy, organizational change, and moral action. Gergen has received numerous awards for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Alexander Humboldt Foundation. He has received honorary degrees in both the U.S. and Europe.
Yulia Golobokoba is a graduate student in Public Communication at Fordham University. A Fulbright scholar from Moscow, Russia, her academic interests include the influence of media in the development of democratic tendencies in non-democratic countries. She has a degree in Journalism from Moscow State University's School of Journalism and hopes her work might someday be used to improve the situation in her home country.
Eric Goodman is a musician, writer, and videomaker living in New York City. His series of conceptual music videos, Thus Spoke The Spectacle, fuses original compositions, filmed and found footage, and dialogue from the fields of media studies, literature and philosophy. Drawing upon a wide range of theories, Eric's writings and videos explore the meaning and effects of our corporate-controlled, media-saturated, technological society. Eric is a graduate of Cornell University, where he led off the first annual MIDI Madness Digital Music Festival. He has studied electronic music, music composition, video production and film scoring at Cornell and the Center for the Media Arts.
Michael A. Green, born in New York, was a self-taught student of general semantics, psychology, mythology, and philosophy for several years before he met Ida Rose Barber. He was particularly helpful to Ida Rose in her last year of research (1981 -1982).
Ronan Hallowell is a high school teacher and independent scholar who writes and speaks on topics related to cognitive science, media, education, philosophy and intercultural communication. Before becoming a high school teacher, Ronan worked in the music and Internet industries and performed as a dance music DJ and as a singer of Lakota Sioux songs for public education events and traditional ceremonies. While he was earning his BA in economics at Boston College, he served as General Manager and Program Director of WZBC-FM, Rolling Stone magazine's number one college radio station for 1991. Ronan received an MA in philosophy and religion from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco where he wrote a thesis on the Native American Sun Dance ceremony. Since 2001 he has taught social science and history at public, charter and independent schools in Kauai and Los Angeles. In addition to his formal education, Ronan was taught by his parents to be a life-long learner and to be a practitioner of the Golden Rule. He is proud that he nursed both of his parents through their dying process in his family home in Santa Monica, CA.
Margot Hardenbergh received her PhD in media ecology from New York University, has written a number of book chapters on television, journalism ethics, and women in media. She is currently on the faculty at Fordham University serving as Associate Chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Rose Hill. She recently received the Jacques Ellul Award for activism from the Media Ecology Association and is President of Branford Community Television, and Co-Chair of the Connecticut Alliance For Community Media.
Alan R. Hayakawa is co-author, with S.I. Hayakawa, of the fifth edition of Language in Thought and Action and, with Toby Fulwiler, of The Blair Handbook and The College Writer's Reference. His career in journalism included reporting on local, state and national politics and writing about art, architecture and urban design for The Oregonian, Newhouse News Service in Washington, DC, and The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa., where as online editor he helped transition the newsroom into electronic publication.
Vincent W. Hevern, SJ, PhD is Professor of Psychology at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York. Fr. Hevern trained as a clinical psychologist and worked in a clinical service context in New York City before moving to Le Moyne in 1991 as a fulltime instructor. His principal scholarly interests lie in discursive and narrative approaches in the social sciences, dialogical aspects of identity development and the self, and the role of emerging online environments and other media in the construction of the self. A Fellow of the American Psychological Association, he is currently completing a book on the theoretical and historical foundations of the narrative perspective in psychology.
