Media Conversations 6--Be There or Be Square!

So, it's been a bit hectic lately, what else is new, but really it has. So I apologize for not letting you know about this sooner, but hey, no time like the present. I've helped to organize, along with David Walczyk of Pratt Institute, a conference on media literacy and education which is being held this Thursday through Saturday here in New York City. If you're around, you really should try to catch all or part of it.

The conference is being held at Pratt Institute on 14th Street on Thursday evening and during the day on Friday. Then we move east and slightly uptown to Gramercy Park and the Players Club for a Friday evening session. Then all of Saturday's sessions will be in the McMahon Hall Lounge at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus.

I should add that the conference is being cosponsored by the Institute of General Semantics, and by the Media Ecology Association.

Here's a cool poster that one of David's students made for the event. It looks great:




The only thing is, the dates are wrong. The conference is only running June 4-6. If you show up on June 7th, there won't be anything going on.

So, what's it all about you may ask. Well, you can go check out the conference website now, or at anytime you like. It has the full schedule and tells you about the various participants. Here's the URL: <http://www.mediaeco.com/moc09>. But I'll also put the schedule in below.

Before we get to that, let me tell you about some of the highlights and things I'm especially excited about.

Thursday evening we're opening with some cool stuff, including the first New York City screening of the documentary Consuming Kids, and a keynote presentation from Tom deZengotita.

Friday morning we have a session on journalism that includes Alan Hayakawa, the son of S. I. Hayakawa, and I'm really looking forward to meeting him; among the others on the session are Neil Hickey of the Columbia Journalism Review, who was for a long time the editor of TV Guide, back when it was America's top magazine, as well as the online guru for the New York Times, Alex Wright.

Friday afternoon we have a session on childhood with Rosemarie Truglio, a dear friend and Vice-President of Research for Sesame Workshop, and also including Twila Liggett, creator of Reading Rainbow, Ed Miller of the Alliance for Childhood, and Mary Rothschild of Healthy Media Choices. This session is followed by one on new media literacies featuring David Walczyk and Paul Guzzardo.

I am especially excited about our Friday evening session at the Players Club, made possible by my friend and colleague Meir Ribalow. And it's worth going, just to check out the Players Club itself, which was founded by the brother of John Wilkes Booth. Meir and I are going to participate in a discussion about heroes and role models with Maria Cooper Janis, the daughter of Gary Cooper, and the actor Victor Slezak, among others.

Saturday morning we're having a session with an international focus that includes my old colleague and collaborator Ron Jacobson, Jordi Torrent, who organized these conferences in the past, Paul Mihailidis, and others.

Saturday afternoon we'll be concluding the conference with a screening and discussion from The LAMP--Learning About Multimedia Project courtesy of Katherine Fry of Brooklyn College, and then a panel discussion on Mapping the Media that will include media literacy maven Renee Hobbs, Thom Gencarelli (a Trustee of the Institute of General Semantics and Vice-President of the Media Ecology Association), Bill Petkanas (Editor of ETC: A Review of General Semantics), and Martin Levinson (President of the Institute of General Semantics).

Well, this will certainly give me a lot of material to blog about, and I'll be sure to do so, and provide more information about these folks, with links and everything, when we get down to it. But for now, I hope you can make it to the conference, and please help to spread the word. Here's that URL again: <http://www.mediaeco.com/moc09>

And, no, I didn't forget that I promised to post the schedule here. Here ya go!

Media Conversations VI
An International Conference on Youth, Media, and Education
Free and Open to the Public

June 4-6, 2009
New York, New York

Co-sponsored by
Pratt Institute
Fordham University
The Players Club
Media Ecology Association
Institute of General Semantics

http://www.mediaeco.com/moc09

Thursday, June 4th
Pratt Institute
144 West 14th St., 2nd. floor

5.30-6.30 pm Multimedia Presentation
Thus Spoke the Spectacle
Eric Goodman and Mike Stevens

6.30-8.00 pm Welcome and Screening
'The Bungled and the Botched' : The Necessity of Psychological Sustainability
David Walczyk, Pratt Institute
Followed by...
The Manhattan Premiere of the film Consuming Kids (67 minutes)

8.00-9.30 pm Keynote Address
Introduced by Tula Gianini, Dean, Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science

"Teaching media literacy in our schools: why it is so easy to do badly and so hard to do well"
Tom DeZengotita, Dalton School/New York University/Harper's Magazine


Friday Morning and Afternoon, June 5th
Pratt Institute
144 West 14th St., 2nd. floor

10:00am-12:00 pm Panel Discussion
Media Education and the Future of Journalism
Cynthia Walker, Saint Peter's College (moderator)
Donna Halper, Lesley University
Alan Hayakawa, Patriot News
Neil Hickey, Columbia Journalism Review
Beth Knobel, Fordham University
Alex Wright, New York Times

1.00-3:00 pm Panel Discussion
Childhood and Media
Jessica Hochman, Pratt Institute (moderator)
Gretchen Hams-Caserotti, Darien Public Library
Twila Liggett, Marymount Manhattan College
Ed Miller, Alliance for Childhood
Mary Rothschild, Healthy Media Choices
Rosemarie Truglio, Sesame Workshop

3:30-5:30 pm Panel Discussion
New Media Literacies
Paul Guzzardo, Urban Designer and Media Activist (moderator)
Thomas Gillespie, Quinnipiac University
Peter Gutierrez, Curriculum Developer; NCTE Commission on Media
Alex Quinn, Games for Change
David Walczyk, Pratt Institute

Friday Evening, June 5th
The Players Club
16 Gramercy Park South (East 20th Street between Park Avenue South and Third Avenue is renamed Gramercy Park South)

7:30-9:30pm Panel Discussion
Heroes and Role Models in Movies and Other Media

Meir Ribalow, Fordham University (moderator)
Maria Cooper Janis, Filmmaker
Susan McGregor, Friend's Way
Lee Pfeiffer, Cinema Retro
Victor Slezak, Actor
Lance Strate, Fordham University


Saturday, June 6th
Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus
McMahon Hall Lounge
155 West 60th St. (between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues)

10.00-12.00 pm Panel Discussion
Media Education in the Global Village

Ron L. Jacobson, Fordham University (moderator)
Mary Bosco Amakwe, Seton Hall University
Paul Mihailidis, Hofstra University
Holly Morganelli, Pratt Institute
Jordi Torrent, Media Literacy Education Project, UN-Alliance of Civilizations & Duende Pictures

1.00-3.00 pm Screening and Discussion
The LAMP Learning About Multimedia Project

Katherine Fry, Brooklyn College/The LAMP
D.C. Vito, The LAMP

3:30-5:30 pm Panel Discussion
Mapping the Media

Thom Gencarelli, Manhattan College (moderator)
Renee Hobbs, Temple University
Dan Latorre, Scholastic Magazines
Martin Levinson, Institute of General Semantics
Bill Petkanas, Western Connecticut State University



So there you have it. Be there or be square, and I do hope to see you there if at all possible!

not here word art

So, I wanted to share with you a bit of word art I came up with, courtesy of the Wordle website. I first heard about this website on Twitter, from a tweet put up by Karen Russell, er, um, I mean @KarenRussell, who is a professor of public relations at the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the editor of the Journal of Public Relations Research to boot! Her blog, Teaching PR, is an excellent resource for public relations education, and social media as well, I should add.

Anyway, Wordle let's you turn any bit of text into a form of word art. If you like how it looks, you can save it in their gallery, too. And you can go look at other works that have been saved there.

