Lance Strate's Blog Time Passing

Book 'Em, Danno

2012-01-24T21:10:00.001-05:00

Well, it's been a bit busy, what with getting ready for the beginning of the semester and then getting it off to a good start, and various and sundry other matters, mainly revolving around the written and printed word. So, books have been on my mind, hey, it's an occupational hazard, and that being the case, the appeal of this video, The Joy of Books, which was first brought to my attention by my friend, Eric McLuhan, should be clear enough to see. So go ahead, look, look and see:

And here's some text from the video's YouTube page:

After organizing our bookshelf almost a year ago (http://youtu.be/zhRT-PM7vpA), my wife and I (Sean Ohlenkamp) decided to take it to the next level. We spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books at Type bookstore in Toronto (883 Queen Street West, (416) 366-8973).

Everything you see here can be purchased at Type Books.
Grayson Matthews (http://www.graysonmatthews.com/) generously composed the beautiful, custom music. You can download it here: http://itunes.apple.com/ca/album/awakenings-single/id496796623

Now, despite the obvious charms of this piece, which is kind of a Toy Story for books, it is not without its critics. My friend Bob Blechman, who recently published a book of his own, Executive Severance, which I told you all about in my last post, Twistery Illustrated, left the following critical comment when I shared the video over on Facebook (and since he left the comment on my profile page, I figure I have enough rights to it to include it here, so don't go get on your sopa box about theft of intellectual property or nothing):

So...books become animated, that is, the content of animation. A book shop seems like the memory core of a mainframe computer. Display of visible movement of books on shelves replaces static perusal of stationary text. Though marvelous in scope and execution, this film has nothing to do with the process of reading, which is what books are really all about. Nice promotion for animation though.

Bob's comments remind me of Neil Postman's critique of Sesame Street, that the use of television and televisual techniques, including commercial advertising formats, to teach about the alphabet and reading, in effect taught much more about watching television than anything else. But then again, why shouldn't Bob echo Neil, since Bob was one of Neil's students, hence his self-described status as a model media ecologist.

And while I will grant Bob his point, I do think that this video is a celebration of the book as an object, the look and visual appeal of the book, of books, plural, in great number. It captures something of the love affair of book lovers with the object of their affections, or if you prefer, their fetish. I would go so far as to say, along the lines of some of McLuhan's commentary, that the video appeals to the tactile quality of book fondling (a topic Gary Gumpert used to bring up in his Mass Media lecture class, which I did lecture support for when I was an MA student), and even the scent, the aroma, the olfactory appeal of this most substantial of print media.

But lest this post be seen as too bookish, let me note that the title of the post is a reference to the classic line from the old TV series (not the remake) Hawaii 5-0. At the end of the episode, when the bad guys were caught, the lead character, Steve McGarrett, famously played by Jack Lord, would utter the immortal words: Book 'em, Danno! And after all, that stop-motion animation is a rather arresting development, don't you think?

Twistery Illustrated

2012-01-10T20:13:00.000-05:00

So, Blog Time Passing readers who have been in it for the long haul may remember a post that appeared during our first month of operation, back in March of 2007, entitled Modeling Media Ecology, which featured Robert K. Blechman, otherwise known as "Bob" and his famous Gilbert and Sullivan inspired video (it's still there, if you've never seen it, be sure to take a look), not to mention his blog, A Model Media Ecologist, which is still going strong.

And even if you joined our program while it was already in progress, perhaps you recall my post from April of 2010, Twitterature, when (among other examples) I cited Bob's efforts at writing a humorous mystery novel via a long series of Twitter tweets?

And I have had occasion, since then, for example in this past October's post, More Scenes from the Center, to mention that Bob's Twistery, as he termed it, will be published, in print, under the title of Executive Severance, by NeoPoiesis Press, the same good people (and I am one of them, so I know) who gave you Media and Formal Cause by Marshall and Eric McLuhan (as first announced here in the classic post from last February, Media and Formal Cause in Effect!) and many fine books of poetry too (check it out at htt p://neopoiesispress.com).

And I should mention the fact that Executive Severance, while a work of fiction, is delightfully full of references to media ecology, and especially to Marshall McLuhan. You don't have to be a media ecologist to love Executive Severance, or laugh at Blechman's extraordinary sense of humor, but if you are now or ever have been one, you will get a great deal of added enjoyment from your reading experience.

So, anyway, I am pleased to share with you the news that Executive Severance is now in print, and easily available online through all major outlets, including good old Amazon. In fact, here's the link to go buy it right now. Why delay? You don't even have to bother finishing this post if you don't want to, just go get your copy.

What? You're still here? Okay, maybe you need some more convincing. Let me get out the press release, and share some information with you.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Lance Strate, NeoPoiesis Press

Phone: (718) 817-4864

email: info@neopoiesispress.com

Executive Severance

by Robert K. Blechman

illustrated by David Arshawsky

Now, let's get a real good luck at that book cover, shall we?

Now, how about some old About the Author-type stuff?

Robert K. Blechman is not a cartoonist. —That’s Robert O.— Robert K. was born at the start of the turbulent 1950’s and spent the first 17 years of his life in a house on the western boundary between Maryland and the District of Columbia, that is, on the demarcation line determining voting and non-voting citizenship. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in English Literature and went on to earn an MBA in finance and a Ph.D. in Media Ecology from New York University.

During the Viet Nam War, Dr. Blechman received a moderately high draft lottery number and so avoided military service. He was gassed once during an anti-war protest in Chicago, but otherwise emerged unscathed.

Until recently he held a senior technology position at a major medical school. He has worked a variety of jobs, including summers as a counselor at Camp Zakelo in Harrison, Maine, and several semesters as an adjunct professor of media studies at Fordham University.

In the course of his corporate career Dr. Blechman has held management positions at iconic national institutions and has experienced a major bankruptcy, a major merger, downsizing, resizing and rightsizing. He could write a book. He was triaged from Columbia University Medical Center when royalty money from the Axel patents dried up; expelled from the New York City Board of Education on pedagogical differences; debited at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP by his counterpart after a major merger; remaindered at HarperCollins Publishers during a change in senior management and deconstructed when Olympia & York Real Estate Management went belly up. All things being equal, Dr. Blechman looks forward to retirement.

Besides the present volume, Dr. Blechman looks to his three children, Alexander, Sara and Eliana to validate his time spent on this planet. Otherwise it’s pretty much a wash.

Dr. Blechman continues to tweet at RKBs_Twitstery, discusses his Media Ecological musings and speculations at his blog, A Model Media Ecologist at www.robertkblechman.blogspot.com and is hard at work on a follow-up novel to Executive Severance.

Executive Severance

Robert K. Blechman

NeoPoiesis Press/December 14, 2011

5.5”x8.5” perfect bound, paper/ $16.95/ 148 pages

ISBN: 978-0-9832747-5-9

P.O. Box 38037 Houston, Texas 77238-8037 www.neopoiesispress.com

And you want some reviews? We got reviews!

“Executive Severance, a laugh out loud comic mystery novel, epitomizes our current cultural moment in that it is born from the juxtaposition of authorial invention and technological communication innovation. Merging creative text with new electronic context, Robert K. Blechman's novel, which originally appeared as Twitter entries, can be read on a cell phone. His tweets which merge to form an entertaining novel can't be beat. Hold the phone; exalt in the mystery--engage with Blechman's story which signals the inception of a new literary art form.”

- Marleen S. Barr, author of Envisioning the Future: Science Fiction and the Next Millennium

"A He Dunit.
Sometimes a little verbose, but OMG this is the best twitstery I ever read. It's got everything: narrative drive, mystery, comedy, thrills, tension, laughs. Blechman is on to something, a genre as important to literature as the invention of haiku in rhyme. ..."
- Marvin Kitman, famous critic

"A delightful 'twitstery' - a mystery written in real time Tweets - that is compelling, entertaining, and shows off what can be done in the 140-character form with style and mastery. Blechman's delight in the language shows in every tweet - that is to say, every thread of the story. His plot is tight, tingling, and diverting. Poe would have been proud of the new form Blechman has given to the mystery story."
- Paul Levinson, author New New Media and The Plot to Save Socrates

“Embracing the challenges found in publishing via the medium Twitter, Bob Blechman’s super silly story Executive Severance is stuffed with punny dialogue, clever character conditions, and a total lack of adherence to the old “rules” of storytelling. It’s a meaty tale told in deliciously rare, bite-sized chunks that I’d recommend for consumption to anyone hungering for fiction that satisfies. Well-done, Bob!”
- Michelle Anderson, ♥ mediaChick, author of The Miracle in July - a digital love story

And there you have it. But enough about Bob. Because, even if you read every tweet as Bob tweeted them on Twitter (and how many tweets can a twitterer tweet if a twitterer could tweet tweets?), and know the story by heart, what makes the print edition of Executive Severance truly exceptional is the amazing illustrations that accompany the story, produced by the acclaimed cartoonist, David Arshawsky. To give you an example, here's an illustration taken from Chapter 1 of the book:

So, for more information about Executive Severance, visit www.neopoiesispress.com or drop me a line via info@neopoiesispress.com. But then again, what more do you need to know? When it comes to the question of whether you should buy a copy of this book, the answer's no twistery, I mean mystery--just be done with it!

Fordham Hoops and a Reform Hazzan

2012-01-09T22:03:00.000-05:00

Well, I couldn't resist commenting on this news story here, as it relates to my home institution, Fordham University. As you many know, Fordham has a storied history when it comes to sports (not that it's any slouch on academics). Ever since I started teaching here, over two decades ago (has it really been that long???), individuals of a certain age, upon hearing I'm a professor at Fordham, immediately say, "the seven blocks of granite." In case this phrase means nothing to you, this goes back to the famous Fordham college football teams of the late 20s and 30s, and specifically the teams' offensive linemen, which included Vince Lombardi, of coaching (and New Jersey Turnpike rest stop) fame. If you think I'm making this up, check out the Wikipedia entry on it: Seven Blocks of Granite.

Back in 2010, I posted an entry on the amazing Fordham flip, as it came to be known, an entirely unique baseball play, unprecedented not only for college ball, but on any level. In that same post, I also commented on the news story about Fordham baseball's 150th anniversary, especially notable because the Fordham Rams, that's our mascot, the ram, has the most wins of any team in history (although it's only a matter of time before colleges located in the warm, southern regions catch up). Anyway, you can read that post here: Fordham Flips for Baseball.

So anyway, this post isn't about football or baseball, but about basketball--I think the "hoops" in the title may have given that away. And in case you're wondering what hazzan means, it's the Hebrew word for cantor, traditionally the individual who helps to lead the Jewish prayer service. This requires proficiency in Hebrew, and also musical proficiency, as the Hebrew prayers are traditionally sung or chanted (the root meaning of cantor being chant). The role has evolved over the years, from amateur to professional, and from lay to clerical. I'll again refer you to Wikipedia for its articles on the traditional role of the Hazzan, and the contemporary role as a member of the clergy of the Cantor in Reform Judaism.

So, with that prologue in mind, let me turn to a New York Times article dated January 9, 2012, and written by Clyde Haberman. The title is At Jesuit School, a Pregame Assist From a Jewish Singer. And it begins like this:

If you’re hoping for a talisman to improve your team’s chances of victory, why not make it a man with a talis?

Okay, already this might require some explanation. A talis is a prayer shawl traditionally used in Jewish worship, in particular to be worn whenever the Torah is taken out. Somewhat ironically, in Reform Judaism, wearing a talis is optional for the congregants, although the clergy usually will wear one. And yeah, you can check it out on Wikipedia, it's listed under the Sephardic dialect's spelling, Tallit. Now, back to the article:

That thought, at any rate, crossed the minds of officials at Fordham University, the Jesuit redoubt in the Bronx. Their men’s basketball team caught a hot hand during the Christmas break when a cantor named Daniel Pincus began singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before home games.

All right, Cantor Pincus! And here's a picture of him, in case you wanted to see:

And guess what? He's wearing a talis, man! And hey, you can check out his official webpage: http://cantordanielpincus.com and even listen to a recording of him singing, well, not the National Anthem, but a Hebrew prayer, a Sephardic rendition of V'Shameru. Okay, now back to Haberman's news item:

Normally, the national anthem is sung by the school’s choir, but the choir went on an out-of-state tour during the holiday recess. Mr. Pincus, 57, who is a cantor at Congregation Shaarei Shalom, a Reform synagogue in Riverdale, the Bronx, had already expressed an interest in performing the pregame ritual for Fordham.

Riverdale, in case you're wondering, is the section of the Bronx closest to Manhattan, just across the river from the island, and it's a lovely residential section--I had cousins who lived there back in the day. It's also the site of the next Media Ecology Association's annual meeting, hosted by Manhattan College, which strangely enough is not in Manhattan, but in Riverdale. Anyway, if you're interested in learning more about Congregation Shaarei Shalom, which as a Reform congregation is a sister shul of my own Congregation Adas Emuno, the link is there for your convenience. All right, back to the story:

“I said to him then that we generally have the choir sing, so let’s see what occurs down the road,” said Julio Diaz, the university’s associate athletic director. Now, unexpectedly, Mr. Diaz found himself down that road. “So I picked up the phone,” he said, “and told him, ‘Cantor, I need your help.’”

I don't know why the choir wasn't available, but I will just mention that Fordham is outstanding in many ways. But when in comes to music, well, not so much. So, please continue:

On Dec. 22, before a game against Texas State University, Mr. Pincus made his debut at the Rose Hill campus in the Bronx, singing without his yarmulke and definitely without a talis (which is one way to render the Hebrew word for a Jewish prayer shawl). Fordham won.

He sang a second time a week later against Georgia Tech. Fordham won again. A few days after that, in the first game of the new year, the visitor was nationally ranked Harvard. Fordham, whose nickname is the Rams, triumphed yet again.

Suddenly, a team that had a losing record before Mr. Pincus showed up was on a roll. Could it be that the Jewish singer had become a good-luck charm for the Jesuit school?

The cantor, for one, doubted it. As “cute” as that notion might be, he said, and as “wonderful” as the interfaith aspect of the relationship is, he was performing as “a classically trained tenor.”

“What I wanted was to bring a classical approach and a singable approach to the national anthem,” he said. “I render it in a traditional way — not hip-hop, not jazz.” And, he added, “if I sing it well and with spirit then maybe it helps everybody tune up.”

The cantor’s singing style was important to Mr. Diaz. “I just want to make sure that we have someone who sings it in a patriotic, proper way,” he said.

Like Mr. Pincus, the coach of the basketball team, Tom Pecora, has a skeptical view of the talisman idea — up to a point. “As a college coach for over 25 years, I think it has a little more to do with defense and rebounding,” Mr. Pecora said. “But we’ll include the cantor if that’s what it takes to win games.”

His attitude reflects an element of superstition that is inherent to sports, perhaps more than to other phases of life.

There’s the school of thought upheld by a character in the 1988 baseball movie “Bull Durham.” You have to “respect the streak,” he says. If you think you’re winning because you keep following the same pattern — like having a cantor sing the anthem — then you are.

“We are superstitious, players and coaches,” Mr. Pecora agreed.

I won't comment on the relationship between religion and superstition, you may be relieved to know. Or the relationship between religion and sports. And the relationship between sports and superstition, well, that's well known.

But there is another school, a more cynical one, especially for this age of the genuflecting Tim Tebow and his imitators. This comes from a classic boxing movie from 1956, “The Harder They Fall.” A prizefighter with a powder-puff punch and a glass jaw is on his knees praying before a match. Seeing this, a mobster tells him with a sneer, “That only works if you can fight.”

In basketball, it works only if you outplay the other guys. On Saturday, Fordham fell to earth. Despite having Mr. Pincus sing once more, the team’s home-court winning streak ended when it lost, 67-59, to Xavier University of Cincinnati. So it goes.

But even though the Fordham choir is about to return from its travels, Mr. Pincus expects to be invited back for future games. “It seems now like I’m becoming part of the family, which is great,” he said.

And why not? Among his talents, the cantor teaches the art of the shofar, the ram’s horn that is sounded on the Jewish High Holy Days.

From the ram’s horn to the Rams is not too great a leap.

And let me just note that there is no coincidence to the fact that Fordham chose a biblical animal as its mascot. And as for Jewish-Catholic relations, well, this is New York City after all, and this is very much a New York story, and for that matter, a Bronx tale.

It's all about community, which is the theme of this Hebrew hymn sung by Cantor Pincus:

Now, Go Rams!

Put Me In Coach

2012-01-05T17:26:00.000-05:00

Apropos of nothing, in response to a request I receive today, the phrase "put me in coach" came to mind, so I went over to YouTube and found this video, set to John Fogerty's stirring song, "Centerfield"--and I just had to share it with you!

I don't know about you, but this was just the thing to warm my heart on this cold, winter's day, a video version of the good old hot stove!

Extended Considerations

2012-01-04T10:33:00.000-05:00

Over on the Media Ecology Association discussion list, someone raised a rather elaborate set of questions about Marshall McLuhan's characterization of media as "the extensions of man," which I responded to. So, for the benefit of Blog Time Passing and its vast multitude of followers, I've taken what I wrote, cleaned it up a bit, and share it with you here.

The concept of technology as extensions seems to have originated with Ralph Waldo Emerson, but my understanding is that at least during the late 19th and early 20th century it was a commonplace notion. The three main sources for McLuhan, I gather, would be Emerson, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards (in The Meaning of Meaning), and Edward T. Hall (in The Silent Language).

I believe that what is unique to McLuhan is the use of the term media in connection to extension, as opposed to technologies or instruments, and his heavy emphasis on media extending the physical body, as opposed to simply functions carried out by the body.

In this sense, prosthesis is the closest to McLuhan's discussion of extension, and he does uses that term, as he gets into the idea that every extension is also an amputation, as whatever part of the body is extended is also numbed in the process. He doesn't use the term cyborg, but that is so similar to what he is talking about that I can only imagine that he would have, had it been a more familiar term in the early 60s.

Exteriorization may be related to extension, but the sense of it is somewhat different, as it works along an interior-exterior dialectic, and I believe it suggests more of a mental rather than a physical operation, projection even more so, as it suggests a way of viewing the world, not acting upon it.

I have a chapter in Rob MacDougall's new anthology, Drugs and Media, where I take the idea of drugs as media and therefore extensions, but extensions that feedback into the self, and add the general semantic distinction between extensional and intensional orientations (note that's intensional with an "s" and not intentional with a "t"), to characterize drugs as intensions.

Simulation I think has more to do with content than medium, or the effects of technology rather than the nature of technology, which is what extension addresses.