C. Andrew Hilgartner, born and raised in Austin, TX, majored in biology at Amherst College, graduating cum laude in 1954. In 1958, he received his MD degree from Johns Hopkins Medical School. While still in high school, Hilgartner declared himself a scientist, and committed himself to revise, or reject and replace the current inadequate theories of biology and behavior. That project has become a lifelong quest, marked by some small successes. Hilgartner started reading Science and Sanity about a week before Korzybski coagulated. These writings provided him with a foundation for his explorations, and enabled him to disclose a previously unknown and unsuspected, untenable assumption encoded in the grammar common to the western Indo-European languages. Rejecting that assumption enabled him to derive a rudimentary "grammar" from the non-Aristotelian premises, on which he and a collaborator built up a "Let's Keep Track of What We Say" notation. This notation assumes a strictly dynamic Cosmos with living organisms, including humans, in it. We now have a novel notational language, based on korzybskian premises, but have not yet generated a discursive language on these premises. Since then, his work has had two parallel foci: a) to disclose more of the structuring and assumptions of Western science in particular, and to uncover and display the implications, including the species-suicidal and pan-biocidal ones; and b) to generate a coherent frame of reference based on the korzybskian premises. Dr. Hilgartner infers that if and when anyone succeeds in making even a first approximation to such a frame of reference, complete with a discursive language, that the human species could recover a diversity of respectful, grateful, viable, sustainable, life-affirming ways for humans to live. Interested parties can download most of Dr. Hilgartner's extensive bibliography on his web page:
Renee Hobbs is one of the leading authorities on media literacy education in the United States. She is a professor of communication at Temple University's School of Communications and Theater, where she founded the Media Education Lab. Her book, Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English is the first large-scale empirical look that shows how media literacy education strengthens reading comprehension and critical analysis skills. Over 20 years, she helped to support the development of the media literacy community in the United States, co-founding the national membership organization and serving as co-editor of the new open-access online Journal of Media Literacy Education. To promote a better understanding of how the doctrine of fair use supports the use of copyrighted materials for teaching and learning, she helped develop the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, in a project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her new book, Conquering Copyright Confusion, will be be published in 2010 by Corwin/Sage. Hobbs has created numerous award-winning multimedia curriculum materials to strengthen students' critical thinking and media composition skills in relation to mass media, popular culture and digital media. She has worked with state departments of education in Texas, Maryland, North Carolina and Pennsylvania to offer staff development programs for K-12 teachers. Hobbs also created the nation's first national teacher education program for media literacy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1993. She earned an EdD from Harvard University in Human Development, MA in Communication and BA in English Literature and Film/Video Studies from the University of Michigan.
Patricia Huff was born in Lincoln, Nebraska and raised in the US, Germany and France as an Air Force brat, has a BS in Applied Mathematics from Brown University 1971; and an MS in Operations Research from the University of California at Berkeley, 1976. She works85-09+ designing data warehouses to answer questions not known during design for advertising, airlines, health, insurance, government, publishing, telecommunications, and transportation by making context explicit; advocates85-09+ revising our dominant culture for sustainability of the biosphere through participation in Surviving Our Culture and Network for New Culture; studies72-09+ general semantics since Van Vogt's quotes referred her to Science and Sanity; teaches85-09+ Magnified Healing and Manifestation Acceleration Technique personal growth courses; presented a guided meditation at an International Conference on Guerilla Linguistics in Toronto; and published a poem and essay on writing in One Among More Than Two.
Alan Kay is one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing, and graphical user interfaces. His contributions have been recognized with the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering1 "for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers," the Alan. M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery "for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing," and the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation "for creation of the concept of modern personal computing and contribution to its realization." This work was done in the rich context of ARPA and Xerox PARC with many talented colleagues. While at the ARPA project at the University of Utah in the late 60s, he invented dynamic object-oriented programming2, was part of the original team that developed continuous tone 3D graphics, was the co-designer of the FLEX Machine3, an early desktop computer with graphical user interface and object-oriented operating system, participated in the design of the ARPAnet, and inspired by children4, conceived the Dynabook, a laptop personal computer for children of all ages. At the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the early 70s he invented Smalltalk, the first completely object-oriented programming, authoring and operating system (which included the now ubiquitous overlapping window interface), instigated the bit-map screen, screen painting and animation, participated in desk-top publishing, other desktop media, and the development of the Alto1, the first modern networked personal computer. This was part of the larger process at PARC that created an entire genre of personal computing including: the GUI, Ethernet, Laserprinting, modern word processing, client-servers and peer-peer networking. He has a BA in Mathematics and Biology with minor concentrations in English and Anthropology from the University of Colorado, 1966. MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science (1968 and 1969, both with distinction) from the University of Utah. In January of 2009 he was named an ACM Fellow by the The Association for Computing Machinery. He has been a Xerox Fellow, Chief Scientist of Atari, Apple Fellow, Disney Fellow, and HP Senior Fellow. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at UCLA. In 2001 he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to children and learning
Steve Keane lives in the Philadelphia suburb of Hatboro with his wife, Kelly, and their nine-month old son, Alex. His experience with general semantics started when he was very young and his mother would read him Robert Heinlein's novels for juveniles, which freely incorporated many elements of the non-Aristotelian perspective. By the time he had S.I. Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action assigned in a college journalism class, he was already familiar with many of the foundational elements of the discipline. The birth of his son has inspired Steve to formally study general semantics and to begin re-reading some of the major works of his favorite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. He hopes to be able to 'de-program' Alex from some of the more automatic reactions that social living seems to imprint upon our nervous systems.