So I took one of my poems from my MySpace poetry blog, one entitled "not here" which happens to be the longest one I've written, and created what I think isn't a half bad piece out of it. Here it is in miniature:

Unfortunately, and this is a drawback for this site, they don't let you copy, save, or upload anything to anywhere else, aside from this sort of thumbnail, so to see the piece in all its glory you're going to have to go over there and look at it, kind of like having to go to the museum to see the painting. Anyway, here's where it lives:
<http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/879891/not_here>.

You can also provide it with the URL of any blog, blog feed, or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed, or a del.icio.us user name, to create an image based on the online text. So, what I'm going to do is post what I've written so far, then feed the URL for Blog Time Passing in, create another bit of word art, and add it to this post. Ready? Okay, here goes!

OK, I'm back! And here's the new text art derived from this blog:

And to see the full size image, head on over to the following address:

http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/883626/Blog_Time_Passing_1

It is possible to change the colors, vertical/horizontal orientation, and shape, but in this instance I just let wordle do its thing. This one could be considered the thumbprint of Blog Time Passing, if you ask me.

Is it art? Marshall McLuhan said that art is what you can get away with. Seems to me wordle is getting away with plenty here!

Autism and Adulthood--A Coming Catastrophe

An op-ed piece in today's Sunday New York Times is worthy of note, to say the least. Entitled, Growing Old With Autism, the piece is written by Karl Taro Greenfeld, the author of Boy Alone: A Brother’s Memoir, which is about growing up with an autistic brother, Noah, who his father Josh Greenfield wrote about in three books, A Child Called Noah, A Client Called Noah, and A Place for Noah.

Let's just jump right in, shall we, as Karl opens the piece in personal memoir fashion:

IN mid-2007, I set off to meet with geneticists, epidemiologists and doctors who specialize in researching and treating autism. I was seeking a novel therapy for my 42-year-old autistic younger brother Noah. I was also looking to discover how heightened awareness of autism — it is now among the most financially successful and mediagenic diseases ever, with hundreds of millions of dollars a year going to research, and regular press coverage — might have resulted in new and innovative programs for adult autistics like Noah.

Those of us in the autism community already know the answer to this one, but let's let Karl go through the motions:

Autism was already widely being described as an epidemic, affecting as many as 1 in 150 8-year-olds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We had come a long way since Noah got his diagnosis in the late ’60s, the so-called dark ages of autism, when many pediatricians believed they had never seen a case, and so-called refrigerator mothers were mistakenly blamed for their children’s withdrawn, antisocial condition.

Yes, that's right, and it was the psychoanalysts who were largely to blame, for blaming the mothers, and Bruno Bettelheim was at the forefront of all this, apparently just making it all up to fit his Freudian theories. Bettelheim's once stellar reputation has been repudiated in general in recent years, but in the autism world he was our bête noire for half a century. But all this is water under the bridge now, so let's get back to Karl's story:

But now, with autism described to me as “the disease of the decade” by Peter Bell, the executive vice president of programs and services for the advocacy group Autism Speaks, I thought perhaps there was hope, even for low-functioning adult autistics like Noah.

I should interject that my daughter is not low functioning, she has moderate autism. But the description of developmental delays from infancy that comes next is very familiar to me:

Noah has been my family’s focus for decades. As a baby, he had been very slow to turn over, crawl or walk, and each subsequent developmental milestone was even more delayed as he grew into adulthood. My parents did everything they could for him, moving us from New York to Los Angeles in the early 1970s to be closer to a pioneering autism program at the University of California at Los Angeles, opening their own day care center for the developmentally disabled, even creating a one-on-one assisted-living situation for Noah — years before this became common — so that they could delay institutionalizing him.

I toured those state hospital systems with my parents when we started looking for a place for a growing-up Noah. Those were terrifying visits: adult patients wearing helmets and restraints, howling and hitting themselves. This was during the ’70s when the scandals at state psychiatric hospitals like Letchworth Village in New York and Camarillo in California were making terrifying headlines. Clients at Camarillo were dying from neglect and improperly administered medications. We had to keep Noah out of that system for as long as we could.

Letchworth Village was part of the same scandal that the young Geraldo Rivera brought to light in the early 1970s (which rocketed him to fame as an investigative reporter at a time when investigative reporters on local news were all but unknown, back when they were pioneering the "action news" format for local TV news), a scandal better known by the name of the other substandard and abusive facility that was brought to public attention, Willowbrook. But let's get back to Noah's story:

Eventually, when he was 22, Noah had to leave home. He graduated from his special needs school on a bright, sunny Orange County day; he was beaming, handsome in his bright blue cap and gown.

But for the profoundly autistic, graduation is perhaps the saddest day in their lives. For those who cannot enter the work force, continue on to more education or find some sheltered workshop environment with adequate staffing, there are few options. Far too few programs and resources are allocated for adults with autism.

Noah has been in and out of sheltered workshops, but these are always under threat because of state budget deficits. Noah has been asked to leave some programs because he was too low-functioning. For several years, we have been trying to find a day program where he might interact with others and perhaps perform some simple, menial job. We have long since given up any hope that he might continue in adulthood the behavioral therapies that are now considered standard for autistics; unless the family is willing to pay the bulk of the cost, there is very little out there for men and women like Noah.

Okay, let's get this straight. Up to age 21, autistic children are required by federal law to be provided with an adequate education by their local school districts. After that, they age out of the school system, and there are absolutely no provisions made for them, for how they are to occupy themselves during the day, let along for their continued learning and growth, which however delayed it may be, does indeed continue. As Karl goes on to explain, all of the focus in autism advocacy has been on early intervention and treatment:

For purposes of fund-raising and awareness-raising, autism has been portrayed as a childhood disease. The federal Department of Health and Human Services has characterized it as a “disorder of childhood.” There are practical reasons for this: early intervention has been shown to be the most effective therapy. The trend in autism treatment has been to steadily lower the age at which intensive intervention commences — as early as five months, according to some experts. Yet autism is not a degenerative condition; the vast majority of those 1 in 150 children who are afflicted will survive to adulthood.

As I spoke with the experts, I began to see that the focus on children had influenced not only the marketing of autism, but also research and treatment. It seemed the majority were interested in children only, the younger the better.

“The best time to look is at the early ages, when autism is developing,” Sophia Calimaro, vice president of research at Autism Speaks, told me a few months ago, explaining that was also where there had been the most treatment success. “I’m not making excuses, but that’s really why more research into adults with autism hasn’t been done.”

The problem is two-fold. As Karl points out, for the purpose of fundraising, children work much better than adults. Help the children! Save the children! Who makes for a better poster child than a child? Those young, innocent faces are so good for moving people to action, and contribution.

But it's also true for the researchers. Children are easier to work with. They offer more hope. They are more malleable, more plastic. There's more of a chance of success in one way or another. You can get the nonverbal child to speak, get the behavioral child to stop injuring himself or herself, get the high functioning child mainstreamed. You can perhaps find the cause of autism, find a way to diagnose it earlier, maybe even, even find a cure of some sort, that might not reverse it but might prevent whatever goes wrong from doing its damage.

It's really a two-fold phenomenon. It's so much better to work with children than adults, children are so much more lovable, less threatening, and can make you feel like a hero. And it's so much better to work with high-functioning autistics where you can perhaps improve their life chances in a significant way, and again register a sense of success that just isn't there when working with low functioning individuals. As Karl himself learns, and explains to us:

Low-functioning adult autistics are viewed with sympathy but not much scientific inquiry. No one has broken down how many dollars are actually flowing to adult autistics, but at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Seattle in May 2007, I counted more than 450 papers and presentations and three dozen talks on autism given by academics and specialists; of those, only two dealt with low-functioning adults, and neither included a cohort large enough to be statistically relevant.