I consider technology to be an extension of biology, not necessarily of human biology, as it is well established that animals also have technologies of sorts.

As noted, McLuhan's stress is on technology as extensions of the body, and that corresponds to how technology acts on the world. But we experience our body only through our senses (including the internal kinesthetic, vestibular and proprioceptive senses), so whatever extends our body also extends our senses, which would also have the effect of numbing or amputating our sense perception, and therefore altering our senses. The senses, of course, are a part of our nervous system, so we are also extending, amputating, and altering aspects of our nervous systems.

Driving a car clearly is a cyborg activity, operating an elevator though is not so much, although we could see in the elevator mechanism an extension of skeletal structure and musculature. But at a certain remove, it does make more sense to talk about the extension of function rather than body.

This would also be the case for techniques rather than technologies, for example McLuhan talks about games as extensions of social organization (I based a study of baseball as a medium on that point in an anthology edited by Gary Gumpert and Susan Drucker).

The idea of technologies as extensions of other technologies, of a new technology extending an older one, comes up in some basic mass media texts. It strikes me as a relatively superficial notion, in contrast the idea of technologies as emanating from the body/biology.

Paul Levinson has the more nuanced idea of remedial media, that is a new medium introduced to solve a problem created by the introduction of an older medium, e.g., window shades for windows, answering machines for telephones, VCRs for TVs, and this relates to ideas about media evolution that Paul also explores.

Also, Ellul talks about the geometric growth of technology as we develop technological solutions to the problems created by our technologies, only to have the solutions create more problems that require more technologies to solve, etc.

But to take McLuhan's view, even if an extension is an extension of an extension, the important point would be to trace the process of extension back to the aspect of the biological body that they all are extending, and especially for McLuhan, from there to the effect this has on the senses. I think we could take it further and say that the body is an extension as well (but of what? the mind? the spirit? God? evolution? the selfish gene? life?), although McLuhan didn't want to go there. But the main point is that technologies are extensions of organisms, even it they are extensions one or more times removed.

As for extensions of consciousness, from a materialist standpoint, any medium that may be said to be an extension of consciousness would be an extension of the brain and nervous system as biological organs. Perhaps it could be said that techniques are extensions of mind rather than body, but that would still bring us back to the brain, so I still return to function, or perhaps behavior as the phenomenon that is extended.

The way I've put it previously is that all organisms act upon their environment, simply by existing within their environment. Simply by performing the basic life function of metabolism, they alter their environment, and technology is just a further elaboration of this basic characteristic of life.

But to say that there is no difference between biology and technology, e.g., eye and telescope, seems a bit extreme. When an organism alters it environment by the addition of extensions of itself, it places the extension between itself and its environment (which is why all technologies are media), and whatever comes between itself and its environment becomes its new environment (or at least part of it)--again, this is something I've said a number of times in the past, so apologies to anyone who might be tired of hearing it.

I feel that we've dealt with the issue of causality fairly well, either by reference to systems theory, where we understand that the extension creates a new environment or system out of which certain effects may emerge, or by recourse to formal cause, as presented in the recently published Media and Formal Cause by Marshall and Eric McLuhan. Some disagree, but I see the two as connected, as I indicate in the foreword to the book, and Robert K. Logan shares that view.

I have also argued in the past that technological determinism is a straw man. I have an essay on this coming up in Ed Tech magazine, it should be out this month, I believe.

Extensions do not have to be physical. While they are rooted in the material world, the best way to understand them, in my view, is not as a what but as a how--as method, means, or in the sense that Kenneth Burke used the term in A Grammar of Motives, an agency.

Animals can be seen as extensions. Lynn White's classic study, Medieval Technology and Social Change, is all about the use of the horse for combat and farming. Ellen Rose published a marvelous little study on pets in Explorations in Media Ecology when I was editor.

The same goes for humans. Lewis Mumford makes the point that the first machines consisted of organized human labor, e.g., as in the building of the pyramids.

And natural objects can be turned into technologies, and therefore extensions, a point I also make in the piece I wrote for Ed Tech. A stone is not an extension, unless I pick it up and throw it, thereby extending my fist. A stick is not an extension, unless I pick it up and use it to extend my arm and hand and finger, extend my reach and sense of touch. That brings us back to method or means, So by themselves natural objects are not technologies or extensions, unless you want to frame all of nature as the extension of the supernatural.

And here ends my extended commentary.

Mademoiselle

2012-01-01T13:58:00.000-05:00

As we begin the secular new year, we might well reflect on our good fortune in being able to live our lives in relative comfort and safety, compared to what so many experienced not so very long ago. And we would do well to give thanks for those with the courage to remain righteous in dark times, and let their actions serve as an example to guide and inspire us as we face whatever shadows we may encounter in our own time.

My cousin in Israel shared the following music video with me, which I found very moving in the story it relates (sung in Hebrew, with English subtitles), and in the stunning vocals of Keren Hadar. According to the write up on YouTube, the song, written by Dalia and Shaul Harel, Dan Almagor, and Rafi Kadishzon, was "written in honor of Andree Geulen on the occasion of her 90th birthday. In Belgium, during the Holocaust, she undertook the rescue of many Jewish children."

The song's YouTube page also provides an extended explanation of how the song came to be:

A song is born.

In summer 1942, as persecution of Belgium's Jews began, an underground Jewish group took form in cooperation with the Belgian underground and set out to rescue Jewish children by hiding them in various places around the country. The most active team consisted of twelve-women, mostly non-Jewish, who managed to hide some 3000 children. This admirable clandestine campaign was unique by the complexity of its structure and the degree of its success.

The only survivor from the team today is Andrée Geulen, and on September 4, a great number of the children who had been hidden celebrated her ninetieth birthday. The celebration included a screening of a DVD in which singer Keren Hadar performed a song in her honor. The song stirred a great deal of emotion.

This song, composed very shortly before the event, arose from an impulse on the part of one of the hidden children — Shaul Harel, who today is a professor of pediatric neurology.

... and this is how it happened:

One warm summer day at the Isrotel Dead Sea Hotel, the Harel family was visiting for a performance of the opera Aïda at Massada. Shaul Harel was lolling alone in the whirlpool bath. As the warm water and the complete solitude began to take effect, he wondered intensely what gift he could bring to Andrée for her birthday. "After all, she already has everything. After the war, she married a Jewish attorney, they were blessed with two daughters and with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and to this day she is surrounded by the love of the children she rescued." Suddenly, as to Archimedes in his warm bath, the Muse descended to him. Although he did not emerge with a mathematical equation — since mathematics was never his subject — he just as suddenly decided to write her a poem. And this is not to be taken lightly, since for many years he had written nothing but medical documentation and articles. The warmth of the water and the atmosphere brought lines tumbling into his mind, and as if possessed, he burst into the hotel room and told his wife Dalia to sit down and transcribe because otherwise the lines would "get away" from him. His wife raised her eyebrows, thinking that the desert heat had overpowered him. But she consented and soon a poem was on paper telling Andrée's story. Shaul's imagination took him further and he said that the poem should be set to music and his favorite singer, Keren Hadar, should perform it. Since the poem was written in free verse, Dahlia worked rhymes into it. The poem was read to Keren and she was moved to tears. She said that it was suitable for setting to music and that she would like to sing it. She recommended Rafi Kadishzon, a prolific and well-known composer. Rafi heard the poem, liked it, and immediately recommended Dan Almagor, a master of the Hebrew word, to adjust the text for the music. In the end, Dan Almagor contributed greatly to the rhythm, to the refrain, and to the perfect fit of the lyrics.

All this occurred in the course of two weeks. A week later, the song was recorded, the DVD visuals were prepared, and copies were printed with graphics and with a French and English translation. Everyone who saw it was moved, and now here it is for you.

And for the inspiration, poetry, inspired musical composition, and generosity in sharing these beautiful sounds, images, and story, we can also be grateful.

Centenary

2011-12-30T11:02:00.000-05:00

As the year-long celebration of the centenary of Marshall McLuhan's birth comes to a close, I thought I'd share with you a poem a wrote on the occasion, and particularly in relation to the publication earlier this year of Media and Formal Cause by Marshall and Eric McLuhan (conveniently purchasable via the widget on the right).

Centenary

Give me that old time commercial Macguffin
I need direction, Spitchcock
Eels wail that, and swell
I am ready for my clothes up
Mr. DeMille shall mug loon
Ear ache, air wreck, ere reckoned
And drew a pondering eye
Extending formal innovation to the causeway
Win again's fake
More shell mock glue-on
Count her blasts, wearing us thin
I'm glistening, come and put me on
Permeating, permit me, per my diem
Martial/artful mech/getta clue on
Mock grew on, menippulating messy jests
The pattern that directs
When the time is ripe
The apple will go to seed
The music will play of its own accordion
Play the record backwards, and it all makes sense
Paul was dead, and now he's better
Metaphysician, obscure thyself!

Lecturing in Grand Rapids On the Binding Biases of Time

2011-12-29T10:45:00.001-05:00

So, Grand Rapids has come up quite a bit here on Blog Time Passing over the past few months, and this time around I have some video to share, although it is admittedly not as entertaining as the Grand Rapids Lip Sync video I featured in my post last month, American Pied Piper.

But if you recall my previous posts such as Good Things From the Valley, Down in the Valley, At the Podium, and Grand Valley Grandeur, you'll remember that I gave a public lecture at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, back on September 21, 2011, based on my book published earlier this year (displayed over on the right), entitled (you guessed it!) On the Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on General Semantics and Media Ecology (actually, this lecture, originally a keynote address delivered at the New York State Communication Association's annual meeting a few years ago, was the basis for the expanded version that appears in the book).

The lecture was videotaped, and recently uploaded to YouTube by Aaron Bannasch of GVSU. I added the videos to my channel as well, and proceeded to provide them to you, dear Blog Time Passing enthusiast, as just one more service of our full service operation here. Unfortunately, the lecture is broken up into three separate parts, or actually, two, as the third part features a rather interesting question and answer session. Just a caveat that the last lines of the lecture have a glitch, kind of like a record skipping, but I guess a bit of a time warp is fitting, after all. It's a little loss of poetry, but does not detract at all from the content of the address.

So, anyway, here goes:

On the Binding Biases of Time GVSU Part 1

On the Binding Biases of Time GVSU Part 02

On the Binding Biases of Time GVSU Part 3

And there you go. It's a lot of talk, I know, but hey, things are pretty quiet this time of year, so I hope you don't mind, and if you don't have the time to listen to it, well, that's kind of the point, isn't it?

My Year in Review

2011-12-28T11:37:00.000-05:00

Everyone's doing it this time of year!

But I think I got them all beat

in being comprehensive

and complete!

So without further ado,

here now is my Year in Review:

A Review to Remember

2011-12-22T18:39:00.000-05:00

All this time spent online, you get used to immediate feedback on what you do, even if it's only someone pushing the Like button on Facebook, or giving it the old Google +1 (sounds more like bringing a date than giving a thumbs up, doesn't it?). And as well all know, there's no Don't Like button, let alone one that says Hate, and Google doesn't venture into the red with a -1, either.

And that's all well and fine for most of us, I believe, and for most of the time. We're not really looking for critical evaluation when we venture into the social media environment, especially not when we do a status update on what we had for lunch. And perhaps we're not really looking for it at all, ever, in a culture where all the children are above average, to borrow Garrison Keillor's quip, where self-esteem is emphasized above all else, we have become increasingly more risk-aversive, and narcissism is rampant on an individual and collective scale, as Christopher Lasch noted decades ago.

The problem, though, is that all these Likes and +1s and Kudos (to include the old MySpace feature) come much too easily, and become increasingly more ritualized and pro forma. And while the ability to leave comments allows for more specific responses, and the possibility of critical engagement, it's not at all clear that anyone is looking for that sort of thing, and most respondents are reluctant to offer that kind of feedback back under the circumstances, so the norm once again becomes a stream of positive comments whose meaning and value become devalued.

And given the immediacy of the response, if you posted something longer than a tweet or status update, it is not even clear that the person leaving a comment actually read what you posted very closely at all, and certainly it is not difficult to leave a bit of praise without having done so.

So, you might say that we get immediate gratification, but no genuine satisfaction from this set-up. Or maybe some folks are satisfied, maybe the same folks who view greeting card poems seriously, or maybe most of us do most of the time, in the way that we get satisfaction from the phatic communication of saying hello, how are, fine thank you, how are you, and otherwise making small talk. Or maybe we just give in to the illusion that it all really means something, given our tendencies towards narcissism and general delusion.

Anyway, what prompted me to think about such things is the contrast you get from the older medium of print publication, where you write something, there's a long process of editing and preparation for publishing, it finally appears in print, and there's little or no immediate feedback, and then dribs and drabs coming in here and there, if you're lucky. Oh, you may get your congratulations on getting something published, of course, and if you post a status update on it, you'll get your Likes and +1s, but after all the effort that went into writing something, e.g., an article or a book, you'll be looking for something more, something substantive, something that really means something.

So, all this is leading up to the fact that the book I published earlier this year, On the Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on General Semantics and Media Ecology, was recently reviewed in Communication Research Trends (Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 38-40, which is published by the Centre for the Study of Communication and Culture, a service of the Society for Jesus, aka, the Jesuits, originally set up in the UK back in the 70s, and now published in California, mainly through Santa Clara University, one of Fordham's sister schools, as the saying goes. The review was written by Heather Crandall of Gonzaga University, another Jesuit institution (and if you think this all makes it an insider deal, you don't know the Jesuits and their high standards and emphasis on excellence).

In case you somehow missed it, here's a link for the blog post from earlier this year announcing the publication of my book: On the Binding Biases of Time. And here are the links for ordering it from Amazon:

So, anyway, I'm sure that if you haven't bought a copy of the book by now, you were just waiting to see a review, to see if the book's any good, right? Well, this one can be found online as well as in the print journal: Strate, Lance. On The Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on General Semantics and Media Ecology. But I'm sure no one will mind if I also include it here in Blog Time Passing.

So, here's how it begins:

Remember your favorite professor? The one whose class you set your schedule around? The one who spoke provocatively about ways of thinking about the nature of what it means to be communicative beings in a social world? Whose demeanor, humble and gracious, stirred your imagination to new intellectual connections, but not without some humor? Reading Lance Strate's new book, On The Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on General Semantics and Media Ecology takes you back to that class, to that engaging conversation.

Okay, so this has got to be one of the all time best beginnings to a book review, ever. It certainly made my day, month, year. Really, I can't tell you how happy this makes me, I couldn't ask for higher praise. Okay, I'm starting to blush and feel embarrassed, so let me just move on to the rest of the review.

The book's name draws on the concept of time-binding from general semantics and on the concept of time bias from media ecology. In Strate's words, "this is not a book about time, or the study of time"; rather it is about time binding, or our uniquely human ability to build knowledge over time. From media ecology, time is conceptualized as our invisible environment. Time does not dominate the conversation, however. It is but a sliver of what occurs in Strate's 14 essays. In his words, these "fugitive essays" make up a "network or matrix of ideas" that are general semantics, media ecology, and systems theory. They necessarily cross and circle each other because the aim is to trace "one-dimensional pathways in an effort to map a two-dimensional terrain" (p. 3). Those familiar with Korzybski and general semantics will recognize how appropriate these geographical metaphors are given Korzybski's famous saying, "the map is not the territory"--used to help others comprehend the difficulty of using our symbol system of language to represent and communicate meaning and experience. Broadly, On The Binding Biases of Time is an enjoyable foray into ecological thinking. "Formal systems of ecological thought, such as media ecology and general semantics, are a relatively recent phenomenon, but ecological thinking has been with us throughout history" (p. 41). It is an intellectual tradition about the relationship between humans, their symbols, and the reality that these symbols supposedly represent (p. 41). The rest of this review provides a glimpse into Strate's essays, some ways the book could be useful to both teachers and scholars, and ends with a note about the revival in general semantics.

Strate's essays begin with Korzybski the person, Korzybski's influences, contemporaries, major works, followers, and of course, accessible explanations of Korzybski's general semantics. General semantics is explained in contrast to Aristotelean thought because Korzybski saw Aristotelean thinking as a perceptual trap that removes people from "any connection with reality, and therefore sanity" (p. 29). For example, Aristotle's laws of logic, according to Strate's essay, include the Law of Identity, the Law of Non-Contradiction, and the Law of the Excluded Middle Together. General semantics are "Non-Aristotelean Principles of Thought." They are the Principle of Non-Identity, the Principle of Non-Allness, and the Principle of Self-Reflexiveness (pp. 23-24). In the end, Strate connects Korzybski's general semantics with the field of media ecology through Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan, and finally, Neil Postman. In Strate's words what each shares, "is that the structure of our mode of communication has much to do with our thought and behavior, individually and collectively, and this is the basis of the field that has come to be known as media ecology" (p. 36).

The essay titled, "Quandaries, Quarrels, Quagmires, and Questions," problematizes (or clarifies) ecological thinking vis-a-vis scientific method. Strate uses Wendell Johnson's 1946 work, People in Quandaries, here. In Johnson's observation, "the method of science has to do with the way that language is used. From which he concludes that, 'the language of science is the better part of the method of science'" (p. 50, cited by Strate, p. 42). Language, then, conceptualized as a medium allows for a consideration of the environment created by that medium, in Johnson's (1946) term, a semantic environment. Language as a medium gives rise to statements of identity or relationship, and through the bias of the medium, we can use language "as a kind of informal science, a way of knowing the world, a form of theory-building" (p. 44). The story of the Trojan Horse is used to illustrate these ideas.

The third essay, about the relationship of systems theory to media ecology and general semantics is a brief synopsis of systems theory, and a taxonomy of scholars who have dwelled on these connections including Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, Christine Nystrom, and Joshua Meyrowitz. The fourth essay is squarely about Korzybski's theory of time binding and the binding biases of time. The way we use language and think about time matters to our experience of time (past, present, future) and how this differs from how we experienced time once upon a time. It is here that Harold Innis' ideas about time and James Carey's ideas about culture are discussed. Also, interestingly, Strate takes issue with Carey's work in a manner both nice and sharp. It feels like grace and truth, in the Biblical sense.

Okay, again, these kind words bring a broad smile to my face, but it's best that you can't see that, as I probably look pretty goofy. So let's just return to the review:

The essay, "The Future of Consciousness," is compelling. In it, Strate reviews the past, present, and processes of consciousness, recognizing the strangeness of the topic. Sometimes funny as in, "it is in the nature of consciousness to wander," (p. 242) and, "if you do not like what I have to say, it is my sincere hope that you hold Allen Flagg personally responsible for whatever defects you happen to identify" (p. 227). The discussion ends seriously with some real possibilities, from a media ecology perspective, about what a new electronic consciousness might be, what the future of human consciousness might be, and what could become of collective consciousness.