Bruce Kodish began studying Korzybski's work around 1965 while still in his early teens, although he began his association with the Institute of General Semantics in 1979 with his first two-week Institute seminar-workshop. Since that time, he has served the Institute as a writer, editor, teacher, and seminar administrator, as well as trustee. He received his teacher certification in korzybskian general semantics from the Institute of General Semantics in 1992. With his wife, Susan Presby Kodish he wrote the acclaimed modern introduction to general semantics, Drive Yourself Sane, which the Institute first published in 1993, and whose second revised edition came out in 2001. He helped edit the 5th Edition of Science and Sanity, published in 1994. When she retired from teaching, his mentor Charlotte Schuchardt Read asked him to succeed her in providing the nonverbal aspect of training at Institute seminar-workshops, in addition to his other teaching roles. In 1996, he received a PhD in applied epistemology/general semantics from The Union Institute Graduate School in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1998, Bruce and Susan received the IGS's esteemed J. Talbot Winchell Award "for their contributions severally and together to the wider understanding of general semantics as authors, editors, teachers, leaders." A working physical therapy clinician, Bruce has written two other general semantics related books, Back Pain Solutions and Dare To Inquire. He is now completing a biography of Alfred Korzybski—the first book-length treatment ever done—which he began working on in mid-2004.
Marian Kozhan is a technical writer in the pharmaceutical industry. She holds an undergraduate degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Rutgers University and an MA in Public Communications from Fordham University.
Karen R. Krupar is an NDEA Fellow who earned her PhD in l967 at the age of 23 at the University of Denver. She has taught at 11 universities (tenured at three), and is presently a Professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver, where she has taught for 20 years. She is the Director of U.S. Federal Title III, for Faculty Development at Metropolitan State, and Director of the Academy for Teaching Excellence. She has published two books (Communication Games, Free Press, 1976; Public Speaking, 1994), three book chapters on diversity and conflict, service learning, and adjunct faculty rights; and an article on diversity and unintended outcomes of campus computing programs.
Martin H. Levinson is the President of the Institute of General Semantics, the Vice President of the New York Society for General Semantics, and the Book Editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He is the author of three books on general semantics: The Drug Problem: A New View Using the General Semantics Approach (2002), Sensible Thinking for Turbulent Times (2006), and Practical Fairy Tales for Everyday Living (2007). He holds a PhD in Organizational and Administrative Studies from NYU.
Paul Levinson is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City. His eight nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge (1997), Digital McLuhan (1999), Realspace (2003), and Cellphone (2004), have been the subject of major articles in the New York Times, Wired, the Christian Science Monitor, and have been translated into ten languages. New New Media, exploring blogging, Twitter, YouTube and other "new new" modes of communication, will be published by Penguin Academics in the fall of 2009. His science fiction novels include The Silk Code (1999, winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel), Borrowed Tides (2001), The Consciousness Plague (2002), The Pixel Eye (2003), and The Plot To Save Socrates (2006). His short stories have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Edgar, and Sturgeon Awards. Paul Levinson appears on The O'Reilly Factor (Fox News), The CBS Evening News, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (PBS), Nightline (ABC), and numerous national and international TV and radio programs. He reviews the best of television in his InfiniteRegress.tv blog, and was listed in The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Top 10 Academic Twitterers" in 2009.
Katherine Liepe-Levinson's credits include Broadway actress, professor of theatre at Colgate University and Hunter College, a theatre in education vendor for the New York City Department of Education, and writer/photographer for journals such as The Drama Review and ETC. She holds a PhD in Theatre from the Graduate School at CUNY and is the author of Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire (Routledge, 2002).
Paul Lippert is Professor of Communication Studies at East Stroudsburg University, and was Managing Editor of ETC under Neil Postman for close to a decade. He teaches courses on film, media, and communication, and is currently researching the rise and fall of modernity.
Tim Lyons, born in Boston and currently residing in Boulder, Colorado, teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado. He also does freelance writing, astrological counseling, and lecturing. He has practiced Buddhism under the direction of Tibetan teachers since 1980. He has published articles or book reviews in Chrysalis, East-West, The Vajradhatu Sun (now The Shambhala Sun), Maryknoll, American Astrology, The Mountain Astrologer, Vocabula, ETC, and other publications.