The careful measurements of brain function, or dysfunction, were almost all done on children. A few cognitive and emotional development studies dealt with adults, but these were overwhelmingly focused on high-functioning autistics and people with Asperger’s syndrome.

Autism Speaks, the major sponsor of autism research projects, has not broken down the proportion of funds that go to adult-oriented research, but Mr. Bell, whose teenage son is autistic, laments that “it’s low, too low. ... We have to change the paradigm for those of us who have kids who are going to grow up and need more and better services.”

And hey, Autism Speaks does a lot of good work, but they themselves have not been immune from this bias. And here now is the coming catastrophe, as Karl describes it:

That change can’t come soon enough. Even with state-of-the-art early intervention — eight hours a day, seven days a week — many autistics will need support throughout their lives. The reality is that very few, perhaps only 10 percent, of those as severely autistic as Noah benefit from the current interventions to the point where they become functioning members of society.

If the current C.D.C. estimation of prevalence is correct, then there will be an awful lot of adult autistics who need lifetime support and care. Noah’s life has been a grim study in how scarce those resources are. Without them, his behavior has regressed.

This message is an important one, and it's a shame it was somewhat buried by the personal memoir, as aesthetically pleasing as it may be to the reader. The present epidemic of childhood autism is about to become an epidemic of adulthood autism, and absolutely no preparations have been made to deal with it. And medical research, including searches for a cure, that's all well and fine, but more importantly we need basic services to take care of these members of our society, these children of ours. Here's how Karl ends the piece:

A recent “psychological and psychopharmacological” report by the California Department of Developmental Services said Noah exhibited a “failure to develop peer relationships, a lack of social or emotional reciprocity,” and it described some of his “maladaptive behaviors” like “banging his head against solid surfaces, pinching himself and grabbing others.”

“Noah may also,” it noted, “intentionally spit at others, pinch or scratch others, dig his fingernails into others, and/or pull others’ hair. He may bite, head-butt and hit others; throw objects at others, and hit/slap his head when he is highly agitated.” He is a handful.

Now, imagine a few hundred thousand Noahs.

Imagine that, indeed. The problem is twofold. One is providing day programs to take the place of school, and allow autistics to perform useful, maybe even fulfilling functions, contribute to society, and better yet continue to develop at their own rate. The second is to provide homes. We parents will take care of our autistic children as adults, for as long as we are able. But we are growing older, and we won't be around forever. Siblings may be able to help, but they won't necessarily be equipped to handle their autistic brothers and sisters. And men and women with autism are otherwise healthy, and except for the possiblity of death by accident, which is somewhat increased, they will live normal lifespans.

This coming catastrophe is only made worse by the recession or depression or whatever it is. No resources forthcoming, fundraising is difficult, the outlook overall is not very good.

So, where will they go? What will they do?

Celebritweets

How could I not post this? Celebrities are naturally gravitating to Twitter as a medium by which they can further boost their fame, and further inculcate parasocial relationships and parasocial interaction, relationships and interaction that feel like they are two-way, but are actually altogether one-sided . And while this is increasing the overall popularity of Twitter, and its value as a medium of communication--the value of any interactive, non-hierarchical network increases the more people adopt it, which is why Facebook seems to be undergoing a snowball effect in regard to its growth--from the point of view of Twitter pioneers and purists, the influx of celebrities, and fans as well, is ruining the medium (someone called it the new MySpace for this reason!). This reminds me of how the introduction of the World-Wide Web in the nineties led to a sudden proliferation of commerical websites online, which horrified all of the early intenet users who had gone around saying things like, information just wants to be free! Anyway, this little cartoon is by the same folks who brought us Twouble with Twitters (see my previous post, The Twitlight Zone), and well worth inclusion here on Blog Time Passing:





So, there you have it, a flood of celebritweets! So say it with me: Noah Moah! Let's go build an ark, my friends, the storm clouds are gathering...

The Disappearance of Religion

So, maybe it's a bit drastic to say, disappearance, but certainly a devaluation of traditional religion has been underway in the west for the past half century or so, at the same time that there has been a resurgence of spirituality.

In media ecological terms, religion as we understand it emerges out of a media environment that employs some sort of writing system; without one, what you have is more of a polymorphous spirituality and a multitude of local practices and beliefs, all seen as equally valid, if not equally powerful. Writing gives us sacred texts which define religious ritual and theology, making it possible to drawn boundary lines between believers and unbelievers, creating an either/or system that includes concepts such as conversion and heresy.

And now that the electronic media are undoing the effects of typographic literacy, an emphasis on homogeneous religion has been giving way to something more like oral spirituality, a neo-paganism if you like, although it isn't necessarily New Age phenomena, but also a mix-and-match approach to traditional religions.

So, given all this, I was intrigued to read an opinion piece reprinted in the North Jersey Record, originally appearing in the Christian Science Monitor, on this subject. The author, Stephen Bates, teaches in the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the title of the piece is Why Americans are devout and diverse but not divided (and the title is linked to the original article in the Christian Science Monitor, if you want to go take a look).

Bates starts out with a gratuitous jab at the prevalence (and presumed over-diagnosis) of ADD and ADHD, which I think unnecessary:

In the Adderall age, many Americans are flitting from faith to faith, or from faith to no faith. The Pew Center on Religion and Public Life recently released a poll showing that about half of adults have changed faiths since childhood. Moreover, some 16 percent of Americans say they no longer identify with any religion, compared with 7 percent who were raised without one.

The Pew Center report is called Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S. (yeah, I got it linked), Here's the Executive Summary of the report:

Americans change religious affiliation early and often. In total, about half of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least once during their lives. Most people who change their religion leave their childhood faith before age 24, and many of those who change religion do so more than once. These are among the key findings of a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life. The survey documents the fluidity of religious affiliation in the U.S. and describes in detail the patterns and reasons for change.

The reasons people give for changing their religion - or leaving religion altogether - differ widely depending on the origin and destination of the convert. The group that has grown the most in recent years due to religious change is the unaffiliated population. Two-thirds of former Catholics who have become unaffiliated and half of former Protestants who have become unaffiliated say they left their childhood faith because they stopped believing in its teachings, and roughly four-in-ten say they became unaffiliated because they do not believe in God or the teachings of most religions. Additionally, many people who left a religion to become unaffiliated say they did so in part because they think of religious people as hypocritical or judgmental, because religious organizations focus too much on rules or because religious leaders are too focused on power and money. Far fewer say they became unaffiliated because they believe that modern science proves that religion is just superstition.

But let's return to Bates, and see what he has to say as he makes reference to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was one of the all time great intellectuals of American politics in the 20th century (and a New Yorker, natch):

Those are just some of a passel of trends that have been reweaving the nation's religious tapestry. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned against defining deviancy down. In a variety of ways, we're defining deity down. Have we gotten so skittish about giving offense that American faith is all but meaningless? Then again, the US is one of the most peaceful nations when it comes to religion. That speaks volumes.

You see? An interesting conflict is brewing here. So, what exactly is going on?

For almost all groups, religious intermarriage has nearly doubled since the 1950s. Though two-fifths of Americans claim to have attended worship services in the past week, scholars believe that between a quarter and half of them are bearing false witness. Speaking of the Commandments, one poll found that 42 percent of Americans could name five of the 10 – whereas another poll found that 43 percent could name three of the five cartoon Simpsons.