The other essays continue to be that engaging conversation where you see application of the ideas. This is especially true of "The Ten Commandments and the Semantic Environment" and "Tolkiens of My Affection." Read in one sitting, you get a sense of Strate the person, his religious practices, his family, his own mentors, his revered friends. This is especially true of "Post(Modern) Man," "Paradox Lost," and "Healthy Media Choices." The essay on renaming Canada's Beaver Magazine is a tad weak to my way of thinking. I suspect it is the word play with the word beaver and its many meanings.

Okay, so I'm not batting 1.000 here, but that bit of criticism helps to establish that the genuine quality of this evaluation. And I would certainly concede the point that that piece, while relevant to the collection, is not one of the stronger selections. So, back to the review now:

Those excited by the scholarship in media ecology and general semantics will find some guiding questions:
Questions about how symbols represent reality,
   how words stand for and point to things in reality,
   how maps depict territories, and how media
   extend us outward into our environments.... And
   questions about the nature of symbols themselves,
   about what a word is and is not, about
   how maps are made, about the meaning of meaning
   and the biases of technologies, about how the
   medium is the message, and how media, by separating
   us from our environment, become our
   new environment. (p. 50)
Due to being a collection of essays, On The Binding Biases of Time read cover to cover contains some redundancy. As immersion into the systems of thought that underlie media ecology and general semantics, the few redundancies are useful. If using the essays individually, the redundancies are, of course, absent.

Again, a valid bit of criticism. When you have essays on related topics, it is hard to avoid a bit of redundancy.

As to the individual essays, you could easily use them in different courses as supplementary readings or central reading. The essay titled, "Quandaries, Quarrels, Quagmires, and Questions," would be useful in an upper division undergraduate methods course or any graduate level theory, methods, or interpersonal course. It would also be useful in a media studies course as the essay covers the dawn of writing from the written word, "whose first awkward appearance was only about five thousand years ago" (p. 45) through the Industrial Revolution and its forms of mass communication. The third essay would be useful in a course on small group communication, organizational communication, or media and society in either undergraduate or graduate level courses. And both the fourth and 14th chapter could supplement a human communication and technology course. One of Strate's goals for the book is to be readable. Therefore the chapters are useful at both graduate and undergraduate levels. At the graduate level, the first four essays and the final essay could be used individually to introduce theoretical and philosophical strands of thought, or as an entire book to show how one body of work was built and can then interrelate with another to build knowledges.

The Media Ecology Association is a curious group. I peruse their Listserv, and visit their panels at the annual National Communication Association convention as I move from mass communication, to visual communication, to rhetoric panels. I suspect, and having read On Being and Time, I now know that the media ecology people understand something of critical importance to human communication, something they hold steadfast to in disciplinary territory. In Strate's own words,

General semantics has much to offer, in a practical
   way for individuals and institutions, and theoretically
   and philosophically for the advancement
   of knowledge. Indeed, it is truly unfortunate
   that this field is so often overlooked these
   days, in the academy, and outside of it. I hope
   that my meager efforts have contributed in some
   small way to the Korzybski Revival now underway,
   to a renewal of interest in his non-Aristotelean
   system, and to its continued
   progress and evolution. (p. 10)

And there you have it! It is certainly great to see that shout-out to the Media Ecology Association, and the inclusion of that final point, that media ecology and general semantics are fields and disciplines that should not be overlooked, and that are eminently worthy of further study. After all, that's the whole point of my book.

So, I am deeply grateful to Professor Crandall for this fine review, for all of her positive evaluation to be sure, and for her careful attention to and sympathetic reading of the work. And I am still just glowing about that first paragraph. I really should have it blown up in size, and framed! Really!

Questioning Direct Democracy

2011-12-21T18:06:00.000-05:00

Discussion on the MEA listserv turned to the topic of direct democracy recently, with suggestions that the Occupy Wall Street movement is a reflection of the desire for direct democracy, borne out of dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs within our system of representative democracy. I responded by acknowledging that direct democracy sounds like a positive development--it might even be deemed utopian--but that the idea also raises some questions for me, and I thought I would share with you here as well.

1. Direct democracy is a more concrete form of democracy than representative democracy. Direct democracy is literally government by the people (or at least those considered citizens). Representative democracy is democracy once removed, democracy higher up in levels of abstraction, as we abstract out from each locality a single representative to stand for (in a sense, symbolize and communicate for) the entire group. It is arguable whether the ancient Greeks who invented democracy would recognize our system of elected representatives as democracy at all. And it is certainly more difficult for individuals with a relatively concrete mindset (which Walter Ong associates with oral culture) to understand our system as democratic, as compared to individuals with a relatively abstract mindset (which Ong associates with literate culture). So, does the desire to shift from representative democracy to direct democracy have anything to do with a resistance to abstract thinking, a return to more of a concrete mindset, which has been associated with the triumph of the image over the word (as discussed in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Jacques Ellul's Humiliation of the Word)? In the long run, can a postliterate culture support and sustain a system of representative democracy, or is its erosion and dissolution all but inevitable?

2. The concept of democracy is closely associated with the concept (or ideology) of individualism. While we take it for granted that people ought to be regarded as unique and autonomous individuals, and that individuals ought to be valued more highly than any group that they are a part of, this view is a relatively recent historical development, mostly emerging out of the literate culture of the Renaissance and the print culture of early modern Europe, but first appearing in the literate cultures of the ancient world, in Israel, Greece, and Rome. Individualism replaced the group-centered, tribal mentality associated with oral culture, a view that comes naturally to human beings, whereas individualism is an artificial invention, and therefore hard to implement and hard to maintain, as natural as it may seem to us. Individualism supports democracy because, as individuals, we are expected to behave rationally within the free marketplace of ideas, make up our own minds, and vote accordingly. If the same electronic media that make direct democracy possible are also undermining the individualism associated with literate culture (and I believe they are), can democracy still work in the absence of individualism, with a mentality characterized by post-individualism, neotribalism, etc.?

3. The concept of democracy is associated with literacy also because literacy provides access to information, and participation in government requires an informed citizenry. This is perhaps less of an issue for the local scale of ancient Athenian democracy, but on the scale of the modern nation (or kingdom), some means of widespread dissemination of information is required, and it is the printing press that answers that need. As print media have expanded, and new forms, notably the newspaper, were introduced, access to political information increased, the capacity for self-governance expanded, and the desire for democracy spread. Now, in our contemporary environment, that the electronic media provide more access to information than ever before is clear, but in doing so, do they provide so much access as to bring on information overload, and thereby short circuit the deliberations by which information is evaluated, plans of action are formulated, and decisions are made? Gatekeeping is a two-way function, opening the gates enough to keep citizens informed, but not so much as to make them overwhelmed. In the absence of gatekeeping, does access become excess, and information become noise?

4. Perhaps most importantly of all, democracy, in being based on access to information, is based on the assumption that access to information is sufficient to make our human environment comprehensible, so that with sufficient understanding of our world we can make informed decisions. But is that really possible given the vast scale of the world that we deal with, global affairs most certainly, and large nations like the United States as well (maybe in a place like Finland they can get a better handle on their society)? And it's not just population, of course, but the complexity of our way of life, the complexity of our technological environment. Is it possible that access to information coupled with extreme complexity is what leads to information overload, the search for simplistic ways of understanding the world, and irrational behavior? Is Ellul right that, given the complexity of technological societies, the only alternative is to cede control to technical experts, including those expert in manipulating public opinion to support the decisions of the technical experts, and thereby provide the illusion of democracy?

5. I wonder if the advocates of direct democracy somehow assume that the citizens who would participate in that new order are the citizens who were shaped by print culture, rather than the "digital natives" who will exhibit markedly different orientations towards politics? And I wonder if the only way that democracy can truly exist is on a small scale and local level? Wasn't that what Marx was really on about, the withering away of the state and the return to the commune, or if you prefer, the tribe or the village?

These are just a few questions, but of course, as any good media ecologist can tell you, the questions we ask are more important than the answers we get, and have much to do with the kinds of answers that they result in.

Searchgeist

2011-12-18T18:34:00.000-05:00

So, my Fordham University Introduction to New Media student Stephanie Diller shared this video with our class via our email discussion list. It's called Zeitgeist 2011: Year In Review, posted by Google (who owns YouTube), and it's a fascinating look at this year's events, not an unusual sort of thing to see in the mainstream media at the end of the year, but it also incorporates a healthy amount of Google self-promotion. Here, take a look at it:

The only explanation provided by the write-up on YouTube is the following:

See how the World Searched with Google's 2011 Zeitgeist:
http://googlezeitgeist.com

And if you head on over to Google Zeitgeist 2011, you'll find the following headline: Zeitgeist 2011: How the World Searched. So, the idea is that the most popular terms that were put into the Google search engine over the past year are a reflection of our collective state of mind, our mutual concerns, interests, obsessions. That we are what we search for, our quests and questions constituting the spirit of our time (zeit is German for time and tide, geist for spirit and ghost).

It's Google as popular culture, the folklore of postindustrial society. And following the headline, Google tells us:

What mattered in 2011? Zeitgeist sorted billions of Google searches to capture the year's 10 fastest-rising global queries and the rest of the spirit of 2011.

So what are the top 10 search items that mattered? Well, here they are:

Rebecca Black
Google Plus
Ryan Dunn
Casey Anthony
Battlefield 3
iPhone 5
Adele
TEPCO
Steve Jobs
iPad 2

So, let's go over this, shall we? First of all, I have to admit that I'm behind the times and not in keeping with the spirit, especially of the teen variety, because I had no idea who in the hell Rebecca Black is. But I've been informed that she is a 13-year-old girl who likes to sing, and whose YouTube music video went viral earlier this year, albeit not in a good way because it was held up to ridicule. Going back to the 1980s, I've argued that every new medium creates a new kind of hero, and the celebrity is a new kind of hero created by the electronic media, but this takes the phenomenon one step beyond.

I also must confess that I didn't recognize the name, Ryan Dunn, but I learned that he was one of the loonies associated with the Jackass movies, and he died in a drunk driving accident earlier this year. Casey Anthony is a name I recognize, as belonging to the mother of the murdered child, Caylee Anthony, and whom many believe to be responsible for the death of her child, although she was tried and acquitted in court this year. Adele is a British singing sensation, but I didn't know that either, I must admit. And of course I know who Steve Jobs is, and wrote several posts about him here on Blog Time Passing after he passed away (Steve Jobs, Media Ecologist, Jobs, Disney, and the Future of Apple, Steve Jobs Was One of Us, and A Ram's-Eye View on Steve Jobs)

As for the non-human search items, well, Google Plus I know, hey, I'm on Google Plus--check me out if you care to. Battlefield 3 I heard about, it's a videogame. When I was in Toronto for the big McLuhan fest last month, several of us were walking back from dinner one night and saw a large crowd of people waiting in line outside of a store, many dressed in costumes, especially strange military garb, some of it futuristic. We thought maybe it was some Occupy Wall Street-like phenomenon, but no, they were waiting in line for the midnight release of Battlefield 3.

Two of the top ten items are Apple products, one the iPhone, although as it turns out, the new release was not the iPhone5, but rather the iPhone4S, but everyone thought it was going to be the iPhone5, and speculation about it was massive. And then there's the iPad 2. The other item on the list, TEPCO, is not one that I would recognize under that name, or the way it's also listed by Google, as 東京電力, but of course I am familiar with the topic of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, which was damaged by the earthquake.

So, what are we to make of all this? That we are a celebrity-obsessed culture? Sure, nothing new there. That we, through the use of electronic media, are trivializing serious matters and amusing ourselves to death? Again, yes indeed, but nothing startling there.

What is important to keep in mind here is that this is a very skewed view of the American and global psyche. After all, we don't search for things we already know about, and the things that we already know a lot about are probably the things that are most important to us. So sure, people are going to go to Google when some unknown name is suddenly coming up all over the place in social media posts. And they'll use Google to find a video folks are talking about online if they don't have the link handy. That's why Rebecca Black, Ryan Dunn, and Adele drew more queries than Steve Jobs. After all, we already know a great deal about Jobs, not to mention the fact that his passing was covered by the news media to a great extent.

And folks who are online tend to be tech-oriented, so they'll search for information about new media products that have not yet been released. It's all rumor and speculation, hence the iPhone5 that existed only in people's imaginations. And for that matter, the same would be true in regard to the Fukushima nuclear reactors, as there was a distinct dearth of information on how serious the breach was and how much radiation was released. This point about how rumor rises up to fill the void was made back in 1966 in a classic study on the subject by Tamotsu Shibutani, entitled Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor, which harkens back to the experience of the Japanese internment camps of World War Two. It's a great study on the social construction of reality, that highlights how the presence and absence of facts makes a difference in the degree to which reality may be a complete fabrication.

And this brings me to the conclusion I draw from all this. Google's lists of top search terms are not so much a reflection of the zeitgeist as they are a mirror of our collective curiosity, a product of the ambiguity that exists in our mediascape, and a measure of our ignorance. Google is our gaze into the void, making manifest the ominous comment from the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.

Google is the abyss staring back at you. Try not to blink.

Arendt Come Due

2011-12-15T15:40:00.000-05:00

So, you no doubt recall that I recently posted a series of discussions based on Hannah Arendt's philosophy concerning violence and power, specifically Violence and Technology, Violence and Power, Violence and Identity, and Violence and Unity.

So, as I was in the midst of these posts, I was contacted by representatives from the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College (where Arendt taught for many years, and where she left her papers), asking if my posts could be edited together, and included on the Center's own blog. And so this is how I came to be a

for the Hannah Arendt Center, which was indeed an honor. I made some modest revisions to the text, including editing out redundancies as I put the four posts together, and the post appeared on their blog last week under the title of Violence, Power, Technology, and Identity. So go take a look if you care to, and maybe leave a comment if you like.

Oh, and there are some cool images included, which I'll let you check out for yourself. Many thanks to Bridget Hollenback, Director of Outreach and Social Media for the Hannah Arendt Center, for her work on the blog, and to Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center, and Associate Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College, for the invitation.

In discussing Arendt, I placed her ideas in the context of media ecology scholarship, and especially Marshall McLuhan's thought, and as a consequence, an excerpt from my HAC blog post appears on the McLuhan Galaxy blog maintained by Alex Kuskis, under the heading of Hannah Arendt & Marshall McLuhan: Violence, Power, Technology & Identity. And I was also pleased to hear from Peter Montgomery, one of Marshall McLuhan's former students, in regard to Wilfred Watson, a Canadian professor of literature, poet, and dramatist, who was the co-author with McLuhan of From Cliché to Archetype, and his wife Sheila, who was also a professor of literature, novelist, and critic, both at the University of Alberta (site of last June's annual meeting of the Media Ecology Association), that

Arendt was perhaps THE favourite reference of both Watsons. Its importance couldn't be stressed enough. She was one of the platforms on which their work and teaching and to some degree McLuhan's also, was built.

And to this I can only respond, Holy Hannah! And just leave it at that.

Artforum Informs that Media and Formal Cause is 1 of the 10 Best of 2011

2011-12-14T16:03:00.000-05:00

The December issue of Artforum magazine includes a feature on the 10 best books of 2011, and one of the 10 picks is Media and Formal Cause by Marshall and Eric McLuhan (with a little foreword by yours truly), published by NeoPoiesis Press. In a post I put up back in February, Media and Formal Cause in Effect!, I went into more detail about the book, so please feel free to return there to refresh your memory, if you feel the need.

In case you're not already famiar with it, Artforum is, not surprisingly, a very attractive periodical, gorgeous in its images and design, thick (approximately 300 pages) and oversized, and the issue costs ten bucks. Each of the listings for the ten best books is accompanied by a book review, and for Media and Formal Cause the review is by Graham Harman, Professor of Philosophy and Associate Provost for Research Administration at the American University in Cairo.

The beginning of The Best Books of 2011 feature can be found online (hence the link), but unfortunately it only includes the first 3 books reviewed as a teaser, ending by saying that if you want to see the rest of the reviews, you gotta buy the issue. And hey, for any McLuhan collector, I'd say that it's well worth the ten dollars. But just to give you an idea of what that page looks like, here's an image taken from a scan of the page the page was too big to fit entirely in the scanner, so headers and footers are missing)

I would particularly note that Harmon writes, in regard to the tetrad or laws of media developed by McLuhan towards the end of his career, that Media and Formal Cause "gives us the crucial prehistory of this tetrad while linking it ever more closely with Aristotle's doctrine of 'formal cause', which the authors try to rejuvenate." And then, later he states that "the formal cause of a thing is not what is most visible to us, but what hides in the background while we are distracted by the content it generates: 'The medium is the message.'" Also quite significantly, Harmon notes that, "in the present book we learn that every medium has effects heralding its own downfall." And he concludes with reference to the discussion in this book of the need for anti-environments to provide us with critical distance from the invisible environment of media, technology, and symbol systems that we are immersed in, and the essential role that artists play in constructing such anti-environments.

So now, if you don't have a copy yet, don't you think you oughta get one? Here, let me help you out with that:

And do keep in mind that this makes the perfect stocking stuffer, secret Santa present, or Chanukkah gift.

So, thank you Artforum, on behalf of everyone involved, including NeoPoiesis Press, for this wonderful bit of holiday cheer!

People Planet Me!

2011-12-13T20:37:00.000-05:00

So, back in the summer time, I was contacted by a journalist, Lynn Ginsburg, about doing an interview about Marshall McLuhan, which I agreed to (a fact that probably would not surprise you, unless you are new to Blog Time Passing).