Eugene Marlow's management experience includes 11+ years at Citicorp, Prudential Insurance, and Union Carbide Corporation, working primarily in Corporate Communications/Public Affairs departments. At Union Carbide, Dr. Marlow staffed and helped design and supervise the construction of a $3 million media production department, including video, audio, and graphic operations. Dr. Marlow has accumulated 28+ years of teaching and training experience in academic and professional development settings, including 24 years teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in liberal arts, media, and business at Baruch College, Fordham University, and Merced College (California). Professor Marlow is founding webmaster of Baruch College's Weissman School of Arts and Sciences website, senior co-chair of the Annual Milt Hinton Jazz Perspectives Concert series (now in its 18th year), and former chair of the Annual Veterans Day Recognition luncheon. He is current treasurer of the Jazz Journalists Association, and former Director, Media Relations of the New York Composers Circle. Professor Marlow has authored eight books dealing with communications, technology and culture and 125+ articles and chapters in professional and academic journals and web sites published in the United States, Germany, Greece, Japan, China, and Russia. Dr. Marlow is also engaged in the field of the performing arts. To date, Marlow has composed over 200 classical and jazz pieces for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and big band. His four critically acclaimed CDs have been aired on radio stations in 22 countries. He is also founder/leader of The Gene Marlow Ensemble and The Heritage Ensemble. Numerous ensembles have performed his classical and jazz compositions, including the Bobby Sanabria Big Band that recorded his composition "El Ache de Sanabria" on the 2007 Grammy-nominated album "Big Band Urban Folktales." Professor Marlow has earned five academic degrees in English, general management, media studies, and music composition, including an MBA (Golden Gate University) and a PhD (New York University).
Pier Marton (MFA, UCLA) is a videomaker/new media artist and writer, and Senior Lecturer in the Program in Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He has taught courses in film and video production as well as computer graphics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where he also served as chairperson of the production program), UCLA, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Indiana University, among others. Issues of ethnicity, spirituality, audience passivity, and violence have been recurring themes in his video works. His exhibits include the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Jewish Museum in N.Y.C., the Beaubourg Museum in Paris, and a variety of other international venues like the Berlin Film Festival and French Television. Mr. Marton's works are in the collections of the MoMA. in New York, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, the Beaubourg in Paris, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Japan Victor Corporation Archives in Japan. He is the recipient of various grants from the N.E.A. and other funding agencies. For more information about Pier Marton and his work, see his website,
Tom McCourt is an associate professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University. He is the author of Conflicting Communication Interests in America: The Case of National Public Radio (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999) and co-author (with Patrick Burkart) of Digital Music Wars: Ownership and Control of the Celestial Jukebox (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). Tom first encountered the story of Drop City more than 30 years ago and has extensively researched its history and significance.
Richard Messing is a practical philosopher dedicated to codifying the necessary and sufficient principles for curing chronic personal problems. In 2008, three years of interdisciplinary research culminated in a new semantic framework referred to by Mr. Messing as The Logic of Free Will. As a philosophical counselor, Mr. Messing teaches The Logic of Free Will and coaches clients in its application as a service for curing chronic personal problems. Mr. Messing spoke at the American Philosophical Association 2008 eastern division annual conference, where he presented a paper entitled, "Logic and Critical Thinking: A Prescription for Curing Chronic Personal Problems". Mr. Messing is affiliated with the American Society of Philosophy, Counseling and Psychotherapy. Richard Messing has an MBA degree in finance from Baruch College and a BA degree in experimental psychology from The State University of New York at Stony Brook. After spending three years exploring a career in computer programming, Mr. Messing became a strategic sales professional in the high tech sector, working at Intel Corporation for fifteen years. Mr. Messing is self-employed as a philosophical counselor, specializing in personal and interpersonal effectiveness.
Janis A. Moore began learning about General Semantics after meeting Michael Green and continued her studies in 1981-1982 with Ida Rose Barber.
Ronny Parkerson was first introduced to the discipline of general semantics while studying S. I. Hayakawa's Language In Thought and Action as an undergraduate at Texas A&M University, Commerce, Texas, in the mid-1960s. He considers himself fortunate to have heard Dr. Hayakawa speak during this period on the effects of language and social control. Mr. Parkerson received his BS degree in Psychology and English in 1967, and his Master of Liberal Arts degree from Texas Christian University in 1984. During the past 40 plus years, Mr. Parkerson has held positions as a naval intelligence officer, independent CPA, civil service employee, and educator. He and his wife Terrell are retired and live in Richmond, Virginia.
Bill Petkanas is the Editor of ETC: A Review of General Semantics and Professor of Communication at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury. His interest in general semantics started as an undergraduate and continued through graduate school. He studied with Neil Postman at New York University, and received a PhD in media ecology. He teaches a course in general semantics at Western Connecticut State University called "Language & Communication."
Ken Petricig, MLIS, is the Quality Assurance Specialist for Columbia University's Center for New Media Teaching & Learning. Previously, he worked for several years at the Columbia University Libraries. His research has focused on website usability and digital resource creation and evaluation.