What's going on? "The idea of a plural society is so new to Americans that many will not even understand the term," Christian Century magazine said back in 1951. "It will be even more difficult to arouse their concern over the development because they will find it difficult to believe that any such thing can happen here." The headline read "Pluralism – National Menace."

It happened here, and, as Christian Century editors fretted, it hasn't been altogether good news for the Good News. Using 1990 data, economist Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., studied the effects of people of the same faith clustering together. For every 10 percent decline in religious density, by his measure, attendance at worship services dropped by 8.5 percent. Religious homogeneity boosts churchgoing. And the United States has become the most religiously diverse nation the world has ever known.

My natural inclination is to think of pluralism and diversity as a good thing, so it's interesting to encounter this other point of view where it is seen as a mixed blessing at best.

Such a society can try to reclaim the faith by slaughtering the infidels, or it can make accommodations. Perhaps the most important accommodation is to quit claiming that your god is the best. In 1924, Robert and Helen Lynd asked high school students in Muncie, Ind., whether Christianity is the one true religion. Yes, said 94 percent. Asked in 2002 if they practice the one true religion, just 17 percent of Americans said yes. Monopolies on truth don't go over well in a religiously multicultural society. Thus, such talk has gone the way of the walls of Jericho.

Since people in religious minorities (my own included) tend to get the short end of the stick when it comes to talk about slaughtering infidels, I am happy to see an end to such triumphalism. But it is interesting to consider that this comes at a cost.

That's why most houses of worship are so easygoing, too – why they now welcome folks who try out faiths the way they try out screen savers. As John Updike wrote, the Christian church once could "exclude and excommunicate; now, unlike most other organizations, it will take us in if we so much as show up."

The cost, then, is a kind of religion-lite, shading into a wholesale trivializing of religion along the lines that Neil Postman warned about in his discussion of televangelism in Amusing Ourselves to Death. So perhaps we become intolerant of religious stricture and discipline, of ethics and morality, but along with it we become intolerant of religious intolerance too.

To be sure, conservative Christians stand apart. They aren't marrying people of other faiths at the same rate as other Americans, and they're considerably more likely to deem theirs the one true faith. When President George W. Bush declared that all religions pray to the same God, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention "corrected" him. But many of the rest of us can't tolerate such intolerance. A Gallup poll in 1989 (admittedly, the Age of Falwell) found that nearly a third of Americans wouldn't want to live next to a fundamentalist Christian.

Fundamentalists lack the light touch of channel surfing and, of course, of surfing the web. And where does that leave us? I agree with Mather below, and disagree with Bates--it leaves us with the disappearance of religion, in all but name.

"The toleration of all Religions and Persuasions," Puritan preacher Increase Mather observed, "is the way to have no Religion at all." Mather got it wrong, but toleration does recast religion. Is that a problem?

Bates himself seems to be rather tactfully tacking around the questions. His conclusion?

Not when you consider the alternative. Here, it's not Sunnis versus Shiites, or everybody versus the Jews. We are a sprawling nation of near-universal belief in a Supreme Being, of many religions, and, at the same time, of scarcely any interfaith strife. We're devout and diverse but not divided. No other country has managed to pull that off, and it's quite an accomplishment. By defining deity down, Americans keep the faith – and keep the peace.

I do agree with his touch of triumphalism here--the American achievement of religious tolerance is remarkable, especially as it has been achieved without resorting to the kind of impoverished atheism that seems so prevalent across the Atlantic. This is not to disparage atheists in any way, shape, or form, there is much to be said for the position they hold, but there is also an enormous loss in abandoning all sense of the sacred in human life.

Peace is one of the great goals of most if not all traditional religions, and you can't argue with that. Watching The Tudors on Showtime, I am reminded of the incredible fact that at one time the English were killing one another over whether the communion wafer was merely a symbol or literally was transformed into the flesh of Jesus during the ritual. I mean, my God, what an absurd cause for war, as duly satirized by Jonathan Swift. And then there's the whole history of the Jews as we lived among Christians and Moslems. Oy vey!

So, after all, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were not all that far off in The Communist Manifesto when then posited a utopia absent all religion, and predicted that it would come to pass as an inevitable historical development. While they may not have been exactly correct, I do think we are witnessing the withering away of the state and of organized religion, albeit very gradually, and not without considerable resistance, and due to technological change, especially the electronic media.

And this, finally, brings to mind the song "Imagine" by John Lennon Here's a version where it's sung by the very young Connie Talbot (someone left another version of it for me under the Comments section of my MySpace profile):



What was amazing about this song is that the lyrics, while quite beautiful, are pretty much straight out of The Communist Manifesto. I just have to wonder how many fans actually have been aware of this fact? In any event, I don't think the case for Communism was ever put more persuasively, certainly not more entertainingly. And while the idealism this represents, however commendable, must be viewed skeptically, neither should it be dismissed out of hand, as it is not entirely without predictive power. Imagine that!

A Brain to Remember, Rest in Peace Leonard Shlain

I heard the news today, that Leonard Shlain has passed away, and you can read all about it, and about Leonard, on the site his family set up: Leonard Shlain's Brain. All I want to do is say a few words about my fellow media ecologist here on Blog Time Passing. Coincidentally, I recently mentioned his daughter Tiffany Shlain in a blog post entitled A Special Day.

Leonard Shlain was a passionate and insightful intellectual, and in addition to his regular job as a surgeon, he was a media ecologist. His first book, Art and Physics, explored the parallel ways in which standard Newtonian and Euclidean notions of time and space were rejected in the early 20th century, in physics by scientists such as Einstein, in art by painters such as Picasso. This follows up on a marvelous insight that McLuhan had about this common thread of discontinuity in our culture, both of which relate back to the introduction of telegraph in the mid-19th century, the first electrical communication technology, which essentially abolished time and space as factors in communication.

Perhaps Shlain's best known book was The Alphabet vs. the Goddess, where he brought his expertise in biology to bear on the notion that monotheism was a consequence of alphabetic literacy, arguing that it also constituted a shift from the feminine-dominated goddess worship of nonliterate cultures to the patriarchal ideologies and theologies of the west. His strong alignment with feminism carried over in his next book, Sex, Time, and Power, where he argued that women had a central role in the development of time-keeping, and with it civilization. And his final book, which will be published posthumously, is Leonardo’s Brain, where he argues that the genius of Leonardo da Vinci is linked to his being feminine, homosexual, left-handed, and right-brained.

As you can no doubt tell from these short descriptions, Leonard did not shy away from controversial topics, and he was not averse to the big ideas, grand historical worldview, and wilingness to engage in probes and explorations that is characteristics of so much of media ecological work. He was a true public intellectual.

Moreover, it was a pleasure to be in the audience for his featured presentations at three Media Ecology Association conventions--indeed, we were fortunate to have him with us just a little less than a year ago at our last meeting at Santa Clara University. He was a marvelous speaker, and one of the few individuals I have seen who knew how to use PowerPoint effectively. Len also gave the 2007 Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture for the Institute of General Semantics, which was published in our journal, ETC, on our website, and in our annual, the General Semantics Bulletin. Here's a photograph of Leonard Shlain from that event:






His works represent significant contributions to the media ecology and general semantics literature, and take their place in our canon next to those of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Walter Ong, Lewis Mumford, Alfred Korzybski, Susanne Langer, and Neil Postman. We will miss his intellectual acuity, his powerful multidisciplinary methods, his keen understanding of the human organism and its extensions, both aesthetic and utilitarian, and his creative flair.