So, it turns out that Lynn was launching a new, online magazine called PeoplePlanet.me, which is also a URL, PeoplePlanet.me (and yeah, you can click on it and go take a look, and if you're that impatient, you can do it now, or wait until I'm done, I won't be too long). This is one of the first examples I've come across of someone using the ".me" domain name, which is relatively new. Over on http://www.domain.me they write

why .me?
Because it is useful, meaningful and memorable, but most importantly .Me represents untapped resource of branding power and you want your online presence personalized ASAP

But I digress. We were talking about PeoplePlanet.me magazine, and here's a sneak preview of what it looks like (assuming you haven't already clicked on the link and gone to see for yourself):

And here's something of how they describe themselves from their About page:

PeoplePlanet.me is a magazine devoted to exploring the next Wave of the Web: P2P and Social Networking. PeoplePlanet’s aim is to entertain, discover and inform how the technology and applications of social networking and P2P are rapidly and radically changing global society in the 21stcentury. While most magazines that cover these topics are dedicated to the technology behind it, or news about specific file sharing or social media sites, we’re fascinated with something entirely different: examining the impact the new medium is having on our identities, and our day to day lives. Our audience is both P2P and social networking devotees, as well as anyone intrigued with where this next iteration of the Web is taking us. We intend to explore the organic changes springing from the technology of P2P and social networking that are already shaping our lives, such as:

How is it affecting social interactions, both on and offline? How is it affecting globalization, in terms of cultures, friendships, economies, governments, etc.? Can P2P and social networking serve as a catalyst to successfully provoke political change in oppressive governments? How do P2P economies work, and how do they mesh with real world economies? Is P2P actually good for those who depend on copyright law, and is it superior for the content providers than old media models? Does social networking create new global affiliations and loyalties that transcend borders? How will nation states react when those borders in some sense become irrelevant in a virtual environment?

Sounds pretty promising, don't you think?

And here's the opening of the Welcome page for the first issue, as written by Lynn Ginsburg, who by the way is listed as the Editor-In-Chief of PeoplePlanet.me magazine:

Welcome to the inaugural issue of PeoplePlanet.me Magazine. We’ll be bringing you entertainment features, thought pieces, and news and views with each issue that covers how the relatively new technologies of P2P and Social Networking are changing our planet.

In this first issue, perhaps one of the keys to understanding how this new technology will have a profound impact on our day to day lives is in our article on Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was a visionary who not only predicted the creation of the world wide web, but also future iterations of it, including technologies such as P2P and social networking. His predictions continue to unfold as to what exactly that will mean to each of us as individuals.

From here, she goes on to talk about the other articles included in this issue, and of course you can read all about it over there. But of course, the McLuhan article is of particular interest here at Blog Time Passing, as you no doubt have already surmised...

So, let's just scroll down and look at the beginning of the article, shall we? It's by Lynn Ginsburg again, and it starts out like this:

Marshall McLuhan had both the fortune and misfortune of being born 40 years too early—he never got to surf the Web he predicted 30 years before its creation. McLuhan was once a controversial figure for his writings and predictions about the future of communications. But he is now fairly widely acknowledged as a prescient genius, who among other things accurately predicted the rise of what would become the Internet, and the effect that media would have on globalization.

And most importantly, he predicted that the effect of the technology itself—not the content the medium carried—would have the greater impact on worldwide society. His most famous saying was “The Medium is the Message,” which to many of his contemporaries sounded like a catchy meaningless jingle. Whereas to anyone living in the modern world, and familiar with the rise of the Internet and its constantly evolving iterations, it sounds like a prophecy continuing to unfold before us.

Now, you may be saying, that's very nice, but I heard it all before, to which I would respond with, but wait, there's more!

McLuhan’s many “prophecies” of this sort were always difficult to unravel–even among his contemporary peers–more like Zen koans than a widely accessible theory. So for insight into McLuhan’s almost eerie prediction of the future—today, and yet to come–we spoke with one of the foremost experts on McLuhan and his works, Lance Strate, Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and author of several books on McLuhan’s theories,as well as co-editor of several anthologies, including The Legacy of McLuhan and Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment.

So, now you know what the point off all this has been (after all, this blog is all about .me). And I'll just leave off with that introduction. I know you're used to me pasting in the entire article here so you don't have to read it over there, but don't you think maybe you're getting a little spoiled, hmmm? And in any event, this time I'd like you to go on over to PeoplePlanet.me and read it there, if you wouldn't mind. Here, here's the link: It's the Medium Stupid! And maybe you could leave a comment, there already are a few, but the more the merrier!

Will PeoplePlanet.me become the next big online periodical, along the lines of Salon, or Slate, or Wired, or CNET? It's hard to say, but if they do, you can say you were there when it all began!

Hey! Hey! Baba!

2011-12-12T22:37:00.000-05:00

I can't really explain it, it's just that the word "baba" was an inside joke among my group of friends when I was a teenager and young adult, one of those things where you just had to be there, and be a part of it. It was used as a form of address, e.g., "and how are you, baba?" or more directly, as in "Yo, baba!" And also used as an exclamation, as in just simply, "baba!"

As I said, I can't really explain it, except to say that within my peer group there was a great deal of linguistic playfulness present, which of course is great preparation for being a media ecologist.

So, okay, having said that, on another, unrelated topic, the music from Disney's The Lion King holds a special place in my heart, as we used to listen to it all the time, when my son Benjamin was still a baby and I'd be feeding him the highchair, and when he was older as we watched the movie on video many times, saw it in Imax, and went to the Broadway show, not to mention seeing the Lion King attractions and parade elements at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.

So, I was quite tickled to have stumbled upon a YouTube video where the still frame displayed the words "Hey! Hey Baba!" and the images were from The Lion King film. The name of the video says it all: Soramimi (misheard foreign lyrics)-Lion King, Circle of Life. So, here now--should I say hear now?--is the video and misinterpreted lyrics:

I was further delighted to see in the very brief write-up of the video the following statement: "Project for The Cultural Nature of Language with Professor Bambi Schieffelin." And no, it's not what you think, not because the name Bambi suggests another Disney connection (or sounds a little like baba). It's just that I had met Professor Schieffelin, who teaches anthropology at New York University, a couple of years ago when we were on a panel discussion together on the subject of literacy at the now defunct Philoctetes Center in Manhattan. I wrote about the panel in two posts here on Blog Time Passing: Literacy and Imagination and More on Literacy and Imagination (admittedly, not very imaginative titles for the posts).

You might also contrast this English misinterpretation of lyrics in a foreign language with an example from another previous post of mine, Phony English, where there is a meaningless play with lyrics meant to sound like the English language.

And when you come down to it, after all that, is there anything left to say, except for...

Hey Hey Baba!

From New York to Nepal

2011-12-08T22:36:00.001-05:00

No, I haven't made a trip to that Asian nation, not that I'd mind going to Kathmandu (hey, that would make for a great subject for a song, don't you think?), but that's not it. But a couple of days ago I received an email message from Dharma Adhikari, who is the Secretary General of the Media Foundation in Nepal.

Dharma has been a member of the MEA listserv, and he reminded me that we had been in touch a few years ago about his research on McLuhan. So anyway, he informed me that he had organized a McLuhan Centenary to be held on December 8 (that's yesterday), apologized for the short notice, and said

I was thinking if you could send us a brief message to this gathering with your thoughts on Marshall and his global relevance today, especially to journalism and media practices. We are inviting a guests from the cross section of Nepali society. This event is being organized by Media Foundation Nepal, in collaboration with Institute of Advanced Communication, Education and Research- IACER, and Creative Press.

So, I thought that my message sent from New York to Nepal would make for a worthwhile addition to Blog Time Passing, and something that you might like me to share with you (and if not, then, oh well...). Not that there's anything especially new and noteworthy about the content of the message, but still and all, there is something to be gained from variations on a theme. So, here it is:

Dear Dharma,

Thank you for your note concerning the Marshall McLuhan Centenary event that you have organized in Nepal. Yours may be the distinction of being the last Centenary event of the year, but as we say, it would not be the least. It is indeed encouraging to know that over this past year, the 100th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan's birth has been celebrated in every corner of the world, with the possible exception of Antarctica. It is indeed fitting that this McLuhan Centenary extend now to the "roof of the world" as it ought to mark McLuhan's permanent ascension into the intellectual canon worldwide.

Marshall McLuhan's approach to understanding media was so far ahead of its time when he introduced it back in the mid-20th century that many people, including a number of otherwise bright and well-educated scholars, were not able to appreciate it. It was not until the popularization of the internet and digital media in the 90s that a McLuhan revival began, and it is that wave that we are riding today. When McLuhan argued that an era dominated by print media and mechanical technologies had given way to a new era shaped by the characteristics of electronic technologies and telecommunications, many were dumbfounded and in denial. Today, we are witness to the disappearance of newspapers, the marginalization of the printed book, the decline of letter writing and downgrading of postal services, and the longstanding shift away from industrialism. When McLuhan suggested that literacy had altered the functioning of our nervous systems, and that electronics were doing so again, many, even among those sympathetic to his views, considered his intuitions to be nothing more than wild and unfounded speculation. But in recent years, research on brain functioning has shown that he was right, that learning to read and write actually rewires the brain, and that watching television and playing videogames alter brain functioning as well. When McLuhan connected the adoption of television to the social and political disruptions of the 1960s, many were skeptical. Today, there is no denying that movements such as the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street are made possible by various new media such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and the use of mobile devices.

That we live today in interesting times, as your neighbors to the north have been known to say, there is no doubt. That we desperately need to understand our times, and understand the environment that gives rise to the events we are witnessing, there is no doubt. And that we need, therefore, to study McLuhan there ought to be no doubt. Through McLuhan, and through broadening that study to include the field of media ecology and the scholars that influenced and were influenced by McLuhan, we can understand that we occupy media environments, environments of our collective creation that in turn create us and recreate us in their own image, individually and collectively. Through McLuhan and other media ecology scholars, we can understand that human life and human culture in its most basic form is born out of a media environment of speech, of the spoken word, an acoustic space, powered by symbols, by language. And we can understand that the shift from tribal societies to what was traditionally called civilization, large-scale settlements, cities, with codified law, government, concepts of property, specialized occupations, education, etc., goes hand in hand with the development of systems of writing, the single most important invention in human history. And it was the invention of the alphabet by the Semitic peoples, and its further modification by the ancient Greeks, that gave the west its distinctive characteristics, as well as forming the basis of later Arabic and Hindu cultures. And when the printing press with moveable type, based on alphabetic writing, was introduced in 15th century Europe, it ushered in what we refer to as the modern world, and the ascendency of the west for the centuries that followed. And today, we find ourselves in a new electronic environment, one that we are still trying to understand, one that promises some form of what McLuhan called the "global village" accompanied by various forms of neo-tribalism that McLuhan also spoke of. And we can either try to understand what is happening, and through understanding try to influence the course of events, or we can stick our heads in the sand and let our technologies take control.

McLuhan said, "the medium is the message," and this goes to the heart of his media ecology, which is the study of media as environments. It is a wake-up call, first and foremost, a call to become aware, to observe what is going on all around us. Environments tend to be invisible because they become routine. We ignore them, they fade into the background, and we find ourselves, for all intents and purposes, blind to them. McLuhan asks us to open our eyes, to pay attention, and to contemplate what is going on all around us. He characterized his ideas as probes, tentative explorations, not dogma, because he wants us, all of us, to use our senses and open our minds, to look and to think for ourselves. It's not about theorizing. It is about making connections, seeing the whole world as interconnected, an ecology, and studying the relationships, the networks, that exist among the various phenomena that we typically regard only in isolation from one another. And to begin by considering the means, the methods, the modes by which we relate to and act upon our world, and our fellow human beings, by considering our technologies, our languages, our codes and symbols and tools and containers and our art forms, by considering our media.

On behalf of McLuhan scholars all around the world, and on behalf of the Media Ecology Association, which is dedicated to spreading and advancing McLuhan's approach, I extend greetings from my home town of New York City, and the fact that I can do so in this way is just one more indication of McLuhan's supreme relevance to us today. I applaud the organizers and sponsors of this Centenary celebration, Media Foundation Nepal, the Institute of Advanced Communication, Education and Research IACER, and Creative Press for their hard work. And I wish you all the best of luck in your proceedings, and know that I wish I could be with you in person right now, as, in the end, there is nothing quite like the medium of human presence. I am certain your discussions will be stimulating and inspiring, and it is my sincere hope that when it is all over and done, you will all do the following: Be the medium, and spread the message.

Sincerely,

Lance Strate
Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University

Dharma has since emailed me to let me know my message was read out lout at the conference (I imagine that it was not the only one), and that the event went very well.

And here is a photograph of Dharma Adhikari holding forth on the subject of the media guru. Congratulations to Dharma and his colleagues on putting on and pulling off another successful centenary event!

Penny for Your Thoughts?

2011-12-07T22:12:00.000-05:00

I have to admit that I'm one of those sentimental types who have a lot of trouble letting go, who have a nostalgic attachment to old media that have become obsolescent and outlived their utility.

I still have my old vinyl record collection all boxed up. It took me many years and a good amount of money to collect several hundred albums, and it may well be that you'll have to pry them from my cold, dead hands. The same goes for my first computer, my Atari 800, which came with 16K RAM that I upped to the maximum of 48K. And there's still an old typewriter stored down in the basement. After all, you never know, do you?

So, the thought of eliminating the penny did not sit well with me, however unnecessary and wasteful the one cent coin may be. I don't often use them anymore, but if I happen to have one or more in my pocket from some recent transaction, and have a chance to give exact change down to the cent in my next transaction, then I'll do it. But for the most part, whatever change I may have collected during the day winds up in a container along with nickels and dimes, and to some extent quarters (the only coin that has some real utility). And sooner or later, the coins in that container are turned over to one of those infernal Coinstar machine, which charges me for the privilege of converting my coins into a more usable form of cash or credit.

So, the point I'm leading up to is that, despite my sentimentality, I am ready to concede defeat on the subject, and this video by C.G.P. Grey, Death to Pennies, has me convinced that it's time to say goodnight moon to pennies, and also nickels and dimes. Here, take a look:

Now, I do want to note that my attachment to the penny has been fading gradually over the years, and I think that this is due, in large part, to the fact that I have been using cash, and especially coins, less and less. More and more, I find my transactions are electronic, just slide the old debit or credit card through the machine (or let the cashier do it for you), and no filthy lucre need exchange hands.

For this reason, and again, despite my penchant for nostalgic attachments, I can see giving up on the dollar bill as well. Dollar coins make a great deal more sense, and again, with our increasing reliance on electronic transactions, I just don't think that these changes will be all that traumatic for us, and neither will resistance to change be all that adamant.

Still, and all, I don't understand why we can't just make all of our currency, well more current, by increasing their value ten fold all at once. Just moving everything over one decimal point, so pennies will be worth ten cents, dimes will be the equivalent of a dollar, and a dollar will get you ten dollars worth. What's the problem with that? It's all symbolic, after all, map as opposed to territory, all based on social conventions, consensus, generally agreed upon exchange value, money being a medium of exchange and what McLuhan humorously called, the poor man's credit card.

Dare I end this post by saying, a penny for your thoughts? No, no, I think it's best if I refrain...

American Pied Piper

2011-12-06T16:06:00.000-05:00

At the McLuhan100 Conference in Toronto that I attended last month, there was an intriguing presentation by Rob Bliss, the media professional responsible for the Grand Rapids Lipdub Video. This is an extraordinary video that was created this past May, and released on YouTube.

The video quickly went viral, and now has almost 4 1/2 million views. It also got a great deal of attention from the mainstream news media.

As was explained on the video's YouTube page:

This video was created as an official response to the Newsweek article calling Grand Rapids a "dying city." We disagreed strongly, and wanted to create a video that encompasses the passion and energy we all feel is growing exponentially, in this great city. We felt Don McLean's "American Pie," a song about death, was in the end, triumphant and filled to the brim with life and hope." - Rob Bliss, Director & Executive Producer

Of course, American Pie is one of the all-time great pop songs, but it's what Rob Bliss set to that soundtrack that is truly amazing. But here, take a look, if you haven't seen it before, you're in for a treat:

Here's some additional info from the video's YouTube page:

The debut project by STATUS CREATIVE http://statuscreative.com/

The international sensation that Roger Ebert calls "The Greatest Music Video Ever Made."

"The Grand Rapids LipDub Video was filmed May 22nd, with 5,000 people, and involved a major shutdown of downtown Grand Rapids, which was filled with marching bands, parades, weddings, motorcades, bridges on fire, and helicopter take offs. It is the largest and longest LipDub video, to date.

*Note: The "NEW WORLD RECORD" designation refers to size and scope, not duration. Storyboards and concept art by Greg Oberle.

What I find marvelous about the video is that it's all shot in one take. While that's not unheard of in the history of cinema (e.g., Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film, Rope), but I do think it is an interesting manifestation of a characteristic that Lev Manovitch associates with new media, resistance to montage. Granted, Manovitch mainly refers to the use of spatial juxtaposition, as in the different parts of a website, with it's hypermediated format, as opposed to serial transitions, as in the cuts and dissolves used in film and television to transition from one shot to another within the same basic frame, I think this stands as a different but equally significant manifestation of that same syndrome. YouTube videos, consisting in such large part of amateur video footage, often do not employ the sophisticated editing of more professional moving image media, and while this video is highly professional, it was created with new media, and YouTube in mind.

In some ways, this is also a throwback to silent film, with its reliance on thousands of extras and large scale scenery, rather than the contemporary trend in film to utilize digital media to create realistic simulations. Here, take a look at this making-of-the-video video:

The coordination of all of the participants in so many locations with a constantly moving camera is the true marvel of this video, and that is also what makes it very much a product of the new media environment. In his presentation in Toronto, Bliss explained that he was inspired by flash mobs, especially New York's ImprovEverywhere, the subject of my previous post, Musical Media and Other Acts of Coordination. And no doubt all of this coordination was carried out with the aid of mobile communications, cell phones that is.

Rob Bliss has a very media ecological interest in creating events, and I applaud him for it. In the age of electronic media, that is the experience we are looking for, an event, not an encounter with an object, a thing.

As for the significance of the video, there's a post about this video on the NPR website, The Grand Rapids Lip Dub: A Giant Street Party Set To Music, and here's an except:

But as much as it's a pure treat to watch, it's also quite moving, and very effective as a response to a list of cities that are allegedly dying. More than perhaps anything else Grand Rapids could have done, the video is a highly watchable, good-natured reminder that including "Grand Rapids, Mich." on a list of dying cities is unavoidably a comment on the futures of the people who live there: kids doing gymnastics, guys with guitars, couples getting married, women in shorts and flip-flops, men with big beards, people who love swing dancing whether they're great at it or not.

It's a little counterintuitive, but a massive crowd ballet that specifically identifies no one turns out to be a surprisingly powerful translation of a impersonal economic projection to a story about individual people.

You may recall from some of my fairly recent posts that I gave a public lecture at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids back in September, and I can tell you that my hosts were quite proud of the fact that the city was holding its first ever major art festival at that same time. Judging from that on-the-ground result, as much as from the video's reception, I'd have to say that Rob Bliss's efforts met with great success, and I can certainly vouch for the fact that the city of Grand Rapids is alive and well.

