New York Top 10 Googles

So, back on December 16, I was quoted in a brief article on top Google searches in New York City for 2014. The results had just been released that day, but I got to see them a day early (woohoo!) so that I could provide some comments on the results. 

I then had a brief telephone conversation with reporter Ivan Pereira, who wrote the article that appeared the next day in am New York (or is it amNew York? Hard to be sure of spacing and punctuation these days, it's ambiguous as it appears in print and both are used in the Wikipedia entry on the paper, and there also is the alternative of amNY as it's abbreviated and in its URL form, also as amny.com. Oh, and note the pun here, between AM as in ante meridiem, or morning, the paper being put out for the morning rush and often gone by the afternoon, and am as in the verb to be, as if to say that the paper is New York, or a representation of New York, the sort of Aristotelian statement that Alfred Korzybski was opposed to, although I am certain he would have appreciated the word play, and made room in his general semantics for the ways in which such double entendres can actually raise our consciousness of abstracting).

However you list the name of the paper, and it is actually a paper, you know, printed with ink on actual pulp, it bills itself on the cover, right under its name, as "Manhattan's Highest Daily Circulation Newspaper" (a fact I have not myself verified). The paper is distributed for free every weekday, and its distribution is numbered in the hundreds of thousands. According to the paper's Wikipedia entry,

The paper is primarily distributed in enclosed newspaper holders ("honor boxes") located on sidewalks and street corners with high pedestrian traffic. Workers ("hawkers," sporting a red amNewYork vest) are sometimes paid to station themselves near NYC transportation points and offer the free paper to passersby. As a result, the paper has had much success with morning and evening commuters.

The entry also mentions that the paper is owned by Cablevision, who bought it from the Tribune Company, along with the major newspaper, Newsday, in 2008.

So, here's the cover of the December 16th, 2014 issue:

Now, before continuing on with the article, let me share with you the Top-10 Trending Searches in New York City, New York in 2014, courtesy of Google:

1. World Cup Schedule
2. Avonte Oquendo
3. Donald Sterling
4. Flappy Bird
5. 2048
6. Missing Plane
7. Oscars 2014
8. True Detective
9. Ebola Symptoms
10. Frozen

and here are the Top-10 How To… Questions for New York City, New York in 2014:

1. How to harmonize
2. How to focus
3. How to network
4. How to photoshop
5. How to reupholster
6. How to listen
7. How to samba
8. How to cosplay
9. How to declutter
10. How to wow

and the Top-10 What is… Questions for New York City, New York in 2014:

1. What is ebola?
2. What is tryptophan?
3. What is ISIS?
4. What is Alibaba?
5. What is bitcoin?
6. What is POC?
7. What is squally?
8. What is edamame?
9. What is gamification?
10. What is quantum?

and finally, the Top-10 News and Events for New York City, New York in 2014:

1. World Cup Schedule
2. Missing Plane
3. Oscars 2014
4. Ebola Symptoms
5. Ferguson Missouri
6. Brazil vs. Germany
7. Golden Globes 2014
8. Mayweather vs. Maidana
9. Wimbledon 2014
10. Unemployment Extension

And now, here is Ivan Pereira's article:

Top Google searches in NYC in 2014

New Yorkers put their own unique spin on Google searches in 2014.

The search giant revealed today the top searches made within the five boroughs in 2014, and the World Cup came in first.

Although the tournament ranked second nationally, Google trends expert LaToya Drake said the energy around the event was different in New York, propelling it to the top.

“It became this collective viewing experience,” Drake said. “Even if you weren’t a soccer fan, you were being left out if you didn’t know the matches.”

Lance A. Strate, professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, credited the city’s diversity for making the World Cup a top trender. At the same time, he said the No. 2 search topic of 2014, Avonte Oquendo, stressed New York’s camaraderie.

Although the 14-year-old autistic Queens boy ran away from his Long Island City school in the fall of 2013, New Yorkers’ concerns persisted through when his remains were found in January.

“In New York, people are tightly packed together, so there is a sense of involvement that you don’t see in other areas,” he said.

The Google data, which didn’t include New York search trends for December, found that the top “What is” query from in the city was “What is Ebola?” The city had its own case at the end of October when Dr. Craig Spencer was hospitalized with the disease following a humanitarian trip to Africa.

“Once it came to the states, there was a lot of fear,” Drake said. “People were looking for answers.”

As I said, a very brief article, especially when it's reduced to text as it is here, or even over on their site where the article is followed by the top ten lists, and also includes this image:

This is not a search box...