A Social Media Tasti-D-Lite

Back on April 27, we were delighted to have BJ Emerson of Tasti-D-Lite as a guest speaker in my Interactive Media class at Fordham University (see previous posts Meet The Social Moose and Social Moose Goes YouTubing). And yes, BJ did bring us free samples, which we loved, but it was also marvelous to hear him talk about his own experiences and approaches to social media in a business context, and we were fortunate that he allowed us to video his talk. It's not possible to present the class in its entirety, but here are some excerpts from his time with us:
















It was great to meet and get to know BJ, and I'm grateful for the delicious discussion of social media that he provided. After class, he was off to their Columbus Circle store, right by Fordham's Lincoln Center campus, for a tweet-up that I really wish I had been able to attend. I understand they served Fail-Whale Cake!

Blogs Don't Kill People, People Do?

So my friend Paull Young, social media public relations maven displaced from down under to NYC, posted a thoughtful commentary on his blog, Young PR, entitled: Blogs Don’t Influence People - People Do. You can go read it, and meet me back here if you like. I won't mind.

Anyway, it was a thought-provoking post, and it motivated me to write a comment in response that I left on his blog, and that I also thought I'd share with you here:

Great blog post, Paull, and I agree with your main point entirely: "The power of blogs and other forms of social media comes from the relationships they enable through conversation." In other words, it's not about the content, messages, information, or memes being sent and received, it's about the connections being made, and the relationships being forged. This is another way of saying "the medium is the message," because what McLuhan meant by medium is closely related to what psychologist Paul Watzlawick meant by the relationship level of communication, as opposed to the content level. We tend to ignore the medium/relationship, and pay attention to the content, but it is the medium/relationship that has the more significant impact on us, individually and collectively.

The one point I would take issue with is your appropriation of the NRA slogan in this context. If you really consider the analogy, you are in effect saying that social media make no difference in our lives, because people would be communicating and relating to one another no matter what, and social media are just another means to that end, neutral in and of themselves, entirely subject to individual choice about how they are used.

From the media ecology perspective, technology changes human relationships and human affairs. Guns do kill people, in the sense that they facilitate aggression, increasing the potential for violence. And blogs do influence people, in the sense that they facilitate communication, increasing the possibilities for forming and maintaining relationships. Simply put, we have a greater number of relationships because of social media, with less regard to geography, and with greater variation and diversity, while also increasing our ability to find others who share our interests and biases. As McLuhan explained in Understanding Media, the medium is the message in part because technological change alters the speed and scale of our communication.

And well now, I guess I've got a blog post of my own here!

And so I have! Content emerging out of relationships, that is exactly what we're talking about, that's the power of social media!

Social Media and Pagan Residue

So, earlier this semester, we discussed Camille Paglia's magnum opus, Sexual Personae, in my graduate class at Fordham University, and in that book she argues that a strong pagan residue can be found within western culture over the past two millennia, underneath thin patina of monotheism. Further, she draws on the binary opposition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian as constituting two faces of paganism (at least of the Greco-Roman variety), with special attention and emphasis on the often overlooked or purposefully suppressed, or repressed Dionysian.

Among the many characteristics that line up within this opposition are Apollonian as order vs. Dionysian as chaos, Apollonian as male vs. Dionysian as female, Apollonian as technology vs. Dionysian as biology, and Apollonian as literacy vs. Dionysian as orality. This is not to say that all of these characteristics were necessarily connected to Apollo and Dionysis in pagan culture, just that the terms Apollonian and Dionysian are used to refer to themes and traits that parallel, reflect, and are analogous to these other binary pairs. Paglia emphasizes order vs. chaos and male vs. female, while I have added on technology vs. biology and literacy vs. orality.

So that got me to thinking, and it occurred to me that the binary opposition of paganism could be applied to social media. This relates back to a previous post here on Blog Time Passing, About Face(book).

Clearly Facebook is Apollonian. It's all neat, and clean, and orderly. Named after a print medium, it very much reflects the biases of literacy, of the literate and well-educated, middle class and affluent, the technologized (but not the do-it-yourselfers) and consumerized, and the patriarchical and paternalistic (and perhaps patronizing) male-imposed, bourgeois, safe environment.

MySpace on the other hand is pure chaos. It is organic, relatively lawless, and altogether messy. And it reflects the oral tendencies that go along with working class culture. It is open, as space is open, rather than closed and kept captive like a book. And in this sense it is an archetypal great mother of a social network, a matix, a womb, the feminine force at its most threatening.

So then, where does that leave Twitter? Well if Facebook is Apollonian and MySpace is Dionysian, that means that both are pagan. And that, I would think, makes Twitter monotheistic. Paganism is, from a monotheistic point of view, idol worship, an image-centered communication system. Monotheism, on the other hand, is logocentric, word-centered, as God is identified by his speech acts (beginning with, Let there be light!) and in certain respects as the divine logos, as the word (either in spirit or in flesh). Images, on the other hand, were prohibited by the Second Commandment, and there is a clear polemic against idol worship running through the Bible. It follows, then, that if Facebook is Apollonian, and MySpace is Dionysian, then Twitter is monotheistic.

To be clear, I don't mean for all this to be taken literally. Rather, I am employing these categories as an exercise in critical thinking, and as a means to unleashing further insights about the nature of social networks.

Symbolic Calculations

So, I had a great time last Thursday doing a guest lecture on general semantics for David Walczyk's information and library science class at Pratt Institute. And it was particularly encouraging to see how well Korzybski's non-Aristotelian approach fit into the course on technology and design that David was teaching.

And on a related note, after mentioning what I was doing on Twitter, I heard from GrtGrndLdr who turned out to be Alexandre Rivest on Vimeo, and who looks like this





or at least that's the image he uses for his profile. Anyway, he asked me to take a look at one of his videos, as if, which he explained was inspired by Alfred Korzybski. It's not about Korzybski's work per se, he was clear about that, but I think this is a great example of how general semantics can spark creative and critical thinking about language and symbolic communication.

as if from Alexandre Rivest on Vimeo.

Now I know that my friend Bruce Kodish would be quick to remind me that general semantics is not just about language and symbols, that's a common misconception, and it would be more accurate to say that general semantics is about how we abstract information from what's out there, and construct internal maps of the world through perception, language, symbols, and also media and technology for that matter, and it is about how we can become conscious of the process of abstracting, and learn how to improve our ability to evaluate our environment, evaluate our own thinking, and evaluate our evaluations.

But it is also true that general semantics does teach us to think about language in new and different ways, and in the case of this video, in entertaining ways as well. Thanks, Alexandre!

Social Moose Goes YouTubing

So, at the start of the semester I introduced the new blog for this year's Interactive Media class at Fordham University, which the students called The Social Moose, in a post I called Meet the Social Moose. And during our last class meeting this past Tuesday, we did our only webcam video of the semester, which I uploaded to YouTube in two parts, and which I'll share with you here, for what it's worth:








And there you have it (and good luck to you all on the final!).

Blogging and Reformation

Ian Farrant, an outstanding student in my Interactive Media class at Fordham University, shared some videos with the class that I thought were worth including here. This one in particular speaks to the revolutionary nature of the internet and online communications:

If Gutenberg's invention of the printing press with movable type made the Protestant Reformation possible, perhaps blogging, and other aspects of Web 2.0 and social media, will allow for the long awaited, long overdue, Islamic Reformation?