B.W. Powe is the author of the influential non-fiction books The Solitary Outlaw, Towards a Canada of Light, Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, the novel Outage and the book of poetry, The Unsaid Passing. The latter was a finalist for the ReLit Prize. His current nonfiction work in progress is Visions of Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. His novella, These Shadows Remain is to appear in 2009. He was the program coordinator for three significant symposia—Marshall McLuhan: What If He Was Right? (2007), The Trudeau Era (1998), and Living Literacies (2002), all held at York University. He has been working to establish the McLuhan Centre for the Study of Literacies at York, where he is a Professor of English. He lives in Stouffville, with his two children.
Robert Priest, also known as Dr. Poetry on CBC's Wordbeat is the author of 16 books of poetry and numerous CDs. He has performed his exciting mix of poems and songs all over the world. His words have been debated in the legislature (see the video at youtube/greatbigfaced), turned into a hit song, posted in the Transit system, broadcast on MuchMusic, released on numerous CDs, quoted by politicians and widely published in text books and anthologies. A literary poet in the tradition of Neruda and Mayakovsky, a composer of lush love poems, and a widely quoted aphorist Robert Priest is also a mainstay of the spoken word circuit both in Canada and abroad. His aphorisms have found their way into The Farmer's Almanac and Colombo's Canadian Quotations. His 'spoken word' video/single "Congo Toronto" received nation-wide airplay on MuchMusic for over three months in 1986, and established for Priest a unique place in the poetry/music canon. Rotweiller Pacifist, 1988, continued the tradition with a collection of twenty spoken word pieces, many of them accompanied by tracks and beats. Robert's 3rd spoken word CD, Tongue'n'Groove, was released on EMI's prestigious Artisan label in 1998. This collection which 'straddles the crossroads of folk, funk and the word' establishes Priest once and for all as a major artist in the field. In 1989, his collection of poems, The Mad Hand, was the recipient of the Milton Acorn People's Poetry award. Robert lives in Toronto where he is a freelance cultural journalist for Now magazine. He continues to write his "Passionate, cocky alternately adoring and insulting verse" (The Toronto Star). His latest book is Reading the Bible Backwards, ECW Press. Matt Quayle is the Co-Creator and Executive Producer of Squawk Box & Squawk On The Street on CNBC-TV. He also serves as the Senior Advisor to CNBC's international morning program Worldwide Exchange. He was named to the TJFR Business News Reporter "30 under 30 list" in 1997, 1998 & 1999 and has been quoted in numerous national publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Money Magazine. He holds a BA in Communications from Rutgers University and is currently working on his MA in Media and Professional Communications at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He lives in Haworth, NJ with his wife (CNBC anchor Becky Quick) and his two daughters, Kimiko (6) and Natalie (5).
Graham Rae is a Scottish writer now resident in the Chicago suburbs. He has been writing about film, literature and music for over two decades and has been published in many magazines and websites, including American Cinematographer, Cinefantastique, 3ammagazine.com, Realitystudio.org and Nakedlunch.org. He has a deep personal interest in the experimental wordwork of WIlliam S Burroughs, and his first novel will be published next year by Creation Books.
Maria Roca is Program Leader for Communication and Interdisciplinary Studies at Florida Gulf Coast University. She holds her doctorate from New York University in media ecology and has been teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels for more than 30 years. She is a GreenFaith Fellow, serves as a Senior Faculty Associate of the Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education, and is currently working on a series of eco-spiritual video parables. She co-founded the award winning Wings of Hope program, an environmental education initiative that partners college students with school children in Southwest Florida to learn about important local issues. To date this program has reached more than 100,000 children.
Jacqueline Rudig has served on the Institute of General Semantics Board of Trustees since 2003. For the past two years she has held the position of IGS Vice President and Treasurer. Jackie hails from Milwaukee, Wisconsin where she practices an extensional and multi-valued orientation in her work as adjunct professor at Alverno College, independent writer, and real estate investor.
Paul Ryan became an experimental video artist after working with Marshall McLuhan at Fordham University. His video work has been shown in Japan, Korea, Turkey, Israel, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, Denmark, Ecuador, Canada and throughout the United States, including The Primitivism Show in The Museum of Modern Art, and The American Century Show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He presented his Design for an Environmental Television Channel at Bogazici University in Istanbul, The Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City, MoMA, and a United Nations Conference. His program for a Hall of Risk in Lower Manhattan was presented at the Venice Biennial. Radical Software published his seminal writings on video. NASA published his Earthscore Notational System. An Associate Professor at the New School, Mr. Ryan authored Cybernetics of the Sacred , Video Mind, Earth Mind and The Three Person Solution. The Smithsonian Institution is archiving his papers and tapes.