So, hello American Pie, and kudos to the Pied Piper who led the way!

Violence and Unity

2011-12-03T18:14:00.001-05:00

So, I thought I had completed my meditation on Hannah Arendt's "Reflections on Violence" with my last post, but it seems that I've come up with a bit of an epilogue to go with the three previous posts, which are in order:

Violence and Technology
Violence and Power
Violence and Identity

So, here goes:

Violence is divisive. Violence separates the hunters from the prey, the attacker from the target, the winner from the loser, the victor from the victim (as the saying goes, you're either one or the other, which represents a cynical worldview, of course). Violence is a zero sum game. Violence performed on one's self is internally divisive, but that's another story.

Technology is divisive. Technology separates the user from the used, the individual from the world, the actor from the acted upon, the subject from the object (technology objectifies the world, and the others who inhabit it).

Violence/technology is an I-It relationship, to use Martin Buber's terminology.

Power is unifying. Power brings together the ruler and the ruled, government and citizen, in consent and cooperation. Power binds us together (for good or for ill), in creating, maintaining, repairing, renewing, and revising the symbolic order.

Identity is unifying. Identity is a shared sense of self, group membership, imagined community, a common ground, a common name, an interconnectedness.

Power/identity is an I-You relationship, an I-You becoming Us.

All too often, power/identity is established through some larger form of divisiveness, a shared identity among insiders in contrast to outsiders, the identification of the other against which we define ourselves. Identity established through divisiveness is the same as power established through violence, it carries the seeds of its own disintegration, it is not sustainable. Divisiveness corrupts because any insider group can sense that they might, at some point, become outsiders, and that the only way to prevent this is to single out some other insider group and treat them as outsiders.

The problem before us is one that we have faced throughout our long history: How to overcome division and forge a truly unified identity. The name for this identity is no mystery: it is humanity. To achieve a global human identity there must be a global human power, a symbolic order, a mutual empowerment based on consent and cooperation.

Does this sound utopian? I am reminded of Buckminster Fuller's remark that we are in a race between utopia and oblivion. And even if it's not possible to achieve absolute unity, we certainly have made some significant progress towards that goal, and it certainly seems to me that we have the potential to make a great deal more progress if we have the will to do so.

And I think Hannah Arendt would agree that this positive sense of a will to power begins with thought, I believe she would agree with McLuhan that nothing is inevitable if we are willing to contemplate the possibilities and the consequences of our actions. And I think Arendt would say that we have to start by thinking, that it's only when we stop thinking that solutions seem hopelessly utopian and problems become insurmountable.

Violence and Identity

2011-12-01T22:08:00.000-05:00

So, in my previous two posts, Violence and Technology and Violence and Power, I've been discussing Hannah Arendt's 1969 essay, "Reflections on Violence", and relating her thought to some media ecological concerns. In particular, I've stressed the fact that Arendt sees violence as closely associated with technology, and diametrically opposed to power.

Reading the essay, and listening to Richard Bernstein's lecture on "Hannah Arendt on Power and Violence," also made me think about the close association that Marshall McLuhan makes between violence and identity. According to McLuhan, violence is a response to the loss of identity, and constitutes an attempt to regain identity. In his final television appearance, with Mike McManus at the end of 1977, McLuhan stated

all forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody. Therefore you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody, and so you become very violent. And so identity is always accompanied by violence. This seems paradoxical to you? Ordinary people find the need for violence as they lose their identities. So it's only the threat to people's identity that makes them violent. Terrorists, hijackers, these are people minus identity. They are determined to make it somehow, to get coverage, to get noticed.

So now, adding McLuhan's insight to Arendt's commentary, we can equate identity with power, loss or lack of identity with a loss of power and impotency. Identity not only tells us who we are, it binds us together in common cause, as a group identity. This brings us back to Kenneth Burke's view of rhetoric as a means to foster identification. Through the forging of a common identity, we create the basis for cooperation and consent, and therefore, in Arendt's sense, power.

When group identity breaks down, cooperation and consent go into decline (this sounds chillingly familiar, come to think of it), and the power of the state/government ebbs. Violence then becomes the means to compensate for it. On the other side of the coin, when individuals or groups do not feel that they are part of the larger group identity, and consequently may feel a loss or lack of identity in contrast to the majority, they may resort to violence as a means of compensation.

Bring Kenneth Burke back into play (and, for that matter, Alfred Korzybski), it becomes clear that power and identity are very much symbolic phenomena. Identity typically is established by having and/or gaining a name. When we share the same name, the same surname, or the same nationality-name, we indicate that we have a shared identity. That is why shifts in language and also bilingualism can be seen as a threat to identity (witness the overwhelming resistance to Spanish in the US, and the problem of Quebec in Canada, which McLuhan was trying to address). Power is a function of symbolic order, and identity is a function of symbolic assignment.

Anomie is the sociological term for lawlessness, for being an outlaw, rejecting society's laws and rules and norms. But it also means, in a sense, being without a name. Being nameless grants a license to kill, or otherwise commit violent acts that violate law, ethics, and morality. Anonymity reduces the barriers to violence, and distance aids in anonymity. It is harder to commit violence with one's bare hands than to pull the trigger of a gun, easier still to drop bombs from a plane, and easier still to push a button and launch a missile. Technology creates distance (as Max Frisch observed, it is the art of never having to experience the world), and grants a measure of anonymity.

Violence is a response to a lack of power. Technology is a response to a lack of power. Violence is a response to a lack of identity. Technology is a response to a lack of identity.

Lacking identity, the individual may try to make a name for himself or herself. This may involve achievement, typically through competition and success in surpassing others, which might be understood as a form of symbolic violence. But often enough, individuals make names for themselves through genuinely violent acts.

Violence is a response to loss of power/identity, but violence cannot restore power/identity, that is, cannot restore it to its previous state of being, its positive existence. Violence can produce a new kind of power/identity, but only a negative form of identity/power, e.g., villainy/tyranny.

Technology is a response to loss of power/identity, but technology cannot restore power/identity, that is, cannot restore it to its previous state of being, its positive existence. Technology can produce a new kind of power/identity, but only a negative form of identity/power, e.g., villainy/tyranny.

Violence/technology/innovation is associated with the loss of our name/language/symbolic order. Violence/technology/innovation cannot restore our name/language/symbolic order.

Only we, as human beings, can bestow a name, can employ language. Only we, as human beings, can create an identity, can establish symbolic order. Only we, as human beings, can create power, and we have the potential to create power in a manner that Hannah Arendt would insist on, within an ethical framework, and grounded in peace, justice, and human rights.

Violence and Power

2011-11-30T19:43:00.000-05:00

So, in my previous post, Violence and Technology, I was getting into Hannah Arendt's 1969 essay, "Reflections on Violence", and the close relationship between technology and violence. But, as I noted, her essay was primarily concerned with the differences between power and violence, which she argues amounts to an almost diametrical opposition. Arendt notes that most scholars and intellectuals see violence as a manifestation of power, perhaps its ultimate manifestation. But they're wrong.

Noting the connection between power and rule, Arendt makes a rather interesting aside about bureaucracy in discussing the traditional equation of power with violence:

These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man - of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy, to which today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy, or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody. Indeed, if we identify tyranny as the government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done. It is this state of affairs which is among the most potent causes for the current world-wide rebellious unrest.

Now, I'm not sure I would agree with her about bureaucracy being the most tyrannical of systems, but I would note that bureaucracy is what James Beniger referred to as an invisible technology, and what Lewis Mumford viewed as a type of machine, in some instances a megamachine. Bureaucracy is a reflection of machine ideology, inhuman and inhumane, and inorganic as well. So I think Mumford probably agreed with her point when he read the essay, as I assume he did, back in 1969.

Back to the point, Arendt argues that power is not simply about domination, that obedience and command go hand-in-hand, so that individuals who are willing to obey are also willing to give orders to others, and vice versa, and conversely individuals who resist obedience to authority also resist being placed in a position of authority over others.

But more importantly, she stresses the role of consent of the ruled, or governed, the centrality of cooperation to the establishment of power. This is consonant with Kenneth Burke's view that rhetoric is not about conflict, but rather about identification, about establishing, maintaining, and increasing common ground. This also falls in line with Jacques Ellul's arguments about the role of propaganda in technological societies, especially integrative and sociological propaganda, where the main goal is to establish and reinforce the legitimacy of the society, and keep people from questioning or acting in ways that work against the effective functioning of the social machine.

Some may also note the similarity of Michel Foucault's views on power, but then there's the question of whether he was aware of Arendt's work and just didn't acknowledge her influence (as he didn't acknowledge the influence of others, e.g., Erving Goffman). But let's take Jean Baudrillard's advice, and "forget Foucault" before we get all foucaulded up, okay?

Anyway, all this is not to say that power minus violence is necessarily a good thing, as Arendt explains:

Indeed, it is one of the most obvious distinctions between power and violence that power always stands in need of numbers, whereas violence relying on instruments up to a point can manage without them. A legally unrestricted majority rule, that is, a democracy without a constitution, can be very formidable indeed in the suppression of the rights of minorities and very effective in the suffocation of dissent without any use of violence. Undivided and unchecked power can bring about a "consensus" that is hardly less coercive than suppression by means of violence. But that does not mean that violence and power are the same.

Consensus may be tacit, and can continue as long as the power structure is not challenged. That is how a single master can control many slaves who out number him and could otherwise overpower him. That's how political systems in decline can still cling to power, as long as no one internally, or externally, challenge their rule. Now, let's hear some more of what Arendt has to say:

To switch for a moment to conceptual language: Power is indeed of the essence of all government, but violence is not. Violence is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues. And what needs justification through something else cannot be the essence of anything. The end of war is peace; but to the question, And what is the end of peace?, there is no answer. Peace is an absolute, even though in recorded history the periods of warfare have nearly always outlasted the periods of peace. Power is in the same category; it is, as the saying goes, "an end in itself." (This, of course, is not to deny that governments pursue policies and employ their power to achieve prescribed goals. But the power structure itself precedes and outlasts all aims, so that power, far from being the means to an end, is actually the very condition that enables a group of people to think and act according to means and ends.) And since government is essentially organized and institutionalized power, the current question, What is the end of government?, does not make much sense either. The answer will be either question-begging -- to enable men to live together -- or dangerously Utopian: to promote happiness or to realize a classless society or some other nonpolitical ideal, which if tried out in earnest can only end in the worst kind of government, that is, tyranny.

Arendt does acknowledge that power needs legitimacy, which brings us back to consent, and which she differentiates from justification. Is there a difference that makes a difference here? Perhaps. Justification requires some sort of rationale, some logic, some explanation. Legitimacy is merely a matter of agreement, of assent on the part of the group, or the majority. In this sense, legitimacy works on the relationship level of communication, as a form of metacommunication, whereas justification works on the content level of communication, to use the terms developed by Paul Watzlawick and his colleagues in Pragmatics of Human Communication, based on the systems view of Gregory Bateson.

Given that violence is different and distinct from power, Arendt notes that violence has the potential to disrupt and overcome power, and to do so quite easily:

Violence, we must remember, does not depend on numbers or opinion but on implements, and the implements of violence share with all other tools that they increase and multiply human strength. Those who oppose violence with mere power will soon find out that they are confronted not with men but with men's artifacts, whose inhumanity and destructive effectiveness increase in proportion to the distance that separates the opponents. Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What can never grow out of it is power.

So, violence can destroy power, but it cannot create power. When governments resort to violence, it is a reflection of their loss of power. And the use of violence to maintain or gain power has unwanted, often unanticipated effects (typical of technology, after all), boomerang effects. Arendt notes, "the much-feared boomerang effect of the 'government of subject races' (Lord Cromer) upon the home government during the imperialist era meant that rule by violence in far-away lands would end by affecting the government of England, that the last 'subject race' would be the English themselves." Or as Ted Carpenter (and Marshall McLuhan) put it, drawing on the Book of Psalms, they became what they beheld.

Arendt also differentiates between violence and terror: "Terror is not the same as violence; it is rather the form of government that comes into being when violence, having destroyed all power, does not abdicate but, on the contrary, remains in full control." Of course, this concept of terror is an older understanding of state-produced terror, the reign of terror as it were. But perhaps we can base a more contemporary understanding of terrorism based on this view, with the idea that terrorists seek to destroy power, and to exert a form of control without actually taking power. This perhaps would be a way to distinguish between terrorists and genuine rebels and revolutionaries.

So, Arendt summarizes the distinction between power and violence in this way:

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course its end is the disappearance of power. This implies that it is not correct to say that the opposite of violence is nonviolence: to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.

Arendt also discusses the role of rage as a cause of violence, and this leads her to consider "black rage" as it was known in the 60s, the anger expressed by African-Americans and the violent acts that stem from that anger, notably the riots that occurred in Harlem, Watts, Newark, and elsewhere. This leads to an interesting comment on expressions of "white guilt" as a collective phenomenon:

Where all are guilty, however, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are always the best possible safeguard against the discovery of the actual culprits. In this particular instance, it is in addition a dangerous and obfuscating escalation of racism into some higher, less tangible regions: The real rift between black and white is not healed when it is being translated into an even less reconcilable conflict between collective innocence and collective guilt. It is racism in disguise and it serves quite effectively to give the very real grievances and rational emotions of the Negro population an outlet into irrationality, an escape from reality.

A controversial comment, to be sure, but one that is quite thought-provoking. And it is an altogether basic point, coming from a Marxist perspective, that one way that those in power maintain power is via a strategy of divide and conquer, and nowhere has this been more apparent in US history than in the division between black and white in the lower classes (as well, between the German working class and German Jews that was encouraged and capitalized upon by the Nazis).

Arendt also criticizes those scholars who argue for the inherent naturalness of violence as a biological imperative, and therefore its inherently irrationality. Instead, she notes that "violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end which must justify it. And since when we act we never know with any amount of certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing, violence can remain rational only if it pursues short-term goals."

I can't help but note the interesting result if we substitute technology for violence in this quote: "technology being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end which must justify it. And since when we act we never know with any amount of certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing, technology can remain rational only if it pursues short-term goals."

The danger of introducing violence bring us back to Arendt's implicit take on McLuhan's medium is the message, that the means are the message, which is to say that the means become the ends.

Still, the danger of the practice of violence, even if it moves consciously within a nonextremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end. If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will not merely be defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in case of defeat is always unlikely. The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.

Interestingly, Arendt suggests that "the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence." This returns to the point of bureaucracy as technology, that it is impersonal and dehumanizing, that you cannot question it or argue with it. Thinking about it, what Plato criticizes about writing in the Phaedrus applies to bureaucracy quite well, at least on those two points. Otherwise, we could modify the original critique and note that bureaucracy gives the appearance of a knowledgeable and accountable government, but in fact represents the complete absence of those qualities.

In his lecture on Arendt at Fordham University (as noted in Violence and Technology), Richard Bernstein stated that what people want is the freedom to act, to participate. That is what the exercise of power by bureaucracy, power without accountability, without responsibility (the key to responsibility being response as Martin Buber has insightfully stated), resists and essentially prevents.

Power based on participation is the formula for a just and stable society. Can technology, which is arguably inherently violent, actually increase genuine participation in the establishment of a legitimate order and power structure? Proponents of new media, such as my friend and colleague Paul Levinson, believe the answer to be unequivocally yes. There is no question that new media are undermining existing power structures all around the world, and here in the US. But can they form the basis of a new political order? Arendt's arguments cast some doubt on the possibility, and should give us pause, as we ought to recall the unpredictability of the ends, and the overwhelming "power" of the means.

I have a little more to say about violence, technology, power, and identity, but I think I'll save it for another post and end here.

Violence and Technology

2011-11-27T17:58:00.000-05:00

So, last week I attended a public lecture at Fordham University given by Richard Bernstein, a philosopher on the faculty of the New School, the subject of the lecture being "Hannah Arendt on Power and Violence" and the sponsor being Fordham's Philosophy Department.

The lecture began with some discussion of who Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was, e.g., German-Jewish intellectual, had an affair with Martin Heidegger when she was an 18-year-old student and he was a married professor in his 30s, wrote her dissertation on St. Augustine, escaped from Nazi Germany before things got really bad, met and became friends with Walter Benjamin in Paris, unlike Benjamin was able to escape to the United States, and famously wrote about totalitarianism, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann (architect of the Nazi concentration camps) and the banality of evil. Of course, that's just a cursory summary of a rich and eventful life.

I joined a few of my colleagues from the Philosophy Department at Fordham and met with Bernstein prior to the lecture for some discussion, and he mentioned that, although Arendt was not a practicing Jew, at the end she asked that someone say Kaddish for her at her funeral. Admittedly, it's not all that unheard of for folks to suddenly get religion when the end is near (no atheists in foxholes, as the saying goes), and for individuals who have been disconnected from their traditions to suddenly want to reconnect. But what I found poignant about this request is that she asked for someone, rather than someone specific, which I take to be a sign of isolation in that typically it would be the immediate family who would say the prayer. And you might contrast this to the Roman Catholic phenomenon of making confession on your death bed, in the hopes of gaining absolution. In Judaism, what might be considered the equivalent of absolution is a social rather than individualistic matter, it comes from having been a good enough person that others care enough about you to say Kaddish on your behalf.

No doubt, there were many who said Kaddish on her behalf, not the least on account of the significant work during and after World War II on behalf of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and in general as a political philosopher with a strong sense of social justice.

And that brings me back to Bernstein's lecture, the main part of which was a summary of an influential essay that Arendt wrote for the New York Review of Books back in 1969, entitled, "Reflections on Violence" (which can be read online, hence the link). The lecture also included Bernstein's commentary on the essay's shortcomings (e.g., her idea of violence is limited to political violence) and relevance, including how well it relates to contemporary events such as the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements. I myself read the essay prior to the lecture, having been sent the link by my philosophy colleagues.

And if you haven't read it already, I do recommend it. It's clear that Arendt wrote the essay in response to the escalating violence occurring in the United States during the late 1960s, which included increasingly more violent antiwar demonstrations, the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the rise of militant movements especially within the African-American community, and rioting in inner city slums, which caused harm especially to African-American populations. No doubt, the escalation of violence bore some similarity to the rise of Nazism in Germany, motivating this essay.

I won't reproduce this rather lengthy essay in its entirety here, but I do want to note some salient points.

To begin with, Arendt thinks it's important to distinguish between violence and power (as well as force and strength). Violence, unlike power, is technological in nature--violence "always needs implements" so that

the revolution in technology, a revolution in tool-making, was especially marked in warfare. The very substance of violent action is ruled by the question of means and ends, whose chief characteristic, if applied to human affairs, has always been that the end is in danger of being overwhelmed by the means, which it both justifies and needs. Since the end of human action, in contrast with the products of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.