Slow of Speech and of a Slow Tongue

So, as I related in my last blog post, yesterday was my daughter's Bat Mitzvah at Congregation Adas Emuno, and it all went exceedingly well. She read and sang several prayers together with our spiritual leader, Cantor Kerith Shapiro, who was very much committed to religious inclusion. The service was simplified and abbreviated, and quite beautiful, and there were many members of the local autism community present, including Sarah's teachers and classmates, as well as members of our congregation.

My son read some prayers for her as well, and I did the Torah reading for her. And then I gave a short speech on her behalf. So, I thought I would share some of my remarks with you here:

The Torah portion that I just read from, Parshat Shemini, tells us how Aaron, the brother of Moses, became the first Priest of God's sanctuary. But the partnership between Aaron and Moses began much earlier, at the time that Moses encountered the burning bush, and God commanded Moses to tell Pharaoh to "let my people go." You see, Moses was a reluctant prophet, and he told God, "I am not a man of words…, for I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue." And we can understand this to mean that Moses, who in our tradition was the greatest prophet there ever was, Moses, the prince of Egypt, Moses the redeemer, Moses the lawgiver, that Moses was a man who had a disability.

Moses was slow of speech, and of a slow tongue, and so God told him that his big brother Aaron would go with him, and that Aaron would be his spokesman, and speak his words for him. And so it was, with the help and support of his family, and his community, that Moses was able to accomplish great deeds, despite his disability.

And so it is today that Sarah becomes Bat Mitzvah, which means Daughter of the Commandments, the very same commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, the very same commandments that Moses then gave to Aaron for safekeeping. And Sarah becomes a Daughter of the Commandments with the help and support of her family and community.

At this point, I proceed to thank everyone who made this day possible, and I'll leave that part out. After finishing up the acknowledgments, I ended with the following:

We will now present Sarah with her very own prayer shawl, as a Daughter of the Commandments. This tallit has been waiting to be worn for over a half a century. Sarah's grandmother, Betty Strate, gave it to me for Sarah to use, explaining that when I was born, my father, whom Benjamin is named after, brought it home for me to wear on my Bar Mitzvah. But before my Bar Mitzvah, I was given a beautiful new tallit from Israel, and so this little shawl was put away for many, many decades. It is now my pleasure to make it available to Cantor Shapiro to present to my daughter, Sarah.

And from there, the service continued to its conclusion, followed by a wonderful celebration. And later, after it was all over, I was moved to write a poem, related to the speech I gave, which I posted on MySpace, and which I also want to share with you here.

Slow

Written for my daughter on the occasion of her Bat Mitzvah, April 18, 2009

I am not a man of words
No I am not
For I am slow of speech
I am slow
And of a slow tongue
I am slow
I am
Slow
The words will not come
The words will not stay
My voice will not carry
I am not a man of words
I am not
Not a man
Of words
I am slow
Slow of speech
And of a slow tongue
Tied into knots
I cannot speak well
I am not eloquent
I cannot find the words
I am not understood
I am slow
I am slow
So how can I speak
How can I speak
How can I speak to the god-king?
When I am of a slow tongue
And I am slow of speech
And I am not a man of words
How can I do anything
When I am slow?


Your brother will go with you
He will go
Go with you
Your brother will go with you
To see the god-king
Your brother will help you
He will help
Will help you
Your brother will help you
So you won't be alone
And he will speak your words
Yes he will speak
Speak your words
The words you cannot
He will be your tongue
When you are slow
He will be your voice
When you are silent
He will speak for you
And you won't be alone
And together you will make miracles
Where apart there are none
Together in words
And together in acts
Together
We will make miracles
When apart there were none

A Special Day

Tomorrow will be a special day for my family, as we will be celebrating my daughter Sarah's Bat Mitzvah. Sort of. Since she has moderate autism, the service will be an abbreviated one, Sarah will read and sing a few prayers, Benjamin will read a few for her, and I'll be doing the Torah reading on her behalf. The important point is that it wil be her special day, and many of her teachers, friends, and classmates will be present. It's going to be a special event for the local autism community, as well as a meaningful moment for the Congregation Adas Emuno community.

So, in anticipation of this event, I want to include in this post an interesting video that was created by Tiffany Shlain called The Tribe. Tiffany is the daughter of the California surgeon, and media ecologist, Leonard Shlain (for whom I have said many prayers of healing at Adas Emuno). You can get background information about the film and filmmakers at the website for The Tribe. But here's the synopsis:

What can the most successful doll on the planet show us about being Jewish today? Narrated by Peter Coyote, the film mixes old school narration with a new school visual style. The Tribe weaves together archival footage, graphics, animation, Barbie dioramas, and slam poetry to take audiences on an electric ride through the complex history of both the Barbie doll and the Jewish people- from Biblical times to present day. By tracing Barbie's history, the film sheds light on the questions: What does it mean to be an American Jew today? What does it mean to be a member of any tribe in the 21st Century?

So, what are you waiting for? Watch it already, it's less than 20 minutes long:





[Sorry, at some point after I posted this entry, the video was made private.] This video actually says a lot about my son and his peers in the Jewish community. The form of the film interestingly mimics the discontinuities of electronic media, from television's flow of broken narrative segments and interrupting commercial messages, to our clicking around and following various links on the web.

But I also want to add something here that relates to the autism community, and I was fortunate to find the following video on a blog post by one of my MySpace friends with the profile name Flame in the Snow. The video is described as follows:

Slideshow of the transition of autistic author, artist, singer-songwriter Donna Williams from infancy to adulthood with a parallel journey told through her artworks.

I have read a number of the books that Donna Williams has written about her experiences growing up and living with autism, and really love them, so I'm very happy to include this video here:



So, that's all for now, I'll let you know how it went. Oh, and let me leave you with a favorite picture of my daughter and me, taken at a fundraiser for autism a couple of years ago.

Man-Cause and Effect

Writer William Safire, who for decades has authored the "On Language" column for the New York Times Magazine, is no stranger to general semantics, as evidenced by his most recent entry, I Don’t Do ‘Do’ in the April 10, 2009 issue. The brief reference occurs in the second section of his column, under the heading "War on Man-Causation" which begins like this:

When Janet Napolitano, the new secretary of homeland security, testified before Congress, she caused a stir by ostentatiously avoiding the use of a certain familiar word central to the mission of her department: terrorism. A reporter for the German magazine Der Spiegel asked, “Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?” Napolitano replied, “I presume there is always a threat from terrorism,” and also noted that she had referred to “man-caused disasters.” She added, “This is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear.”

This is certainly a noteworthy bit of rhetorical invention, and as Safire proceeds to take note of it, he reminds us of general semantics' founding father, old Alfred K.:

The Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan commented: “Ah. Well, this is only a nuance, but her use of language is a man-caused disaster.” Noonan makes an excellent point of light: a word is not the thing itself. (That was the message of the general semanticist Alfred Korzybski, famous for “a map is not the territory.”) Renaming terrorism “man-caused disaster” does not begin to deal with the real thing that is terrorism.

An excellent bit of snark on Noonan's part, but of course, Safire himself begs the question of what is the "real thing" that is terrorism, or whether there is any "real thing" in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I am with Safire in the sense that there are real events that occur that involve the murder of innocent civilians by nongovernmental and nonmilitary organizations and groups.