Harvey Sarles was a student of Edward T. Hall's colleagues, who were all "canned" from the FSI (Foreign Service Institute) of the U.S. State Department. Hall's close-co-thinker was Sarles's teacher, George Trager (who is mentioned throughout The Silent Language) at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where Trager ended up with Ray Birdwhistell. Sarles earned an MA from SUNY Buffalo in Anthropology and Linguistics (1959) and a PhD from the University of Chicago in Anthropology (1966). He worked at the Western Psychiatric Institute from 1962-1966, and has been at the University of Minnesota since 1966 (beginning in the Anthropology Department until the Chomskyan "Revolution" changed everything, and continuing in Cultural Studies since 1986). His published books include Language and Human Nature; Teaching as Dialogue; Nietzsche's Prophecy: the Crisis in Meaning; and Next Places.
Frank Scardilli is a 1949 graduate of Yale Law School, and has had significant experience both in private practice of law and public service. He is a member of the New York, New Jersey and Washington, DC Bars, and has for the last 30+ years been Chief Mediator for the U.S. Court of Appeals where he has mediated thousands of cases. He is a recipient of the "Court's Highest Honor, the 2nd Circuit Merit Award Which Signifies the Esteem the 2nd Circuit Holds for His Mastery of the Art of Negotiation and Ability to Solve Difficult Legal Problems." He continues to serve the Court on an Emeritus pro bono basis. Long interested in building bridges of understanding between lawyers and non-lawyers and parties in conflict, he has lectured at the U.N., at Bar Associations and at least a dozen colleges and universities. He was also featured as a weekly guest TV lecturer on a program on "Law for Non-Lawyers." He is a member of the Institute of General Semantics Board of Trustees, and recipient of the 2009 J. Talbot Winchell Award.
Suzanne C. Schick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech, Communications, and Theatre Art at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Since 1993, she has taught courses in Public Speaking, the Mass Media, Corporate Media Applications, Audio, and Multimedia Design. Dr. Schick has developed and taught two online courses – Public Speaking and the Mass Media. Professor Schick received her BFA from Tisch School of the Arts in film and television, and her MA and PhD from the media ecology program, all at New York University. Her current research interests include media and globalization and the unintended social consequences of wireless media.
Hillel A. Schiller is a retired teacher, educational consultant, learning therapist and process curriculum designer. He has taught at the New School for Social Research and CUNY's Bernard Baruch College. He promulgates the relevance of "contextual perception" and teaching the science non-reductively from a qualitative, unitary-process perspective advocated by L.L. Whyte, the physicist, historian, and philosopher of science.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat was Professor of Art and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin until she retired in 2004. Her field is the art and archaeology of the ancient Near East. She is presently working on Neolithic symbols at the site of Ain Ghazal, Jordan. She is the author of When Writing Met Art (2007), Before Writing (1992) and How Writing Came About (1996) which was selected by American Scientist as "one of the 100 books that shaped science in the 20th century."
Peter Schmideg produced/hosted radio programs at WBAI (99.5 FM) in New York City. Topics for his radio programs included psychedelic drugs, Antonin Artaud, virtual reality, H.P. Lovecraft, comic books, Luis Bunuel, Lenny Bruce, UFOs, and the history of science fiction film music. Among the people he interviewed were film director Roger Corman, novelist Robert Anton Wilson, techno visionary Jaron Lanier, composer Philip Glass, journalist R.U. Sirius, and drug guru Terence McKenna. His greatest radio achievement was "Border Radio," a documentary based on Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford's book which chronicled the heyday (1930-1965) of the Mexican border blaster radio stations from whence quacks, mystical singing cowboys, seers, and outrageous DJs like Wolfman Jack foisted themselves upon America's consciousness. Peter Schmideg's website, Illumination Gallery
Blake Seidenshaw pursued honors study at the University of Victoria in British Columbia that was self-directed, interdisciplinary, and focused on complex systems dynamics, and which inspired him to pursue a theory of ecological cybernetics that incorporated principles from music theory and semiotics. Following the completion of his undergraduate degree in 2005, he travelled to Mysore, South India, to study classical Ashtanga Yoga under the late Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. Between regular visits to Mysore, the past four years have been spent traveling, exploring the backpacker havens of South Asia, and working as a Vegan/Vegetarian Chef in fine restaurants across Europe and the USA. Recently transplanted in New York City, he enrolled in Fordham University's interdisciplinary Humanities and Science MA program, for which he is currently planning and designing an interdisciplinary seminar series, "Interdisciplined 2009", to be held at Fordham's Lincoln Center campus this fall. He also practices and teaches Yoga with his wife at AYNY in SoHo, cooks gourmet vegan food with and for family and friends, and plays music in his spare time.