Now that sounds awfully media ecological, doesn't it? For all intents and purposes, she is saying that the means (aka medium) is the message!

Arendt goes on to note that traditionally, violence has been seen as an instrument of power, but that technological advances in warfare (she mentions the possibility of robot soldiers!), weapons of mass destruction (especially biological weapons that can be used by small groups rather than large states), and guerrilla warfare (and what we now call terrorism) have led to a reversal of that relationship. In many ways, this is a very prescient observation:

What all these very uncomfortable novelties add up to is a reversal in the relationship between power and violence, foreshadowing another reversal in the future relationship between small and great powers. The amount of violence at the disposal of a given country may no longer be a reliable indication of that country's strength or a reliable guarantee against destruction by a substantially smaller and weaker power. This again bears an ominous similarity to one of the oldest insights of political science, namely that power cannot be measured by wealth, that an abundance of wealth may erode power, that riches are particularly dangerous for the power and well-being of republics.

Arendt also goes on to make a similar point about the use of violence for revolutionary aims. Noting the leftist leanings of the baby boomer generation (e.g., the hippies), she points out that

this is the first generation that grew up under the shadow of the atom bomb, and it inherited from the generation of its fathers the experience of a massive intrusion of criminal violence into politics - they learned in high school and in college about concentration and extermination camps, about genocide and torture, about the wholesale slaughter of civilians in war, without which modern military operations are no longer possible even if they remain restricted to "conventional" weapons.

But noting the then recent shift to militancy within "the movement" (as it was known), she again invokes a key critique of the technological environment and its discontents:

Their behavior has been blamed on all kinds of social and psychological causes, some of which we shall have to discuss later. Still, it seems absurd, especially in view of the global character of the phenomenon, to ignore the most obvious and perhaps the most potent factor in this development, for which moreover no precedent and no analogy exist - the fact that, in general, technological progress seems in so many instances to lead straight to disaster, and, in particular, the proliferation of techniques and machines which, far from only threatening certain classes with unemployment, menaces the very existence of whole nations and, conceivably, of all mankind. It is only natural that the new generation should live with greater awareness of the possibility of doomsday than those "over thirty," not because they are younger but because this was their first decisive experience in the world. If you ask a member of this generation two simple questions: "How do you wish the world to be in fifty years?" and "What do you want your life to be like five years from now?" the answers are quite often preceded by a "Provided that there is still a world," and "Provided I am still alive."

That sense of pessimism became very much characteristic of the 1970s, and continued into the 1980s, eventually dispelled by Reagen's rhetoric of optimism, economic recovery, and the fall of the Soviet bloc, but also coincided with the revolution in personal computing that in turn led to the rise of the internet. Has that sense of pessimism returned anew, in the post 9/11 decade where concern about terrorism, warfare, and the loss of liberty are still present, and especially in light of the financial disaster of 2008 that continues to affect the global economy? Are movements such as the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street leading the way to increased freedom and justice both in the world? Or are they a prelude to increased violence?

I think Hannah Arendt at least helps us to formulate some important questions, and reminds us that however unpredictable the ends may be, we would do well to pay close attention to the means being employed.

There is also some common ground between Arendt and Marshall McLuhan, a point first brought to my attention by my old classmate Paul Lippert, who was also in attendance at Bernstein's lecture. For Arendt, violence requires technology. For McLuhan, technology is a form of violence. The relationship between the two is certainly worth considering, even in relation to the seemingly benign technologies we refer to as new media. What is the violence that they do, to our political arrangements, our economic and financial arrangements, our social organization and way of life?

There is more to discuss about Arendt's essay and Bernstein's lecture, about the relationship between violence and power, but I'm going to save it for another post, and sign off here, for now.

The New Hyperreality

2011-11-19T21:29:00.000-05:00

Back in the 80s, postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco introduced the term hyperreality to refer to our ability to create simulations that go beyond imitation to become more real than real, copies without originals to refer to (so that they are not actually copies of anything), maps that contain more than any territory (to touch upon the favorite metaphor of general semantics), artificial products of artifice that we then try to remake the real world in the image of (oh, that sounded a bit awkward, didn't it?). The preeminent example was Disneyland, where Main Street USA constituted an archetype born out of a cliché, to use one of McLuhan's lesser known oppositions (i.e., From Cliché to Archetype).

To be frank, what the postmodernists meant by hyperreality had been earlier expressed with less hyperbole, and much more clarity, by Daniel Boorstin in his classic work, The Image, especially in regard to Boorstin's discussion of pseudo-events. To some extent, the idea can be traced back even further to Walter Benjamin's classic essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (originally in German, reproduced in English translation in Illuminations, and more recently in a new translation in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media), which Boorstin draws upon in The Image.

Postmodernist hyperreality was pure theory, a form of Continental cultural theory to be exact, but it had its parallels in computing as a form of simulation, for example in ideas about artificial intelligence. In the 1982 film Blade Runner, the android replicants are described as more human than human, although in the movie they appear to be the product of biotechnology rather than silicon engineering. But the notion of hyperreality also dovetailed nicely with the the concept of virtual reality that became a popular obsession for a while back in the early 90s, and Baudrillard's famous work in this area, Simularcra and Simulation, inspired and actually appears as a book on Neo's shelf in the 1999 film, The Matrix (although Baudrillard felt the filmmakers did not understand what his work was really about).

Back in the real world, the fit with hyperreality was a bit awkward, because virtual reality was not more real than real, given the state of computer graphics back then. And even now. On the other hand, the expanded concept of virtuality gets at the fact that the human imagination allows us to experience any simulation as virtually real, even one composed only of words. What is a novel, after all, if not a simulation of reality? What is fiction if not a simulation of real life? What is a story, if not a simulation of a sequence of events?

But all this has to do with the old hyperreality. So, what then is the new hyperreality, you might ask? And I'm glad you did. Rather than use hyper in the sense of more real than real, I want to suggest a new meaning of hyperreality as reality plus (to play off of the Google+ formation). Like hypercube and hyperspace, I want to talk about reality with an added dimension. And like hypertext, hypermedia, and especially hyperlinks, I want to refer to reality that is networked and connected, that has an overlay of data and interactivity.

But ok, I'm not talking about anything entirely new here. I'm just saying that the term hyperreality would be a useful one to use in reference, not to virtual reality, but to the more modest phenomenon of augmented reality.

Augmented reality is nothing new, if you've been into new media for a while now, and it's becoming increasingly more a part of our popular culture. I mentioned it in a previous post Ad-ding Interactivity, and here's a news segment from New Zealand, circa 2007, on AR:

I find the augmented books a bit pointless, I mean, why do you need a book at all with this technology? But here's a more practical use from 2009, involving a cellphone app called Layar:

As you can see, the cellphone here is not even very sophisticated, compared to our current batch of smartphones. But it's very nice if you're looking for a new place to live, or in need of some other form of guidance as you move through a particular geographical location. The key, obviously, is the combination of mobile devices and geolocation. Anyway, now here is the new Layar video from earlier this year:

It certainly sounds very exciting, and I can only imagine that there will be a great need for media producers to provide content for this new medium.

Now, it is not my intent here to ignore the criticism that folks dazzled by this new hyperreality may lose sight of our everyday, unaugmented reality. The postmodernists who introduced hyperrealtiy in the old sense were not necessarily celebrating the phenomenon--mostly they were not. And when it comes to new technologies and media such as AR, there will always be negative effects, drawback, side effects, blowback, no question about it. It's a cause for concern, especially as we move away from mobile phones that have to be held up to our eyes, and replace them with glasses or goggles that we look through at all times--believe me, that's the obvious next step. But my aim in this post is to understand the phenomenon of AR and the new hyperreality, and I will leave the critical evaluation for another time.

One use that the Layar folks mention is tourism, and here's a rather dramatic way in which reality and fiction, new media and old media, the scenic and cinematic can merge:

The Augmented Reality Cinema app looks to be very entertaining, and this facet of tourism, going to visit places you've already seen in the movies or TV, has been going on for decades now, with increasing interest. But for a much more practical approach, here's a 2007 video from BMW utilizing those goggles I mentioned before:

Goggles are a feature of classic virtual reality technology, of course, but in VR the goggle obscure the outside world and only show you the simulation, whereas in AR the whole point is to let you see the world, and provide an overlay on top of it. It's pretty much the equivalent of McLuhan's light on vs. light through distinction.

And how often have you struggled with a poorly written and poorly illustrated printed manual or set of instructions? How often have you looked at a diagram showing how to put something together, and wondered which end of the rod they're referring to, or whether one part is supposed to go in front of or behind another? This takes the longstanding practice of technical writing into a new realm of technical media, and provides us with a truly functional expert system, one that goes beyond knowledge to know-how, and how-to. Definitely a plus, however you look at it.

So, the new hyperreality is certainly a way to get attention in the world of marketing and promotion. My colleague, Ed Wachtel, recently brought to my attention this campaign from St. Petersburg/Clearwater. Here's a video of it:

But you can check it out for yourself by going to their website (click there or here), and following the instructions to print out the Augmented Reality marker and then go to the page for the hyperreal tour.

Or you can just go to Starbucks, provided you download the appropriate mobile app--this was brought to my attention by Holly Lemanowicz, one of the students in my Introduction to New Media class at Fordham University:

Much more ambitious and stunning, albeit a tad sexist, is this use of AR in the promotion of Axe deodorant body spray, known as Lynx in Great Britain, and thanks to another of my students, Stephanie Diller, who actually experienced this AR when she was studying abroad in England this past spring semester. The location is Victoria Station in London, and here it is not the small screen of the computer monitor, or the very small screen of the cellphone, but the jumbo display where the hyperreality is seen:

But when it comes to taking the new hyperreality to the next level, who better than the folks most often associated with hyperreality in the 80s, Disney! It was another of my Intro to New Media students, Alyssa Marino, who brought this one up. First, here's Disney's official, slick video on the ambitious AR event that occurred over the past few days over at nearby Time Square:

And another, more naturalistic short recording:

And one that's a bit longer, not as good a view, but providing a much better sense of how it all worked:

Disney went further than anyone in operationalizing the older virtual reality kind of simulations in their DisneyQuest Interactive Theme Park, so it's not surprising to see them surpassing everyone else in regard to augmented reality. They truly are the masters of hyperreality, and every student of media should spend some time at WaltDisneyWorld in particular to truly understand the potential of the hyperreal, and media as environments.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Everywhere a Sign, we previously used the written word to create a kind of overlay on top of our environment, largely through the use of signage, and we are now in the process of creating an electronic overlay. More than ever before, we are living in a media environment, and that's why, more than ever before, we need media ecology, the study of media environments, to make sense of it all.

My Lambda Pi Eta

2011-11-17T20:52:00.000-05:00

Lambda Pi Eta is the honor society for communication majors, officially sanctioned by the National Communication Association, and back in the 90s I started up a chapter here at Fordham University, together with a colleague who has since moved on, Roger Musgrave. So that's why I gave this post the title of my LPH (it's H not E because Eta is not Epsilon--the letter in the Greek alphabet for Eta looks like, and is the ancestor of our letter H in the Roman alphabet, oh, and please, no Greek jokes about Eta Bitta Pie or whatever, I was in a fraternity you know, Beta Theta Pi, so that's all old hat to me).

So, I was very pleased when a colleague who is very much present in the department, Margot Hardenbergh, revived our chapter this year after a long period of being dormant, on hiatus, offline, etc. Way to go, Margot!

And the first new induction ceremony was held last month. We were very fortunate to be able to get the respected communication scholar Michael Schudson, presently teaching in Columbia University's Journalism School, to give a talk at the ceremony, which he did, and I was asked if I'd say a few words and also introduce Michael, which I did, and all that was topped off by some remarks by the Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, Michael Latham.

But don't take my word for it, check out the write-up on our student newspaper's website, The Ram, under the title Lambda Pi Eta Inducts Students for the First Time in Decades. The piece by Connor Ryan starts off as follows:

Lambda Pi Eta, the communication honor society on campus, lost its name and place of recognition after years of neglect and a history that has dumbfounded even the society's current presidents – that is, until Sara Kugel, last year's United Student Government president, and Dr. Margot Hardenbergh, undergraduate associate chair, inspired Katie Corrado, FCRH '12, and Alison Daly, FCRH '12, the society's co-presidents, to reignite the tradition.

"I volunteered to help start Lambda Pi Eta because I wanted to make a lasting impression on campus and give back to the department that has done so much for me," Daly wrote in an email. "We want to recognize students of high academic standing for their hard work and dedication to the communication field."

I'm quite pleased and proud to say that Daly and Corrado are both students of mine. The article includes a picture of them, Alison on the left, Katie on the right:

So, anyway, back to the write-up:

The society's first induction in years took place on Thursday, Oct. 27 in Tognino Hall of Duane Library and welcomed the current 37 students that make up this year's collection of the communication department's finest. Dr. Michael Schudson of Columbia University, Dr. Michael Latham, Dean of Fordham College Rose Hill and Dr. Lance Strate, a professor in the department, offered words of wisdom and personal experience at the intimate ceremony, which was attended by prestigious members of the administration, as well as students and their families.

"The comments by Dr. Lance Strate were an inspiration, and it was a great honor for Fordham to have a distinguished scholar like Columbia's Dr. Michael Schudson address the group," Latham wrote in an email regarding the ceremony's speakers.

Now, that was awfully nice of Dean Latham to say. Of course, he missed my initial joke about how when we started the chapter in the 90s, I could make a joke about the name being Lambada Pi Eta, and people would know what I was talking about (remember "the forbidden dance"?). But I did talk about how the three Greek letters stand for logos, pathos, and ethos, which Aristotle identifies as the three forms of proof or three types of appeals that can be made when addressing an audience. Logos means word, and also logic, and refers to logical proof and the appeal to reason. Pathos represents the emotions, and emotional appeals can indeed be powerful. And ethos refers to what today we would call source credibility, how believable you are, which in part can be generated during the communication process, but in part has to do with the individual's prior reputation. In a more traditional sense, ethos refers to the speaker's character, and the connection to ethics here is quite clear.

This all comes from the first major treatise on the subject of communication, Aristotle's Rhetoric, and I also explained that inherent in the three terms is a model of communication. Ethos refers to the source of communication, the speaker in antiquity. Logos refers to the message that the speaker puts together, the argument the speaker puts forth. And pathos refers to the audience, and the ways in which the message is received, interpreted, and responded to. All that's missing is the medium or channel, which Aristotle took for granted because in his time the only form of public communication was public speaking.

But I also suggested that we can consider ethos, pathos, and logos as a guide to life. Logos, being about reason, is linked to intelligence and learning, and by virtue of being inducted into the honor society, the students had already demonstrated their strength in this area. But while it is important to have a good head on your shoulders, that is not enough. You also have to have a good heart. And that is what pathos represents. Reason must be tempered and balanced by passion, to pursue those things you that are really important to you, that you really care about, and by compassion, as we like to say in Jesuit education, to become men and women for others. And the balance is achieved with the aid of ethos, to be individuals of good character and ethical conduct, because then others will give you recognition and respect, will listen to what you have to say, and will consider your messages with care. And even in the midst of the most hostile of crowds, with ethos on your side they will at least respect you for your position, and you may yet succeed in providing a little bit of opening to minds that are otherwise closed.

Well anyway, that's my spiel, or sermon, or whatever you want to call it. It's an approximation of what I said at the first couple of induction ceremonies back in the 90s, and what I said last month. This is the first time I've written it down. So, enough about me, back to the article, if you please:

Lambda Pi Eta stems from the National Communication Association, and Fordham represents one of more than 400 chapters spread across the country. With the strength and popularity of the communication and media studies department on campus, students feel that an honor society dedicated to the major would thereby be popular – and with effort, successful.

"As a school with a very reputable communication department, it only seems right to have the presence of an equally reputable honor society on campus," Corrado said. "Many of the students within the department have completed internships at some of the biggest media companies, have consistently done well in the classroom and are genuinely passionate about graduating from Fordham and making positive contributions to the media industry."

Yes, we are a very, very reputable communication department. Are you listening, Dean Latham?

While the society represents high academic achievement and perhaps a powerful networking tool down the road, Latham reminds that the society also provides an invaluable opportunity for students to create meaningful relationships with professors in the field.

"More broadly, they [honor societies] also help create a culture in which students and faculty can have valuable exchanges about personal goals, careers and values outside the classroom," Latham said. "Honor societies like these give students an important goal to aspire to and set a standard for excellence."

Excellence indeed! That is very much a part of Fordham's culture. And as for what's next...

With the much-anticipated induction ceremony in the rearview, the society is looking to host more internal events dedicated to connecting Lambda Pi Eta to communication industries in New York. For example, the society had a private meeting with "Jeopardy" host Alex Trebek when he came to campus last month.

"By the time [this article] gets published, we'll have held our first event with Jeffrey Salgo, longtime director of CBS," Corrado said.

Besides the joy of being a part of the society, the private events and specialized attention are what draws most students to Lambda Pi Eta.

So, tell me, how do I join, you may well be asking yourself! And who could blame you?

In order to gain admission into the society, students whose first major is communication and media studies must complete an application that is released in the spring and meet specific minimum cumulative and major GPA requirements. Students who are admitted into the society are those who show dedication to the communication industry through course work and extracurricular activities. Dr. Margot Hardenbergh is the honor society's faculty advisor.

"The biggest perk is knowing that you are among the elite of students within the communications field in this country," Corrado said. "Academically, being in Lambda Pi Eta says a lot, and I think employers will recognize that when we graduate."

So, my hat's off to Margot Hardenbergh, and to Alison Daly and Katie Corrado, and all of our new LPH members. Congratulations, we are very proud of you all!

It's in the Air

2011-11-14T22:56:00.000-05:00

Beyond the cloud, beyond the smartphone and tablet, the future of computing is in the air. Not up in the air, but floating, right there in front of you, me, us.