Ok, I added the caption myself, couldn't help but make the allusion to the famous painting by René Magritte, entitled La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), but better known by the caption that is part of the painting, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe):

But speaking of images, I hope you don't consider it treacherous or a pipe dream if I also share how the article looked on page 4 of the issue, continuing on to page 5:

So, now, you can see that the article is not the article is not the article, which brings to mind Korzybski's general semantics principle of non-identity, and the related notion that the map is not the territory, which is what Magritte was trying to get across. And am New York is not amNew York or amNY, etc. Along the same lines, the top Google searches for New York do not necessarily represent what was most important, most valuable, or even most perplexing to New Yorkers. It only tells us what it tells us, that is, what New Yorkers used the search engine to search for most often. To give one example, love is very important to most people, and often very puzzling, but I doubt it was a search term that would ever come up in a top ten list.

Simply put, what remains unsaid is what exactly do these lists represent? What are they indicators of? What are they symptoms of? It's interesting that no one is every quite able to put their fingers on the answer, and perhaps somewhat sad to say that most people never even raise the question. So all it amounts to is a bit of trivia, a bit more of what Neil Postman called amusing ourselves to death, and what I punningly altered to amazing ourselves to death, and I think this applies because we are in many ways amazed by the searches and the fact that the results can be tabulated in this way (and we should also be a bit concerned, given the fact that big data of this sort can be used to influence and manipulate us in myriad ways).

The results are also an example of what Daniel Boorstin termed a pseudo-event, a news item that does not report on something that actually happened, or would have happened had there been no news medium to make the report. Sure the data exists, but the whole idea of doing a story on top ten lists of Google searches is a brilliant way to promote Google itself, and the idea of the Google search itself, great public relations, but what is the actual news value. As Boorstin noted more than half a century ago, pseudo-events are designed to fit the format of the news media, so they are easy to report on, and make for good news items, but they are ambiguous, and in fact part of their attraction is in the fact that they beg the question, what does it mean?

So, when we come down to it, the top Google searches represent exactly what they say they are, the top Google searches. They are nothing more than that, they are what they are. Like an image, like a photograph, like data, they may be used as evidence of something, but make no claim or argument of statement, in and of themselves. But in saying, they are what they are, we also have to say, Ce n'est pas ce que c'est, this is not what it is. Or as Korzybski liked to put it, whatever you say something is, it is not.

Non-identity is the first non-Aristotelian principle of general semantics, and non-allness is the second, and that certainly applies to my quote in the article. I spoke to Ivan Pereira for about fifteen minutes on the phone, and gave him way more commentary than he could possibly use. That's a given when reporters reach out in this way, so this is not a complaint, merely a point of reference. And it's good to have an outlet like Blog Time Passing where I can fill you in on some of what was not included in the article.

Now, if you follow my blog, you know I've done this before, and it is particularly easy to do when my comments are provided via email. In this case, though, they were delivered orally via a telephonic exchange, so I have no recorded record of them. So I'll just fill in what I can remember, which includes the point I already made about the meaning of these top Google search results. Raising that question was obviously more than could be dealt with in the article.

Beyond that, what particularly stands out for me is on the subject of Avonte Oquendo. Pereira used my general point about New Yorker camaraderie as a product of population density, and I can understand why, as it speaks to the distinctive character of New Yorkers and the New York lifestyle, and does so in a positive manner. What he didn't include were my comments about the New York Metropolitan Area also having a very high proportion of individuals with autism, which is what made the story resonate so much locally. Of course, in making this point, I noted that the metropolitan area includes the New Jersey suburbs, which has the highest incidence of childhood autism in the nation, and pointed out that a large number of individuals who reside in the North Jersey area commute to work in Manhattan, and would therefore be doing those Google searches from work. This would be in addition to the relatively high rate of incidence within New York City itself. Now, I think this is a much more relevant, important, and even insightful point. So why wasn't it included? It's possible that New Yorker prejudice against Jersey played a role, but I doubt it. I think the problem was more aong media ecological lines, in that the point was too complicated for a format that favored a short and simple comment.

I also noted that New York had a case of Ebola, a point included in the article, but without any comment that I made (I'm sure I wasn't the only one to bring it up). I also remarked that many of the items in these lists were probably high up in Google searches nationally, but what seems to speak specifically to New Yorker concerns, given the hectic, fast-paced lifestyle, the constant level of stimulation, so much so that when New Yorkers go out to the country, it is not unheard of for individuals to have trouble sleeping because it's too quiet for them, and again the density and tight spaces that New Yorkers occupy, are search items about how to harmonize, focus, listen, and declutter.