Jaime Snyder is Co-Founder of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and its former Executive Director. He is a producer, director and writer of educational media, and his film projects include: Executive Producer for the PBS American Masters' Special Buckminster Fuller: Thinking Out Loud; Pablo Casals': A Cry for Peace; Producer-Director of the award-winning short film Modeling the Universe; and Co-Director of the film Reflections: Buckminster Fuller, winner of the CINE Golden Eagle Award. He developed a series of multi-media educational programs for BFI entitled the Dymaxion™ Laboratory. He is also a singer-songwriter. As Fuller's grandson he studied and worked with Fuller until his passing in 1983.
Janet Sternberg first learned about general semantics from Neil Postman while earning her doctorate in the media ecology program at New York University. Since then, she has gone on to write about Postman's legacy in the general semantics journal ETC, and to become a member of the Board of Directors of the New York Society for General Semantics. (And whenever possible, she uses E-Prime.) Janet also counts herself among the Media Ecology Association's most active members, serving as the MEA's current President. At Fordham University, Janet enjoys teaching and advising in her position as assistant professor of communication and media studies. A native New Yorker and former Fulbright scholar who grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Janet speaks and writes in several languages, and has published and presented internationally on topics as diverse as media ecology, linguistic theory, the history of technology, legal dilemmas and misbehavior in cyberspace, and mediated interpersonal communication. Janet's current research involves the relationships among communication technologies and issues such as information overload, rampant consumerism, social fragmentation and alienation, and declining levels of civility, for a book project entitled Mediating Ourselves to Death, inspired by her studies with Postman.
Mike Stevens began playing drums at age eight, carrying on a long musical family tradition including two grandfathers who were professional musicians. He began playing professionally at age 16, and performed with several bands on the Florida bar circuit while obtaining a philosophy degree from the University of Florida. In 2004, Mike replied to an ad in the Village Voice which read, "Drummer Wanted: Nietzsche meets Pink Floyd." After viewing a screening of Thus Spoke The Spectacle, Mike joined the project in April of 2004 and today contributes his talents as drummer and creative collaborator.
Lance Strate serves as the Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics, in addition to his position as professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University. He co-founded the Media Ecology Association, served as the MEA's first president for over a decade, and remains a member of the organization's Board of Directors; he also served as president of the New York State Communication Association (1998-1999). The author of Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study, he co-edited The Legacy of McLuhan with Edward Wachtel, and Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment with Ron L. Jacobson and Stephanie Gibson. He initiated and has been the Supervisory Editor of the Hampton Press book series in media ecology for over a decade, and was the editor of several journals including the Speech Communication Annual (2000-2001), Explorations in Media Ecology (which he founded, 2002-2007), and the General Semantics Bulletin (2007/2008), and he currently co-edits the "Poetry Ring" feature for ETC. He received the New York State Communication Association's John F. Wilson Fellow Award in 1998, in recognition for exceptional scholarship, leadership, and dedication to the field of communication, and Denver Mayor Wellington E. Webb proclaimed "that February 15, 2002 be known as Dr. Lance Strate Day in the City and County of Denver" in honor of the keynote address he gave for the Rocky Mountain Communication Association. He maintains a poetry blog,
Elizabeth Thompson has served in a leadership capacity on numerous educational initiatives throughout her 20+ year career. Her experience in both the non-profit and for-profit realms has centered around the creation, dissemination and 'brokering' of leading edge ideas, people, and networks of communities across disciplinary boundaries and media platforms. These include the worlds of sustainability, global change activism, art, information technology, and whole systems design. Ms. Thompson currently serves as the Executive Director of The Buckminster Fuller Institute. Since her tenure began in 2004, she has lead BFI through a complete re-organization, overhauling both its internal operational systems and mission as well as the development of its leading educational programs.
Ed Tywoniak is Associate Professor of Communication, past-chair of the Department of Communication, and Distinguished Fellow for Curriculum and Technology at Saint Mary's College of California, where he has served on the faculty in the School of Liberal Arts for 30 years. He is currently chair of the Division for Communication and the Future of the National Communication Association and is a member of the Media Ecology Association. His most recent publication is a co-authored undergraduate Communication textbook titled Communication and Social Understanding (Kendall Hunt, 2009). Prof. Tywoniak lives in Oakland, California with his wife, Linda.