For starters, here's a Ted Talk from 2009 dubbed SixthSense, featuring Pattie Maes of MIT demonstrating a wearable device that uses video projection, designed by Pranav Mistry:

Now, here, more recently, is OmniTouch, a similar type of device developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and funded by Microsoft:

The presentation is a bit dry, admittedly, but it does suggest the direction that we are moving in, whether it's OmniTouch, SixthSense, or something entirely different. Oh, and here's a follow-up video, which is even more dry than the last one:

This also demonstrates that Microsoft, a company whose leadership position in the world of new media has been steadily eroding since the departure of Bill Gates from active stewardship, and the ascendancy of old rival Apple, is not to be counted out of the game just yet. In fact, here's a recently released vision of the future, the future in particular of Microsoft Office:

The video, rather blandly named Productivity Future Vision (2011), includes some unspecified form of 3D or holographic technology, embedded in multiple screens, which as I've noted previously, indicates that the screen, as a singular framing device is obsolescent. You might also compare this vision to that of Corning, the glass company, which I discussed in a post back in August: Life in Glass Houses.

McLuhan argued that both clothing and architecture are extensions of the skin, and with these videos we gain a vision of the future world of electric skin...

Electric skin? Hey, wouldn't that be a great name for a band? Anyone out there play bass? Or maybe air guitar?

The Medium Is...

2011-11-04T11:00:00.004-04:00

So, several months ago, Mary Ann Allison, who was the Vice-President of the New York State Communication Association at the time (she's President now), and running this year's annual NYSCA conference, asked me if I would be willing to be part of a Pecha Kucha session there.

What the hell is Pecha Kucha you might ask. Or you might click on the link to find out, but basically it means doing a quick talk with a PowerPoint presentation consisting of 20 slides that advance automatically every 20 seconds.

As for how you pronounce it, it sounds something like P'chachka, but not exactly, and anyway I like to think of it as Pikachu-chu.

So, I said I would do it, not having any idea what I would do it on, but this year being the Marshall McLuhan centenary and all, I decided to create one based on his famous aphorism, the medium is the message. And I presented it first at the Media @ the Center Marshall McLuhan Symposium at Fordham University on September 17, that you've been hearing all about for the past couple of months on this blog. And then I presented it a second time, as the last of 5 such presentations, at the NYSCA conference last month.

As I was working on this Pecha Kucha, I found that it was impossible to say all that I wanted to say in normal prose, and so I turned to a kind of didactic poetry for the format. I'm not saying it's good poetry, heck, I'm not sure if it's poetry at all, but neither is it exposition, and in writing it up, I used the format of poetry, so it is what it is, so to speak.

I also turned the PowerPoint into a video, and added the soundtrack, which is not exactly the same as the live Pecha Kucha performance, but provides some idea of what it was like. I've uploaded it on my YouTube channel, and you can go look at it over there, it also appears under the title of The Medium Is... (A Pecha Kucha) , or just catch it down below.

And did I hear you say that you wanted to read the text too? Well, okay, I can be accommodating, I'll add it in right here, for what it's worth.

The medium is…

The medium is the message
McLuhan's wake-up call
warning us to be aware
of the way that we get things done
because the way that we do things
determines what we end up doing
and the way that we do things
determines what we end up with
when we do the things that we do

The medium is the massage
McLuhan's pun and word play
our technologies work us over
manipulating our senses
remixing sensibilities
we shape our tools
and our tools shape us
individually and collectively

The massage splits into the mass age
from the Gutenberg galaxy
comes the age of the machine
the age of the masses and the massive
where the individual is an isolated
alienated atom
within the nuclear family
a corporate conformist
lost in the midst of a lonely crowd

And message divides into mess age
and we have made a massive mess of things
the global village a global garbage dump
McLuhan called it Planet Polluto
Except now
Pluto is no longer a planet
and soon enough
the same may be true of planet Earth

The maelstrom
McLuhan's metaphor
for our technological and cultural environment
a whirlpool of
advertising
entertainment
information
and news
but there are patterns recognizable
within the dynamic mess
although immersed within the chaos
still we can find emerging order
provided we pay attention

Alfred Korzybski said
the map is not the territory
media are maps
they tell us about territories both real and imagined
different media map the world in different ways
each one shaping our view of the world differently
altering our sense of place
and space
orienting
disorienting
directing
and misdirecting

Neil Postman said
the medium is the metaphor
and
our metaphors create the content of our culture
and so
we come to see ourselves
our minds and our bodies
as writing tablets
or clockworks
or steam engines
or electric circuits
or as computers

Ashley Montagu said
in teaching
it is the method
and not the content that is the message
the drawing out
not the pumping in
he understood that the questions we ask
give us the answers that we get
or as the computer scientists say
garbage in, garbage out

new modes of communication
result in new forms of social mutation
writing erases the tribal world
inscribes us into civilized, city life
printing produces the modern world
nationalism and industrialism
and the electric circuit
binds us together as global villagers
and actors on a global stage

new media result in
an ongoing metamorphosis
Walter Ong says
human consciousness evolves
we are transformed
from tradition-directed orality
to inner-directed literacy
to the plugged in
participating
outer-directed
people of the tube and the web

Show me the money and I'll show you the medium
the first coins followed the alphabet
paper money is a product of the printing press
and with computers and telecommunications
all that is solid
about cash and capital
melts into the air
and is gone.

One evening after a seminar with Neil Postman
I went out to a bar with my classmates
went to the Men's Room,
and saw graffiti on the wall that said:
pornography is technology's contribution to masturbation
and I said
the ghost of Marshall McLuhan was here!

Online and the on the air we go meatless
in person, our bodies are our media
as are our organs of perception
the ear thrusts us into the midst of things
at the center of action
surrounded by acoustic space
while the eye places us on the outside looking in
as spectators, voyeurs, and peeping Thomists

Media are tools for thought
every language contains its own unique worldview
written language brings linearity and abstract thinking
words, numbers, pictures, music
all encode the world in different ways
Isadora Duncan said
if I could tell you what it meant
there would be no point in dancing it

Oral cultures remember collectively
through songs and poetry
stories and sayings
the written record gives us
chronology and history
and now, memory is a database
randomly accessible
hyper and nonlinear
easily erased
and yet capable of recording
anything and everything
any of us say or do

Our media come from us
they are extensions of us
they are reflections of us
but we forget
we think our technologies are alien
apart from us
we fall in love with them
not knowing that we have fallen in love with
an image of ourselves
McLuhan called this
Narcissus narcosis

Through our media
we learn what the meaning of is is
formal cause greater than self
when every effect is special.
the calendar and the clock
the written word
the printed page
telescope
microscope
and the electromagnetic wave
all tell us
all about
space and time

Our media are extensions of ourselves
they come between ourselves and the world
they screen and filter the world
Max Frisch said
technology is the art
of never having to experience the world
but what comes between ourselves and our world
becomes our world
and so we become what we behold
because the medium is the membrane

The medium divides
the medium connects
the medium comes in between
in the gaps and the intervals
in the ground behind the figure
the medium surrounds and pervades
the medium is the environment
we enter into a conversation
we write in English or Spanish or French
we get into a book or movie
we go online
and we study media ecology

The medium is Marshall McLuhan
the medium is he
as the medium is you
as the medium is me
and the medium is all of us together.
so let's be the medium
and spread the message

And there you have it, hope you liked it, and in any event, it's one, two, three, p'cha-cha-cha!

No Nook NIche?

2011-11-03T17:26:00.001-04:00

So, here's another quote'o'mine making its way around the information infrastructure. This time, it's on the Nook, the tablet sold by Barnes & Noble to compete with Amazon's Kindle. It seems that Barnes & Noble is about to announce a new Nook, and there's all kinds of speculation on what features and price range it might represent.

So, Erika Morphy was working on the piece for the E-Commerce Times, an online publication, and it was published on November 1st under the title of, Can the Nook Color Find a Niche in the Tablet Market? It was also published under the same title on TechNewsWorld, and a bunch of other places as well, strange how this all works, but that's besides the point.

So, anyway, under the headline is a little B&N graphic, to lend some graphic interest, so let's include that here as well:

There, that's better, right? A little color, something easy on the eyes? Anyway, after that there's a larger type, boldfaced, introductory teaser that goes like this:

Barnes & Noble wants to carve out a place for its Nook in the tablet competition, but it's not clear how the company is going to pull that off. "The Nook will prove to be an also-ran in both hardware and software, and unless Barnes & Noble has some miraculous breakthrough up their sleeves, say a virtual reality interface, they will not make much of a dent in the tablet market," predicted Lance Strate, a professor at Fordham.

Woohoo! So, what's this all about, you might ask. Well, we'll return to this quote a little later, but now the article starts in earnest, as Erika provides the context:

Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) has sent out invitations to a press conference this week in New York City. The specific topic of the event, set for Nov. 7, is unclear -- but it's almost certain the spotlight will be on its Nook.

It is widely expected that B&N will unveil its answer to Amazon's (Nasdaq: AMZN) Kindle Fire -- that is, a 7-inch Nook Color tablet designed to compete with the Fire in price and functionality.

B&N did not respond to the E-Commerce Times' request to comment for this story.

Now, they may be trying to generate suspense, but usually when there's no comment at all, not even something like, I can't tell you anything, but watch out, this will knock your socks off, well, that's not a good sign. Anyway, the article continues with a heading and a new section:

Hugging the Low End
It would be surprising if B&N didn't unveil a Nook tablet in view of the suddenly changed competitive landscape. The big question is how it will price the new device.

The Kindle Fire has effectively carved out a place for itself at the low end of the tablet market, with its US$199 price point. The Nook could be a contender in this arena -- but only if comes down from the current $249 retail price for its Nook Color e-reader. Even if it does, however, it still has a high hurdle to compete with Amazon's wealth of content.

"What Amazon has done is finally identify a price point that is palatable for the average -- as opposed to high-end -- tablet consumer," James Brehm, senior strategist and consultant with Compass Intelligence, told the E-Commerce Times.

It's doubtful that B&N can drop down to $199, however, in Brehm's view. Best analyst guestimates have placed the cost of producing the Kindle Fire somewhat higher than the $199 retail price Amazon is asking for it.

Amazon will be making this up in content sales, Brehm said -- which is not something B&N can count on as heavily as Amazon can.

So, okay, it's doubtful that B&N can price their tablet any cheaper than the Kindle, and it may well be more expensive. And they don't have the content to offer that Amazon does, especially all of the streaming media that Amazon makes available to its Prime customers. After all, Barnes & Noble is a bookstore, or rather a bookstore chain, representing the old media of print and place, now struggling to compete with the entrepreneurial online and algorithmic savvy of Amazon.com. And as tempting as it is to lament this sad state of affairs, I can also recall how, not too long ago, Barnes & Noble superstores helped to drive the vast majority of local, independent booksellers out of business--so, turnabout, fair play, and all that. Anyway, back to the article, and my turn at bat:

Content Wars? Not Hardly
It would appear that B↦N doesn't stand much of a chance in the tablet wars unless it can come up with an effective niche strategy.

"Barnes & Noble cannot compete with either Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) or Amazon, and are truly reduced to B-side/B-movie status," Lance Strate, professor of communications and media at Fordham University, told the E-Commerce Times.

Possibilities include providing more functionality in the device, or perhaps partnering with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) to tap into a more business-oriented market, Strate speculated.

"In the end, though, the Nook will prove to be an also-ran in both hardware and software, and unless Barnes & Noble has some miraculous breakthrough up their sleeves, say a virtual reality interface, they will not make much of a dent in the tablet market," Strate predicted.

One thing I didn't mention that might come up is that B&N may make the Nook a gaming device as well. But that does seem to be very much at odds with its primary role as an e-book, doesn't it? Would it be anything less than a cheap sell out on B&N's part?

The bottom line is, again, that Barnes & Noble is not a technology company, they don't have the resources to come up with the kinds of features that Amazon or Apple can, and their only hope is to partner with someone who does, and is not already tied up with the other tablet companies, like Microsoft, for example. Otherwise, Apple has the high end of the tablet market, and Amazon the low end, and there's not much room for a third party that has neither the advantages of one nor the other. Okay, let's get back to the article and the next section:

The Education Market
Another possible avenue for differentiation, Brehm suggested, is the education market.

"That has been a hot market for Apple but many school systems, including those in the state I am in -- Texas -- don't have the money for that kind of hardware," he said.

However, money could be had for a lower-cost tablet device, especially one that rolls out as part of a relationship with educational publishers and that is equipped with WiFi connectivity.

"Amazon has a bigger ecosystem for its content -- it is going to be hard for B&N to beat that even if it does manage to produce a $199 tablet," Brehm concluded. "It will need a specialized strategy."

That may be Barnes & Noble's last and best hope, education. After all, there is a captive market for textbooks, it's the one thing you can always count on, and in fact I know of several academic publishers who have more or less stopped publishing regular books, and are limiting themselves to textbooks, and reference works (which have a built in market with libraries).

Barnes & Noble does have an advantage with the textbook market, especially since a significant percentage of college bookstores in the US are run by B&N. And this alleviates the publishers' problem of used book sales cutting into their profits, while at the same time it can also can alleviate the overstuffed backpacks of school children and college students alike.

After all, textbooks are not really loved, not known for their literary merit, plus going electronic allows for the texts to be automatically updated, not gratuitously updated simply to generate a new edition to cut into used book sales, but whenever needed, and only as needed (as opposed to just shuffling things around to make it different). Yes indeed, textbooks, that's the ticket! Now, on to the article's conclusion:

No Worries About Apple
One competitor B&N doesn't have to worry about is Apple. For all the hype over the $199 tablet, Brehm doesn't see Apple reaching to the lower end of the market to compete.

"Apple will always see itself as a premium product," he said, "and they will never come down in price to get a larger market share."

I find this a bit funny. Wouldn't it make more sense to say that one competitor Apple doesn't have to worry about is B&N?

Maybe what Barnes & Noble should do is get out of the hardware game, which they're not really suited for anyway, and partner with Apple to make the Nook a software feature on the iPad. Both companies have a good relationship with schools and educators, it could be a match made in heaven! And, if not a marriage, then maybe it would be an occasion for a little bit of Nookie?

McLuhan Then/Now/Next Soon

2011-10-28T17:03:00.000-04:00

So, I'm looking forward to attending and participating in the upcoming McLuhan Then/Now/Next international conference in Toronto, November 7-10, and if you haven't made plans to join us, it's still not too late. This is going to be more than a mere conference. It will be an event, a happening, a McLuhan extravaganza!

The full conference registration fee is $275 or just $75 for students, and there's a one-day rate of $100, and just $35 for students. And it's well worth it, as registration includes continental breakfast, snacks, lunch and networking receptions.

And, as it says on the conference website, there will be 4 full days of investigations and discussions on the past, present and future of McLuhan’s work and influence, both in Toronto and around the global village, featuring world-renowned scholars and lecturers (including me), plus film screenings, concerts and visual art happening all across the city. So hey, go register, you'll be glad you did.

There are still last minute adjustments being made to the program, but I'll be on a plenary session with Paul Levinson, Joshua Meyrowitz, Julianne Newton, and Elena Lamberti on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 8th. I'll also be participating on an event hosted by the Italian Consulate in Toronto one evening, and hosting a poetry reading on another. But to get an idea of what's going on, take a look:

Not bad, eh? And that's not counting all of the events taking place in conjunction with the DEW Line Festival, where artists throughout Toronto and around the world are coming together "to co-create a week of stimulating art, music, poetry and discourse that considers and probes the future of digital media and its impact on our culture and the way we live our lives."

And there's even more than that, but you'll have to be there to experience it, or else be square!

Outage Outrage

2011-10-24T22:07:00.000-04:00

So, you may have heard about the 4-day BlackBerry outage that began in the UK, and spread to Europe, the Middle East, India, Africa, and finally North America, home of the Canadian-based company that makes that cellphone, Research in Motion. Not for nothing those phones have been nicknamed, CrackBerry, for the addicting quality of the email service that they provided before the iPhone and Android got into the mobile internet game.

So, this was no short-term, system is down phenomenon, this was a major communications BlackOut, and BlackEye, for BlackBerry. And as it turns out, I was interviewed by Roger Cheng for a piece he posted on the major tech site, c|net, described as "the premier destination for tech product reviews, news, price comparisons, free software downloads, daily videos, and podcasts."

The article appeared on October 17, with the title, Hey, RIM! Time to step it up with better BlackBerry freebies, followed by the line, "Research in Motion, is that really all you've got?"

Roger begins by noting the following:

After a critical outage that left some BlackBerry users without e-mail for as many as three days, RIM is offering customers $100 worth of premium apps for free. Enterprise customers also get a month's worth of technical support.

The problem is, the BlackBerry faithful stick with you for primarily one reason: your excellent e-mail service. If they wanted games, media apps and other whiz-bang features, they would have fled to an iPhone or Android smartphone already. You lose your e-mail, even for one day, and you lose your best reason for keeping a BlackBerry.

Okay, so here's where I come in:

"(RIM) has to do something really substantial, something that makes people go wow," said Lance Strate, a professor of communications and media studies for Fordham University.

Now, of course, I said a great deal more in the interview, and it's always the case that only a small bit of what's been said is actually quoted, but here's how Roger continues:

So here's a modest proposal: work with your retail and carrier partners to get your customers early upgrades to new BlackBerrys. For some of your best customers, hand them out for free. Already own a new BlackBerry? Throw in a Bluetooth handset or other accessory.

Interesting idea, right? Good advice, you might say, or at least provocative, right? I'm glad you think so, because that's what I said in the interview. I said that offering $100 of apps won't impress most customers, they probably have all or most of the apps they want already, and anyway they're not substantial, they don't feel like you're getting anything much. As for free technical support for a month, that's something most customers probably won't even need! But hardware, now that would make a difference. A free upgrade, or at least a really good Bluetooth accessory. That's what I said.

Let me be clear, though, that I offered the idea free of charge, and felt no special ownership of it, not that anyone can really claim to own ideas anyway. Especially as an academic, I'm used to giving ideas out freely. So, it just strikes me as funny to see it appear without attribution, but this is not exactly journalism, is it? It's commentary. Anyway, the important thing is to get quoted and get your name out there, that's what the publicity game is all about. The medium is, you know, the message.

So, let's go on with the article:

Sure, giving away phones sounds like sacrilege at a company that generates the bulk of its revenue from hardware, but bear with me. Such a program would buy a massive amount of goodwill from peeved customers. You could even snatch away the spotlight from Apple's latest iPhone launch.

RIM's BlackBerry DevCon conference starts tomorrow. Just think how different the atmosphere would be if attendees were buzzing about the new BlackBerry program instead of grousing about the outage.

There are longer-term advantages, too. You can lock in customers that may have been tempted by the new iPhone or the latest wave of Android smartphone. You're so proud of the latest BlackBerry operating system? Here's a great way to get more users to try it out.

Yes, your margins would take a hit. But right now, the smartphone business is all about market share, and you're on the losing end. Keeping existing customers--particularly loyal ones--in the fold with new BlackBerrys is one way to preserve your base.