There are some interesting items relating to economics and careers, such as Unemployment Extension, what is bitcoin, and how to network, and I think that how to reupholster speaks to the thriftiness and old world sensibility of New Yorkers. Pereira used my comment on the diversity of New Yorkers, which includes the fact that so there are so many immigrants and expatriates in residence, that probably made the World Cup trend higher here that in most of the rest of the country.

All of this is an attempt to interpret the data, a kind of exercise in Talmudic hermeneutics, but again, following Postman, the problem is one of decontextualization, that like TV, these lists appear in the context of no context, to use Postman's phrase, so we really don't know what these results represent about us. What is the reason that people do a Google search for a particular term? Under what conditions do people search or don't search for any particular word, phrase, or topic? What makes particular search items more or less popular? Are we more likely to search for things we hear, see, or read about on the news? Are we more likely to search for things we watch on television? Are we more likely to search for things we encounter online? Have mobile devices changed the way that we search? These and many more questions are the kind of context analysis that's needed to really make sense out of these reports on top Google searches of the year. 

This also relates to the third non-Aristotelian principle of self-reflexiveness. Are the top Google search terms a map of a territory, and if so, what's the territory? Or are they a map of a map, or a map of a map of a map?

And of course, it follows that the terms we search for have much to do with the search results that are returned, which is after all a variation on what good old Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. And we don't need Google to tell us that!

Secondhand Gun Smoke

It's time again for me to share one of my guest posts written for the Hannah Arendt Center's blog, as part of the Quote of the Week feature, this one appearing on February 11th, and thanks again to Bridget Hollenback for providing the illustrations. My previous contributions, in reverse chronological order, are The Deprivations of Privacy, History and Freedom, We Create the Conditions that Condition Us, Charlie Chaplin and Hannah Arendt, and see also an earlier post entitled  Arendt Come Due.

And as you no doubt gather from the title of this post, this builds on previous posts here on Blog Time Passing on the issue of gun control, such as On Guns and More and Human Sacrifice and the False Idol of Firearms, as well as Machine Gun Moloch.  

"The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. And this latter is never possible without instruments."

Hannah Arendt, On Violence

The instruments that Hannah Arendt refers to in this quote are instruments of violence, that is to say, weapons.  Weapons, which in the main, translates to firearms, make it possible for One to commit acts of violence against All. And this fact has been brought into sharp focus in light of the devastating tragedy of this past December 14th, 2012:  the massacre of 20 young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut by a 20-year-old man using a semi-automatic assault rifle that belonged to his mother, the first victim of a killing spree that ended when he turned his weapon on himself and took his own life. The extreme depravity of this incident sent shockwaves throughout the nation, and reports of subsequent shootings of a more commonplace variety have been picked up by the news media, whereas previously they have more often than not been ignored. Fulfilling their function as agenda-setters, journalists have placed gun violence high on the list of national debates, reflecting the outrage of many citizens, as well as the genuine concern of a significant number of leaders and officials in government and organized religion.

Despite the fact that many citizens find the status quo intolerable, and favor legislation that would increase the limitations on the types of weaponry citizens can legally purchase and own, and on the requirements for sale and ownership of firearms, there has been considerable opposition to any form of what is commonly referred to as gun control. That pushback had come from what is sometimes referred to as the gun lobby, the National Rifle Association being the primary organization representing the firearms industry, and citizens who insist that our constitution's second amendment guarantees them the freedom to arm themselves as they see fit. And whereas one side mostly speaks in the language of moderation, arguing for reasonable restrictions on firearms sales, the other tends to speak in an extremist language of absolutes, arguing against any abridgement of rights and freedom, maintaining that gun control legislation is completely ineffective, and that, in the words of NRA Vice-President Wayne LaPierre, "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

Fighting fire with fire is not a method favored by firefighters, except in the most extreme of circumstances, and likewise fighting firearms with firearms is a tactic of last resort for putting an end to gun violence. Firefighters stress the importance of prevention, and we certainly are entitled to ask, how can we prevent a bad guy from getting hold of a gun in the first place? When prevention is ineffective, and violence ensues, it may be necessary to engage in further violence as a countermeasure. But even if the result is cessation rather than escalation, the situation already represents a failure and breakdown of the community. As Arendt explains,

the danger 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 be not merely 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 to a more violent world.