Of course, sometimes any death of innocent civilians is called terrorism, but there are operational definitions that can be brought to bear, albeit with less than perfect boundaries, to distinguish individuals and groups operating as criminals from groups engaged in violence out of political (or religious) motivations; likewise we can also differentiate violence committed by organized police or military where there is at least some offical chain of command and semblance of accountability, even if it is the last resort of an interntional war crimes tribunal.

I think there's also cause for separating violence committed against civilians from violence committed against military and police officials, even though the latter is sometimes conflated with the former. But there is a sense in which a political uprising might with some legitimacy attack the organized forces and officials of what is perceived to be an illegitimate or otherwise tyranical government or invader, as opposed to targeting noncombatants and anyone outside of the chain of command.

When I was growing up, and the Vietnam War was raging, there were the regular armies of North and South Vietnam, the latter aided by the US, the former less directly by China and the Soviet Union, and there was also the Viet Cong, insurgents largely working within South Vietnamese territory on behalf of the Communists to the North. And the type of warfare they were engaged in would probably be called terrorism today, but back then it was called "guerilla" warfare. "Guerilla" is Spanish for "little war" and the term dates back to the Naopleonic invasion of the Iberian penisula at the start of the 19th century. As a child, I always thought that they were saying "gorilla" warfare, and you can imagine the mental picture I drew based on that!

But I digress. And really, the point I had set out to make is that "terrorism" viewed from a general semantics perspective is a high-level abstraction, and the only way to deal with it sensibly is to bring it down to more concrete terms, provide operational definitions (being careful not to reify them), and turn the single concept into an array of different, albeit related phenomena.

Taken to an extreme, we might say that each action that could or has been labeled as "terrorism" is an individual case and should be evaluated on its own terms, independent of any such categorization, and there is much to be said for such an approach. The devil is in the details, as the saying goes, but the danger as well is in not seeing the forest for the trees. We need to generalize, it's entirely useful to do so, but probably best to maintain our generalizations at a lower level than that of "terrorism" as a unitary concept. And it would be best to avoid what Wendell Johnson called "dead-level abstracting," that is, sticking to the same level of abstraction. To avoid it, we need to go back and forth, comparing the general to the specific, and the specific to the general.

To be stuck only on specifics, to deny the possibility of generalization and categorization in favor of a complete and absolute sense of difference, is very much in keeping with cultural and moral relativism, and postmodernism, and this brings us back to Safire's column, because in all fairness, he had his sights set on another issue:

Napolitano, however, is to be hailed for breaking the taboo that has afflicted the word man. Political correctness, driven by the abhorrence of sexism in language, has banished such phrases as the forgotten man, man on horseback, century of the common man, even man in the arena. The adjective manly is forbidden and mankind is out, replaced by humanity. Chairman finds its substitute in chairperson or plain chair (although The Times requires a writer to choose between and chairmanchairwoman). The only acceptable use of man is when it is introduced by hu.

Not anymore! Thanks to the vocabulary policy adopted at the cabinet level by the Obama administration, long-awaited change has come to lexical misanthropy. With the start of what phrasemakers could call “War on the Word ‘Terrorism,’ ” Napolitano’s coinage of the compound euphemism man-caused shows we finally have a top-level politico who can do nuance.

Safire is joking around, of course, and somehow I don't expect a return of the repressed man-terms just because of this one neologism (and might it be considered sexist in implying that only men cause disasters, a reasonable supposition at one time, but not any longer given that female suicide bombers have become practically commonplace?).

But for its poetic qualities alone, I do wish we could retrieve that word, so beautiful in its simplicity, man, as referring to the entire human race. But then again, maybe the human race is just too unattactive itself to merit such a perfect verbal representation. Maybe in our clumsy, awkard, bumbling ways, we deserve such graceless terms as humankind, humanity, and homo sapiens?

Of course, the map is not the territory, and neither is it the terror, Tory.

The Story of the Internet

OK, just a quick note here, to say that this video is really well done, and I like the way it shows how a number of different developments in different kinds of technologies, in different nations, and at different times, all came together to form the internet. Really impressive work!



Of course, taking a big picture perspective, we might say that the bias of electric technologies has been towards greater convergence of technologies and services--this is a point McLuhan made decades ago, and Mumford before him. It's not that the internet was inevitable, there are many different ways that things could have worked out. The evolution has been dynamic and fluid, and chaotic, like a stream, but like a stream, it has followed a certain, unmistakable direction.

The Tweet Police

Is it a crime to use Twitter all of the time? Some folks seem to think so. Others, in the guns don't kill people, people kill people camp, think that it's only the way that some people use Twitter that's the crime. Hence, this video, entitled "Twitter Cops," another production from the comedy group The Landline:



In all seriousness, it's the medium that's the message, and the message in this instance is connection, plain and simple, it's a sense of relationship that is established, much like the sharing of otherwise insignificant gossip. It's not surprising that this Cops parody is muy macho, because men have traditionally been impatient to get to the point in conversation, whereas women's style of communication more readily allows for talking for its own sake, for the sake of establishing, maintaining, and reinforcing relationships. Men tend to miss this subtle point in being goal-oriented, rather than paying attention to the socioemotional dimension of communication.

Maybe what we need, then, is not Tweet Police, but Twitter Maids?

Can There Be News Without Paper?

Can there be news without paper? That is, news without newspapers? That's the question folks are trying to answer, in effect is journalism dead, now that newspapers are dropping like flies?

And of course, journalism emerged out of the print media environment, at a time when news was synonymous with newspapers.

Numerous innovations led to this development, such as the application of steam power to printing in the 1820s, leading to the first cheaply produced, majorly mass produced daily newspapers, such as the penny press in the US. And this led publishers to look for news to fill the daily paper, first turning to crime blotters and introducing reporting on crime, and then moving to the artificial creation of news items in the form of pseudo-events, to use Daniel Boorstin's neologism, media events that only exist because of the presence of the media, such as the interview, the publicity stunt, and the press release.

Intensifying the situation was the invention of the telegraph in 1844, which placed a new premium on speedy dissemination of information, and with it rapid turnover, and of course, the scoop. In addition to the wire services, this placed special premium on the reporter; it also changed the style of writing, with emphasis on the inverted pyramid and who, what, where, when, why, and how--put all the most important information at the beginniing of the article, in case the transmission gets cut off, or the editor wants to shorten the article to make it fit--and the style of layout, resulting in the mosaic look of the frontpage, with most articles continued on other pages, slapped together in the midst of incoming reports, a decidely nonlinear structure in which it is impossible to read a newspaper from beginning to end in order.

Whew! And then there was the wedding of printing to photography, so that photojournalism becomes part of the mix after the Civil War. And this is only to name the most significant of many innovations in printing technology.

And so it came to pass in the late 19th century that the newspaper barons donated money to universities to found departments and schools of journalism, so that with journalism professors came also the professionalization of journalism. Workers and managers within the print media organizations were no longer just reporters, and editors, but now became journalists, a special status, and more and more a sacred calling, or at least so they themselves saw it.

Of course, in the 1920s, broadcasting emerged as a competitor to newspapers, but broadcast journalists in radio, and later television, still modeled themselves after print journalists, often started out in the newspaper industry, used experienced newspaper reporters and editors to write and edit broadcast news, drew heavily on printed reports, etc.

And today, the bloggers, or as I prefer to term them, the blogists, either immitate print journalists, or define themselves in opposition to the journalistic establishment, which makes them just as much defined by them.

So, is journalism dead? No, of course not.