Barry Vacker teaches media, cultural, and utopian theory at Temple University, Philadelphia. His recent publications include the text for Peter Granser's photography book Signs (Hatje Cantz and The Chicago Museum for Contemporary Photography 2008). Space Times Square is based on ideas in Barry's "Theory Zero" experimental book series: Zero Conditions (2008), Crashing into the Vanishing Points (2009), and Starry Skies Moving Away (2009). Barry's innovative text-anthology, Media Environments (University Readers 2010), will be available for adoption for mass media and society courses in Fall 2010.
Tyler Volk is Science Director for Environmental Studies and Professor of Biology at New York University. Recipient of the NYU All-University Distinguished Teaching Award, Volk lectures and travels widely, plays lead guitar for the all-scientist rock band The Amygdaloids, and is an avid outdoorsman. Volk's previous books include CO2 Rising: The World's Greatest Environmental Challenge, Metapatterns: Across Space, Time, and Mind, and Gaia's Body: Toward a Physiology of Earth. In Fall 2009 Chelsea Green will publish his book Death, half of a double-book with Sex, by Dorion Sagan.
Edward Wachtel is the Director of the Edward A. Walsh Digital Media Laboratory and associate professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University. His articles on media, perception and art have been widely published in scholarly journals such as Leonardo, The Structurist, ETC, and Explorations in Media Ecology. He has contributed chapters to numerous books devoted to media studies, and the philosophy of technology. His most recent book is The Legacy of McLuhan. which he co-edited with Lance Strate.
Mary Pelak Walch earned her doctorate in communication arts and sciences at Pennsylvania State University. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University, and a faculty associate for the Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education. Her primary areas of research are in rhetorical criticism, media studies, and communication pedagogy.
David Walczyk is an assistant professor at Pratt Institute where he teaches and researches through the Cultural Informatics Lab. His work is at the intersections of media ecology and interaction design with an emphasis on transforming cultural information. He is also interested in design(er) psychology.
David Waters received his BS (1980) and DVM (1984) degrees from Cornell University and his PhD degree from the University of Minnesota (1992). He is currently Professor of Comparative Oncology and Associate Director of the Center on Aging and The Life Course at Purdue University. Since 2000, Dr. Waters has served as Executive Director of the Gerald P. Murphy Cancer Foundation, a not-for-profit research institute located in the Purdue Research Park. He is nationally recognized for his work on utilizing pet dogs as models of human aging, and is an expert on the comparative aspects of prostate cancer in men and dogs. His research, which targets the underexplored intersection of the fields of aging and cancer, is aimed at developing personalized cancer prevention products and other interventions that promote healthy longevity. As a teacher, Dr. Waters contributes significantly to Purdue's Dual Title PhD Program in Gerontology, serving as professor of record for several graduate courses. His course "Lifestyle and Age-related Diseases in the News" has been instrumental in identifying some of the problems plaguing the process of communicating health-related news to the public.
John Watts has been described by a fellow artist as "a force of nature". In the three decades of his career he has amassed a considerable body of creative work. His distinctive writing has steadily evolved against a variety of musical forms encompassing written word, poetry and humor. He has a distinguished catalogue of 17 original albums with sales in excess of two million. This self-confessed "follower of the troubadour tradition" was born in December 1954, into a family of singers. He progressed through school inspired musically by the late sixties Trojan catalogue and the great 'maverick' artists from Alex Harvey to Lou Reed, Captain Beefheart to David Bowie, Jake Thackery to James Brown. His childhood heroes were George Best and Pablo Picasso. John was the mastermind of Fischer-Z, contemporaries of the Police and Talking Heads. He formed the band with Steve Skolnik at Brunel University in 1976. Arriving at a point where punk, art wave and reggae crossed over, they secured a record deal with UA in 1978 alongside the Buzzcocks, the Stranglers and Dr Feelgood. His band achieved continuous chart success and critical acclaim throughout continental Europe and Australia for over 20 years. Watts has since amassed a considerable body of creative work. His last three albums have established him as a multimedia solo artist: Ether Music & Film–with accompanying road movie, Real Life Is Good Enough–with poetry book and It Has To Be–real life stories documented on film. John Watts has created a unique multimedia music and art piece in Morethanmusic & Films, a 13 track CD/DVD of music and films. In addition, he is creating 100 Morethanmusic Artefacts that can be commissioned from www.johnwatts.co.uk. Each artefact includes a copy of the CD/DVD as well as a unique song and personalized artwork made for each individual commission.
Susan Wieczorek has spent her life studying, researching, and experiencing communication within the medical profession as a communication faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown for the past 20 years, a former hospital personnel/marketing director, a professional speaker at medical seminars, an office manager for her husband's medical practice, and a mother of six children. Her most recent interest and area of publication involves the effect of technology on the physician/patient relationship and the need for improved training models and methods throughout medical school, residency, and post graduate programs.
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