So yeah, I said some of these things too, about creating goodwill, and keeping your customers, preserving your base, locking people in. But Roger has put his personal spin on it, no question there, and he does a good job of it, as he continues:

Unlike other analysts and bloggers who think the outage sounds the death knell for RIM, I think there's still time to repair your image. While customers may be angry, service contracts, business ties and other impediments keep most people from leaving right away.

A stepped-up giveaway program is another way to get some of your other BlackBerrys out in the wild. While the BlackBerry Bold flagship smartphone is performing well, the rest of the lineup has fared poorly.

"(RIM's) other BlackBerries, namely its aging Curve line and new models including the pure touchscreen Torch 9850 appear below plan," Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu said in a recent research note.

If they aren't selling well anyway, why not create incentives to get some of these devices into your customers' hands?

Hey, you're already giving away PlayBooks to developers at DevCon. Why not expand that program to some of your best customers? When the iPhone 4 launched, AT&T allowed customers to upgrade their phone after just one year. You could work with the carrier partners and provide incentives to them to enable similar early upgrades.

For now, the apps and the promise of a month of technical support--which leaves your non-enterprise customers out in the cold--just don't cut it.

And now, back to me:

"It's definitely too little, too late," Strate said. "I think they're really not recognizing the magnitude of disconnecting people at a time when we have come to expect connectivity 24-7."

And that is really the key point here, the fact that we are accustomed to being online all the time, constantly connected, dependent on that sense of electronic contact and the presence of a digital safety net, addicted to it, some would say. To be disconnected, then, is traumatic, and that's what RIM has failed to recognize, the psychological trauma that BlackBerry users experienced.

And so, Roger returns to the theme of the inadequate response:

Are BlackBerry customers really going to be satisfied with a free copy of puzzle game "Bejeweled" or shooter "N.O.V.A."? These are trinkets that many would have never downloaded in the first place.

"We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience," RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said in a statement today. "We have apologized to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence. We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again."

But you can't guarantee that customers will be safe from another outage. Despite your claims of superior reliability and security, your network has suffered from its share of problems, including a previous e-mail and messenger outage just last month.

Your customers will be a lot more understanding if they're using a new BlackBerry. RIM, it's time to step up your game.

Great way to conclude, with strong words and a dramatic challenge. And this piece did quite well, as it was also picked up by Scientific American's website, where it appears under the same title, Hey, RIM! Time to step it up with better BlackBerry freebies. But Scientific American, hey, that is very cool!

And there is an entirely strange, weird, alternate reality version appearing on dflix.net, under the mutated title of Hey, RIM! Time to step it up with improved BlackBerry freebies – CNET News, with the piece reading like someone made strange minor alterations throughout. To give just one example, my first quote in the article is rendered thusly:

“(RIM) has to do something unequivocally substantial, something which creates people go wow,” pronounced Lance Strate, a highbrow of communications as good as media studies for Fordham University.

I'm not sure if this was some program that randomly substituted synonyms for some words, or if it was sent through Google translate into another language and then was translated back into English. But hey, a "highbrow of communications," I kind of like that title. Please use it from now on, okay?

Anyway, the piece was picked up by quite a few aggregators out there, including the following:

Dallas Newss.com, October 17^th, 2011
http://topics.dallasnews.com/article/0ejt3JTgzy82x?q=iPhone

Daily Me, October 17^th, 2011
http://dailyme.com/story/2011101700003287

Tech News AM, October 17^th, 2011
http://technews.am/conversations/cnet-news/hey_rim_time_to_step_it_up_with_better_blackberry_freebies

Text Telephone, October 17^th, 2011
http://texttelephone.com/?p=4809

Phone Prize.com, October 17^th, 2011
http://phoneprize.com/b/2011/10/18/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies/

View Headlines.com, October 17^th, 2011
http://www.viewheadlines.com/Technology/Article.aspx?i=362523&t=Hey-RIM!-Time-to-step-it-up-with-better-BlackBerry-freebies

Mobile Phones.co, October 17^th, 2011
http://www.mobile-phones.co.za/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies/

Common4u.com, October 17^th, 2011
http://www.common4u.com/2011/10/17/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies/

Donald Schwartz, October 17^th, 2011
http://donald-schwartz.com/2011/10/17/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies/

Breaking News Now, October 17^th, 2011
http://www.breakinnewsnow.com/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies-cnet/79748

Capecod.com, October 17^th, 2011
http://topics.capecod.com/article/01QyePW0nJbaq?q=retirement

Thunderfeeds, October 17^th, 2011
http://thunderfeeds.com/reader/news/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies

Technology Feed Today, October 17^th, 2011
http://technologyfeedtoday.com/2011/10/17/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies-cnet/

Popular Gaming, October 17^th, 2011
http://populargaming.com/7-mobile-gaming/android/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies-cnet/

Bourne Computer Centre, October 17^th, 2011
http://www.bournecomputercentre.co.uk/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies/

Life While, October 17^th, 2011
http://topics.lifewhile.com/article/02FWbROgAr0SH?q=iPhone

Xydo, October 17^th, 2011
http://www.xydo.com/articles/35274001-rim_needs_to_step_it_up_with_blackberry_freebies

Zicos.com, October 17^th, 2011
http://en.zicos.com/tech/i26203833-RIM-offers-free-apps-to-make-up-for-BlackBerry-outage.html

Buzz Tracker News, October 17^th, 2011
http://www.buzztracker.com/category/rim

Feeds on Floor, October 17^th, 2011
http://www.feedsfloor.com/telecommunication-wireless/hey-rim-time-step-it-better-blackberry-freebies

Techno Tree, October 18^th, 2011
http://www.technotree.org/blackberry-maker-tries-to-soothe-angry-customers-businessweek/

Augusta.com, October 18^th, 2011
http://augustaga.com/blog/rim-might-compensate-operators-inquirer/

Kcsi.com, October 18^th, 2011
http://www.kcsitv.com/cnet.php?SessionID=7e37075f4e9c92091203e

Brad Potts.net, October 18^th, 2011
http://bradpotts.net/2011/10/htc-loses-patent-case-against-apple-san-francisco-chronicle.html

The list was compiled by some interested PR folks, not me, in case you're wondering how I'd have the time to find all of these links, or why I'd care to. I include them here because this is all of interest from a media point of view, cell phones and connectivity, journalism and commentary, publicity and diffusion.

So, to return to the topic with which this post began, is this the death knell for the BlackBerry? Unless they suddenly take my advice, I think it is the beginning of the end, and they'll soon go the way of the PalmPilot. And me, I've had an Android, and now I have an iPhone, and there simply is no comparison, it's the iPhone hands down, it's superiority is crystal clear. Android is the cheap alternative to the iPhone, and I don't think there's much room in the market for a third party line.

But, as to the larger point, in the end, I do think we won't be satisfied with anything less than complete and continual connection, for better or for worse, and system failures and outages will become increasingly less tolerable, more traumatic, for all of us.

And you can quote me on that!

More Scenes from the Center

2011-10-18T11:46:00.000-04:00

Some more shots taken at the Media @ the Center Marshall McLuhan Centenary at Fordham University. Note the satisfied purchaser of a copy of Media and Formal Cause by Marshall and Eric McLuhan in the first picture--that's Stacy Zeifman, who earned her MA at Queens College in Media Studies back in the day. And speaking of which, there's Gary Gumpert in the red scarf in a couple of the shots.

And last but never least is the Model Media Ecologist on the right, Bob Blechman, the author of the forthcoming Executive Severance, a mystery story composed on Twitter, with added illustrations, being published by NeoPoiesis Press, publishers of such fine works as, you guessed it, Media and Formal Cause by Marshall and Eric McLuhan.

Radio Free McLuhan

2011-10-17T14:40:00.000-04:00

Please note that I do not mean radio free of McLuhan in the title of this post. Rather, it's a play on the old Cold War days when we sent our propaganda (and I mean that in a good way) broadcasts over and beyond the Iron Curtain into Eastern Europe, via Radio Free Europe. And there has been an Iron Curtain of sorts that kept McLuhan out of public discourse for a long time, but we have been in the process of tearing down that wall ever since the Media Ecology Association was founded in 1998.

So, last Monday evening I was a guest on Benjamen Walker's radio show, Too Much Information, on WFMU, which is an independent, freeform radio station, one of the last of its kind, listener-supported, community-oriented, and the longest running freeform station in the USA.

WFMU started out as the student-run radio station of Upsala College in New Jersey, but when Upsala went upside down and bankrupt and kaput, WFMU was set free and is still alive and kicking, broadcasting out of Jersey City to the New York Metropolitan Area on 91.1, and via WMFU, a repeater station in Mount Hope, New York, to the Hudson Valley and lower Catskill area in New York State as well. And of course, you can also tune in on the internet.

Anyway, what kind of show is Too Much Information? Basically, it's a talk show, and here's the description they have on the web:

Too Much Information is the sober hangover after the digital party has run out of memes, apps and schemes. Host Benjamen Walker finds out that, in a world where everyone overshares the truth 140 characters at a time, telling tales might be the most honest thing to do.

What the hell does that mean? Well, how the hell should I know? But it sure sounds like fun, doesn't it. Maybe the cartoonish illustration that accompanied this mission statement will help:

And that does look a little like Benjamen Walker, if he were a cartoon, I guess, maybe...

Well, anyway, we did have some fun with our show, I can say that much, and here's how it's described on the TMI site:

October 10, 2011: Live Show - medium / message/ massage
A rare live broadcast! First we hear a segment about Marshall Mcluhan, then we learn about WFMU's upcoming Radiovision festival and then we hear from Marshall Mcluhan expert Lance Strate and we check in with Occupy Wall Street.

The live part was so we'd get some call-ins, which didn't work out, unfortunately. But we did have a scheduled phone call with Beka Economopoulos, one of the leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which led to an interesting exchange, but I'll let you listen to it and see for yourself.

The show is about an hour long, starting with the 10 minute podcast that Benjamen Walker prepared for the UK Guardian newspaper's website this past July (as noted in my previous post, Standing on Guardian for McLuhan), followed by a few minutes of promotional messages, and then we get into the nitty-gritty of the show.

You can download the MP3 and listen to it, or access it directly here:

Listen to this show: MP3 - 128K | Pop‑up player!

Or head on over there and check things out:

Playlist for Too Much Information with Benjamen Walker - October 10, 2011

And hopefully we'll have a chance to do another show together before too long. In any event, I hope you enjoy this bit of radio daze...

Off to Oakland

2011-10-16T23:15:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow evening, I'm off to the left coast to give a public lecture at Saint Mary's College of California, which is somewhere in the vicinity of Oakland. I'll be doing my Binding Biases of Time talk, based on my book On the Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on General Semantics and Media Ecology. In case you don't have a copy yet, or still haven't gotten a second copy, you can order it over on the right of this post, assuming you're reading this on the actual website. Or come to the talk, and pick up a copy, and I'll sign it for you, if you want.

Anyway, my host, Ed Tywoniak, did up a pretty cool flyer that he shared with me, and that I'd like to share with you:

Cool, and informative, too! And if you're in the area, come see me, if you care to, I'd like to see you. And come over and tell me that Blog Time Passing sent you!

A Ram's-Eye View on Steve Jobs

2011-10-15T13:21:00.001-04:00

So, as you may know, the mascot of Fordham University is the ram, which makes sense, when you think about it, Fordham being linked to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, and the ram being a biblical beast (e.g., Abraham sacrifices a ram in place of Isaac in Genesis).

Our sports teams are the Fordham Rams, except for the women's teams which are called the Lady Rams (it wouldn't sound so great to call them the Ewes, or the Sheep). We have a van service that shuttles back and forth between our Bronx, Manhattan, and Westchester locations that we call the Ram Van. And the student newspaper at our Rose Hill campus (it wouldn't sound so great to call it the Bronx campus) is also called, The Ram.

I bring all this up because I wanted to add one more entry to my previous posts, Steve Jobs, Media Ecologist, and Jobs, Disney, and the Future of Apple, as last week I was interviewed by one of our many bright and talented student reporters, Karen Hill, for an article about Steve Jobs that appeared online on The Ram's website: Fordham Community Reacts to the Loss of Steve Jobs.

The piece begins by placing the news of the death of Steve Jobs in the context of our school:

The big question on campus has been "Did you hear about Steve Jobs?" On Oct. 5, 2011 Steve Jobs, the revolutionary co-founder of Apple, passed away from complications of pancreatic cancer.

His loss has hit the world of technology, and Apple consumers, hard. Many are left wondering how the company will continue to thrive with the loss of such a unique figurehead as Jobs.

For years, Fordham University classrooms have been lit by the glowing apples on MacBooks. With the prevalence of Apple's technology on campus, Jobs has had an inevitable impact on the students and professors alike.

"My MacBook is my life," Noelle Bohlen, FCRH '12, said. "I work on it, which brings me income. I write computer programs on it for school and design posters or build Web sites."

And here's where I come in. Please note that I am erroneously identified as an associate professor--I have not been demoted, I'm still a full professor, or full of something, anyway... [Actually, they have since corrected that error, and also the name of the department, which is Communication singular, not the plural Communications.]

Apple products have proven to be more than just a fad used for solely entertainment purposes. They are serious machines built for serious workers. According to Dr. Lance Strate, an associate professor in the communications and media studies department, Mac computers have been used on Fordham's campus throughout his two decades as a professor here at Fordham.

Now, the point was that our Edward A. Walsh Media Lab (which was set-up by my colleague, friend, and fellow media ecologist Edward A. Wachtel, in the mid 90s, and funded by Rose Hill alumni who remember their old professor from our department from back in the 50s and 60s, Ed Walsh, with enormous fondness) was set up as a Macintosh lab, the only computer lab at Fordham that used Macs rather than PCs. If you want to do video, audio, graphics, multimedia, art, creative work or media work, Macs are the way to go.

Me personally, I've had a Mac since 1991, when the printer for my old old Atari 800, on which I wrote my dissertation, broke down in the middle of printing out the final version, and I couldn't get it repaired or replaced, a crisis resolved by retyping the whole damn thing! So, it's been Macs ever for me ever since.

But I digress...

"Mac users are known for their loyalty despite all the trouble that went along for the first 10 years or so of the product [Mac computers]," Strate said.

This period of "trouble" was due to Job's resignation as CEO of Apple in 1985, when he left to work for a hardware and software company, NeXt. In 1997, Apple bought NeXt and Steve Jobs returned to his position as CEO; thus, the revival of Apple began.

Some may have forgotten this, or might be too young to know, but Apple almost went under at one point. In fact, Bill Gates even helped out right around the time that Jobs returned to Apple. It was only the loyalty of Mac users that kept it going during those dark years. If Jobs had not come back to Apple, I think the Macintosh would have gone the way of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST, both of which used graphical user interfaces (GUIs) similar to the Mac.

I think the loyal Mac users deserve some credit here, don't you? But of course, so does Jobs himself.

For Apple customers, Jobs' products are popular because of their advanced and innovative technology, which maintains usability.

"He understood early on that computers are not merely tools or appliances but tools for communication that culminate into a compelling experience with pleasurable aesthetic," Strate said. "Steve Jobs was one of us – super representative. Being a leader isn't be[ing] separated from everyone else, but being a part of everyone else."

This is a point I made in some of the previous posts. So now, let's hear from someone else, say, my colleague, friend, and fellow media ecologist, Paul Levinson:

Jobs' determination was a large portion of what made him a success and inspiration to budding entrepreneurs, inventors and even the average Joe.

"It is one thing to have a dream, and another to make it happen," Dr. Paul Levinson, an associate professor of communications and media studies, said.

Here too, Paul is also mistakenly identified as an associate professor [this too has been corrected]. Oh well, at least they're being consistent! Anyway, back to the article:

Jobs clearly made his dreams happen. He moved from building computers in his garage to becoming CEO of the world's second richest company.

While Jobs was a college dropout, he still serves as inspiration to college students.

This is something that, amazingly, comes up in McLuhan's work, notably his 1972 book, Take Today: The Executive as Drop-Out, co-authored by Barrington Nevitt (and note that they also collaborate on one of the chapters in Media and Formal Cause, which, as I've mentioned before, can be ordered just to the right of this post). Dropping out is a common characteristic of many of the executives of the new media age, Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, etc.

But kids, if you're reading this, don't be a fool, stay in school:

"As students at Fordham University, it is understood that college betters the students," Levinson said. "However, even without a degree, Jobs has provided a lesson that everyone, including students, must follow their inner most powerful dreams [...] But every student must evaluate what they really want [...] and if they have a real dream to peruse then they do what they must."

"If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts," Jobs once said.

It seems as though Jobs and Apple are so iconic that everyone looks up to him, and that the only people without Apple products are Bill Gates and his family.

Now, I would bet good money that Gates has a Mac, probably quite a few. But that's besides the point. And now, Karen being a good journalist, looks to other points of view on the passing of Jobs:

When MacBook Pro owner, Amy Gembara, FCRH '14, was asked how she felt about the loss of Jobs, however, her innocent response was "Who's that?"

Besides those who simply are not aware of Jobs, anti-Apple students exist.

"[Jobs] was incredibly rude and insensitive in business relationships. I own no Apple products. Their history with DRM, closed source and standards non-compliance leave me ideologically opposed to the company," Jeff Lockhart, FCRH '13, said.

Regardless of one's personal opinions, Apple and their products will never be quite the same.

"Jobs was unique and quite possibly irreplaceable," Levinson said.

While some fear that Apple will face a downfall, loyal customers have faith in the legacy Jobs built. Others doubt the quality of products to come.

And that is the six billion dollar question, isn't it? And only time will tell, after all. I do like the fact that Karen brings the article to a nice closing at the end, and back to the local angle:

Jobs was diagnosed with cancer in 2005, and planned his business in direct response to that diagnosis. The Apple University was formed in 2009 to train future employees. In addition, Jobs resigned from Apple in Aug. 2011, due to the progression of his illness. While Apple will not be the same, it will be well equipped with Tim Cook as the new CEO.

Ultimately, Jobs' death came as shock, especially since the iPhone 4s was released one day before his death. The Upper West Side Apple store, a few blocks from the Lincoln Center campus, was decorated with flowers, sticky notes and real apples with a single bite taken out of them. Jobs may be gone, but he still lives in the legacy of Apple and hearts of consumers, including students and professors of the Fordham community.

And through this small, close-up view of the impact of Steve Jobs on our community, we gain an intimate view on what his passing means (or doesn't mean) to the similar communities throughout the nation, and the world.