LaPierre's insistence that the only way to stop violence is with violence is not only simplistic in his childish morality of good guys vs. bad guys, but in his view of the situation as being One against One. Again, it would certainly be reasonable to concede the point that violent action on the part of one individual is sometimes required to put an end to violent action on the part of another individual, and such action is authorized on the part of duly appointed representatives of the law, e.g., police. But in acting in the role of police, such individuals are acting as representatives of the All, so that what appears to be One against One is in fact a case of All against One.  But LaPierre's notion of a good guy with a gun is not a police officer—indeed police departments typically favor stricter gun control—but an armed private citizen. In other words, his One against One would exist in a larger context of All against All, everyone armed in defense against everyone else, everyone prepared to engage in violence against everyone else.

That guns are instruments of violence ought to be clear. You cannot cut a steak with a gun. You cannot chop wood with a gun. You cannot excavate a mine with a gun. Unlike knives, axes, and even explosives, firearms have no practical use other than to harm and kill living things. There are recreational applications, granted, but there is nothing new about violence in recreational activities, boxing, wrestling, and fencing all have their origins in antiquity, while eastern martial arts disciplines have grown quite popular in the United States over the past half century, and football has become our most popular sport. It follows that hunting is simply another violent recreational activity, as we are now 10,000 years past the agricultural revolution, and few if any of us live in the wilderness as nomadic hunter-gatherers.  And target ranges, skeet shooting, and the like, all of which use obvious surrogates for human and animal bodies, are essentially recreational activities, apart from their function in training individuals  how to use firearms.

Instruments of violence, like all tools, are made to be used, and their violence cannot be confined to prescribed targets and situations. So with All against All, everyone lives under the shadow of violence, the possibility of being fired upon serving as a guarantee against bad behavior. From the individual's point of view, everyone is suspect, everyone is a potential menace that must be guarded against. And of course the danger they pose is greatly amplified if they are bearing arms. So peace is achieved through mutual intimidation, and at best a respect based on threat and fear. Under these circumstances, there is no solid foundation for political action based on consensus and cooperation, let alone social cohesion. With All against All, the potential for action taken by All against One is minimized.

Reducing if not eliminating the potential for All against One is central to the ideology of the NRA, for whom the All is not so much everyone else as it is our representatives in positions of authority. Armed private citizens are the good guys with guns, and it is not only the "criminals and crazies" who are bad guys, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the government. Ignoring the fact that historically, the second amendment was understood as granting individual states in the union the right to create militias in the absence of a standing federal army, gun advocates invoke "the right to bear arms" as a check against government tyranny, insisting that they are entitled to the same right to revolution that was claimed by the founders of our nation in the Declaration of Independence. That the Confederate states invoked the same right in seceding from the Union, igniting a debate settled by the most violent of means, is of little import it seems. The Civil War apparently did not end with Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, but merely underwent a transformation into a subtle insurgency movement that continues to this day. This no doubt comes as a surprise to the vast majority of American citizens, including the multitudes that flocked to movie theaters in recent months to see Steven Spielberg's Lincoln.

Arendt drives home the point that violence exists in inverse relationship to power.  Power is derived from the All, from the consent and agreement of the governed, the source of political legitimacy. Power is the ability to achieve goals without the use of violence. When governments are forced to resort to violence, it reflects a loss of power, one that is difficult to reclaim, and may ultimately result in that governments demise. Violence can destroy power, that is the lesson of revolution, but it cannot create power, only political action can. It follows that gun advocates see the second amendment as curbing the power of government, thereby empowering the individual. That sense of power is something of a chimera, however, for as soon as firearms are used, their power dissipates. If they are used against another private citizen, even a so-called bad guy, the user will have to answer to the legal system, and may be found guilty of unlawful action, or subject to civil liability. If they are used against a government official, the user will sooner or later discover that he (or she, but almost always it is a he) is outgunned, that One against All may only succeed in the short-term but will eventually fall to the vastly superior firepower of organized authorities.