Is journalism dying? Yes. It had a good run, for over a century. Now it's coming to an end. Simply put, no journals (meaning daily newspapers), no journalism. We will no doubt continue to use the word, but the activity it refers to will be something else entirely. Let's call it blogism for the sake of clarity. Changing the meaning of words without good reason was referred to by Neil Postman as the demeaning of meaning, and the fact that words can reference different phenomena at different times and in different situations had much to do with Alfred Korzybski's formation of general semantics as a non-Aristotelian system.

Can there be news without paper? There will still be information and intelligence, yes, and rumors and reports. But news as a separate and distinct category, one clearly delimited and differentiated from opinion, entertainment, and fiction? I don't think so, no. That will disappear.

And the incompatiblity of good old journalism within the new media environment is highlighted in the following humorous video from The Landline, aka Landline TV:



Beyond the absurdity of oldstyle newsmen in our new blogosphere, journalism also emerged in a culture in which science, with its emphasis on objectivity, was displacing religion as the dominant narrative, ideology, mythology, and wordview. The assumption that reporters are capable of providing an objective account of events is fundamental, I would argue, to the legitimacy of journalism as a profession. And for some time now, the ideal of objectivity has been called into question, and more or less dismissed in favor of postmodern cultural and moral relativism. The end of the subject, the death of the author, the rise of the posthuman, all sound the death knell of journalism as collatoral damage.

So, all you need to do is to be like Daniel in the lions den, and read the writing on the wall: Extra, Extra, Read All About It: "Journalism is Dead," Says God.

Jump They Say

Last week in my course on the Science Fiction Genre at Fordham University, I focused on time travel, and had the students screen (before class, on their own time) The Terminator and 12 Monkeys, and also La Jetée, the brilliant short independent film by Chris Marker that 12 Monkeys is overtly based on, as it is acknowledged in the credits--it is also an unacknowledged, possibly indirect influence on The Terminator. I've previously posted about La Jetée--The Jetty Stream--and Chris Marker--The Marker of Photography, so this is something of a follow-up, and if you've never seen La Jetée, you can see it cut up and not the best quality via YouTube (embedded in The Jetty Stream), although I highly recommend the recent DVD release of the film, coupled with another of Marker's works, Sans Soleil.

In fact, I was interested to learn, from reviewing the DVD for class, that rock star David Bowie was very influenced by La Jetée, has said that he always wanted to use it somehow, and incorporated it into the music video for his 1993 song, Jump They Say, which appears on his Black Tie White Noise album.

So, I found the music video on YouTube and screened it for the class. As it turned out, La Jetée was only a minor element in the video, the main inspiration being the following image from La Jetée:




But there were numerous references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I was interested to read further about the video in wikipedia--here's a pertinent excerpt:

As the lead-off single, “Jump They Say” received a considerable promotional push from Bowie’s new label, Savage Records (though Arista Records distributed the package in Europe). A striking video was shot by Mark Romanek, depicting Bowie as a businessman paranoid of his colleagues, who seemingly conduct experiments on him and find him a disturbing influence, forcing him to jump from the roof of the corporate building to his death. The video is heavly influenced by Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film Alphaville, as well as Chris Marker's film La Jetée and Orson Welles' The Trial - both from 1962. The influence from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968 is also obvious. The song, while not Bowie’s first release since Tin Machine, was pushed as a comeback single, and reached #9 in the UK charts – Bowie’s first top 10 single since “Absolute Beginners” in 1986, and his last to date.

I would embed the video here, but YouTube says that embedding is disabled by request, so you'll have to go over there to see it, if you care to--here's the link: Jump They Say.

And here are the lyrics, for what they're worth:

Jump They Say lyrics

When comes the shaking man
A nation in his eyes
Striped with blood and emblazed tattoo
Streaking cathedral spire

They say

They say

They say
he has no brain

They say
he has no mood

They say
he was born again

They say
look at him climb

They say 'Jump'
They say 'Jump'

They say
he has two gods

They say
he has no fear

They say
he has no eyes

They say
he has no mouth

They say hey that's really something
They feel he should get some time
I say he should watch his ass
My friend don't listen to the crowd
They say 'Jump'

They say 'Jump'

Watch out

Watch out

They say hey that's really something
They feel he should get some time
I say he should watch his ass
My friend don't listen to the crowd
They say 'Jump'
Juuuuummmppp
Got to believe somebody
They say 'Jump'
Juuuuummmppp
Got to believe somebody
They say 'Jump'
Juuuuummmppp
Got to believe
They say 'Jump'
Juuuuummmppp
Got to believe somebody
'Jump'
Got to believe
'Jump'
Got to believe somebody
'Jump'
Got to believe
'Jump'
Got to believe somebody
'Jump'
They say 'Jump'
They say 'Jump'
They say 'Jump'
They say 'Jump'

And somehow, I can't resist the temptation to contrast this with Van Halen's lyrics for his song Jump:

I get up, and nothing gets me down.
You got it tough. I've seen the toughest soul around.
And I know, baby, just how you feel.
You've got to roll with the punches to get to what's real
Oh can't you see me standing here,
I've got my back against the record machine
I ain't the worst that you've seen.
Oh can't you see what I mean ?

Might as well jump. Jump !
Might as well jump.
Go ahead, jump. Jump !
Go ahead, jump.

Aaa-ohh Hey you ! Who said that ?
Baby how you been ?
You say you don't know, you won't know
until you be here.
Well can't you see me standing here,
I've got my back against the record machine
I ain't the worst that you've seen.
Oh can't you see what I mean ?

Might as well jump. Jump!
Go ahead, jump.
Might as well jump. Jump!
Go ahead, jump. Jump!

Might as well jump. Jump!
Go ahead, jump.
Get it and jump. Jump!
Go ahead, jump
Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump!

And all I have to add to all that is, yumpin yiminy!!!!!

Play Ball!

I can't believe baseball season is starting up again, already! Being a NY Mets fan, I have mixed feelings, hope coupled with a lingering sense of dread after the last few disastrous season enders. Ah well, hope springs eternal, and I look forward to getting a look at the new stadium at some point this summer. I have many fond memories of Shea Stadium, but I won't miss it, it really was not well-designed for watching baseball games.

Anyway, in celebration of this new beginning, I thought I'd include this little poem I wrote on the subject:

Myths of Baseball

Abner Doubleday, double, double day!
Invented baseball, so they double say!
Did he do it? No double way!
It’s a bit of fakelore, O double kay?

James Fenimore Cooper, coo coo cooper!
Wrote no baseball rulebook, wasn’t sue sue super!
That’s a mistake, a blue blue blooper!
I’m sorry to have to be a party poo poo pooper!

But the first recorded game was at Ho Hoboken!
That’s where baseball first was spo spo spoken!
By two New York clubs, no joe joe jokin’!
With every play new records were bro bro broken!

And as an added bonus, here's one of the funniest comedy routines every devised, and one that, in it's own way, is pure poetry, at least in my opinion:

Abbott and Costello, they may not have been as brilliant as the Marx Brothers, as original as Laurel and Hardy, or as over-the-top as The Three Stooges, but they were up there with those other comedy acts,, and Jerry Seinfeld speaks highly of them as a major source of inspiration for his own comedy.

Speaking of which, here's a classic moment from the TV series:

Loogie or not, there's always a bit of magic in the air when baseball is being played:

A great movie, yes, but I also recommend the novel that it's based on, W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, a marvelous excercise in baseball rendered via magic realism, and even more so his amazing companion novel, The Iowa Baseball Conspiracy. They are great reads, even if you're not a baseball fan!

And now, let's PLAY BALL!