American society, like all societies, looks to a set of values that, upon close inspection, holds logical contradictions, values that, from a distance, appear to be psychologically consistent with each other. We value the individual, and adhere to the most extreme form of individualism of any western society, but we also value the community. We seek a balance between the two, but ultimately they come in conflict with one another, the One vs. the All.  And we value freedom, but we also value equality. Both seem fundamental, but freedom includes the freedom to excel, to dominate, to gain an advantage, enforce and reinforce inequity, while any effort to be truly egalitarian requires restrictions on those freedoms. Moreover, we believe in capitalism, free enterprise as it were, but also in democracy, the American way, politically-speaking, and we assume the two can co-exist without discord. But capitalism is inherently undemocratic, favoring oligarchies and the absence of government regulation and oversight, whereas the exercise of democracy extends to policies that affect and constrain economic and financial activities, and the organization and conduct of business.
In the past, Americans have slightly favored the individual, freedom, and capitalism, all of which are aligned with one another, over the community, equality, and democracy, although the emphasis has shifted somewhat depending on circumstances (for example, during wartime, we become increasingly more likely to rally around the values of community and equality, and belief in democracy). To put it into Arendt's more succinct terms, we try to find a balance between the One and the All, but to the extent that the two are in conflict, we lean a bit towards the One.

In favoring the One, we tolerate the One against All, the result being that we are scarred by gun violence to a degree vastly out of proportion with other western societies. For gun advocates, gun ownership is an individual right and an essential freedom that must not be abridged. Never mind the fact that "the right to bear arms" is rarely found on any listing of basic human rights, as opposed to the right to live in safety and security, free from fear and threat, a right that gun ownership jeopardizes at least as much as it protects. And never mind the fact that our first amendment freedoms are subject to significant limitations and governed by legislation, and those freedoms are listed in a clear and unequivocal manner, in contrast to the second amendment's convoluted and confused diction ("A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"). It is also interesting to note that gun advocates like LaPierre do not hesitate to try to shift the focus onto the first amendment, blaming violence in film, television programming, and videogames for incidents like the Newtown shooting. And what is often downplayed is that the gun lobby, in resisting all attempts at gun control, are defending the interests of the gun industry, the businesses that manufacture, distribute, and sell firearms. Of course, it is hard to play up the importance of free enterprise in the wake of the murder of elementary school children.
In their radical views on the second amendment, and their absolute embrace of individual freedom and capitalism against the interests of community, equality, and democracy, gun ideologues like LaPierre insist on the supremacy of One against All, and it is not surprising that the result is an extreme form of violence.  And, as I noted earlier, leaders representing the interests of the All against the One tend to speak, naturally enough, in the language of practical politics operating within a democratic form of government, the language of negotiation and compromise, but find themselves confronted on the other side with the abstract absolutes characteristic of the language of ideology. You might say, what we got here is a failure to communicate, in the words of Cool Hand Luke, although the two sides probably understand each other better than they let on.

The ideologues know that if they refuse to blink first, the compromisers will most likely give up and move on to more pressing matters. And the compromisers know that the ideologues refusal to negotiate gives them an excuse to turn away from a divisive issue that may cost them a measure of support in the next election, and deal with more pressing matters with a greater probability of reaching a successful conclusion. Only now, after Newtown, is there talk of having reached a tipping point in public opinion, one that may pressure the compromisers to insist upon a settlement, and may force the ideologues to accept the pragmatic need for negotiation. The likely outcome is that the ideologues will make some minor concessions, allowing for some small progress on gun control, a step in the right direction to be sure, but a far cry from the measures needed to curb the high incidence of gun violence in the United States.

Change will come, because the alternative is intolerable. To the extent that we live in increasingly denser populated areas, in urban sprawl rather than rural isolation, so that the consequences of violent action become increasingly more catastrophic, we require more civilized, more civil living conditions, the insurance against violence that can only come from the power of organized authority subject to political oversight, not private citizens responsible only to themselves. To live in a society of All against All is ultimately regressive, and can only make sense if the social system disintegrates, a remote possibility that cannot be balanced against the actuality of incident after incident of gun violence.

Change will come, but it may only come gradually, given our cultural bias towards the One against All, and it may only come generationally.  Over the past half century, Americans have become increasingly more risk aversive, as more information about potential risks to health and safety have been made available through the electronic media. However, as Henry Perkinson argues in No Safety in Numbers, it is the risks that we have no control over that we are particularly averse to. When the risk is perceived as a matter of individual choice, an expression of personal freedom, we are less averse to it than when it is understood to fall outside of our locus of control. Prohibition is often invoked as the archetype of failed measures to eliminate harmful behavior, and the word prohibition is often thrown into discussions on gun control and similar measures in order to summon up those negative connotations. Despite the potential risks to health and safety from alcoholic inebriation, over-consumption, and addiction, drinking was seen as an exercise of free will, and therefore acceptable. It was only with the campaign against drinking and driving that the locus of risk was shifted from the individual consuming intoxicating beverages to the innocent victims of drunk driving, accident victims who had no choice in the matter, whose freedom was in fact curtailed by the drinker. The same is true of tobacco.

Once medical research established that smoking causes emphysema, heart disease, and cancer, modest change in American smoking habits ensued. It was not until the findings about secondhand smoke were established that real cultural change took place, a truly extraordinary shift in attitudes and behavior about smoking. The key was that secondhand smoke exposed individuals to risks that they had no control over, risks that they were subjected to against their own volition.

While this form of risk-aversion is relatively recent, a more basic understanding that permeates American society is that individuals can exercise their freedoms as long as those freedoms do not jeopardize others. The early assertion of a right to own slaves could only persist insofar as individuals were willing to view the enslaved as somehow less than fully human; otherwise the freedom to enslave clearly cannot justify the denial of another individual's freedom. Similarly, free enterprise and free markets, the freedom of individuals to engage in any kind of business and labor practices they might chose to, eventually was understood to conflict with the rights of labor, of workers and employees, as well as the rights of consumers, so that the freedom of capitalism is subject to constraints imposed in the interests of the community and democracy.

In the face of the violence of One against All, what is needed is the power, in the positive sense of democratic political action, of All against One. The power of public opinion and a growing consensus will serve as a bulletproof vest to protect the body politic from assault by the weapons industry and gun ideologues. And the best place to begin is by talking about the dangers that uncontrolled access to firearms pose to citizens who do not choose to live with these instruments of violence, citizens whose freedoms and rights and very lives are put at risk without their consent, citizens who all are victims of secondhand gun smoke.

On Guns and More

I know we have all been deluged with reports, interviews, and other messages regarding the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut that claimed the lives of 20 young children and 6 adults. I admit to being deeply affected by this tragedy, as a father, and as a teacher, but I find it hard to imagine anyone not being dismayed by this event.

Earlier this year, I put up a blog post entitled, What to Blame for the Colorado Shooting?, and some of my thoughts on these type of events can be found there. But I think for many of us, this latest round is the last straw when it comes to gun violence. I sure hope it is. So I want to take a little time to share some thoughts that go well beyond that previous post. If I had more time, I'd provide a more comprehensive, if not exhaustive argument, but for now, this will have to do. And I hope you'll forgive me for getting up on my soapbox and getting all political and preachy. I just need to get this off my chest.

There is no one cause for these mass shootings, so anyone arguing that it's not guns, it's mental illness is just plain wrong. It's both, of course, except when the shooter is not mentally ill, say for example when a child is an innocent victim of a drive-by shooting, in which case it's guns and crime that's the cause.  But there is a common denominator between the two main reasons why children are gunned down, and that's guns.

So I'll start with guns, and have the most to say about guns, but then I'll also move to other factors that also play a role, like mental illness, and crime, and licit and illicit drugs, and media content as well.

But it all begins with guns, or firearms, which we can consider as a medium or technology, as McLuhan does in Understanding Media, briefly in the first chapter entitled "The Medium is the Message," and later in a chapter devoted to weapons.  As a medium, what is the message of firearms? Clearly it's violence, destruction, injury, death, or at least the threat of same. As Mark Twain put it, when you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail, and when you have a gun in your hand, everything becomes a target.

Yes, there are other kinds of weapons, like the bow and arrow, the knife, the sword, etc. But the innovation of firearms, as a technology, made it possible to injure and kill more efficiently, faster, with greater force, with greater damage, in greater numbers, from greater distances, with less personal contact, with less sense of responsibility, with less connection to the consequences, and with less effort, hence the gun's appellation, the great equalizer. 

Take away guns, and you won't eliminate acts of violence, but you'll make them more difficult to carry out. It will take longer, which allows for more time to rethink what you're doing and change your mind. It will make the damage done less severe, and give victims a better chance to defend themselves. People will still die from knife wounds, but there is a world of difference between running away from someone with a knife, and someone with a gun. There is a world of difference between defending yourself against someone coming at you with a knife, and someone firing a gun at you. And the damage done by a knife is often less severe than damage done by bullets.

Guns make it easy to kill, easy to do harm to another human being. If it is unethical, immoral, and evil to harm another human being, a point on which more religious and ethical systems agree, then in what sense are firearms ethical, moral, and good, or even neutral?

Let's put hunting aside. This isn't about hunting. Let's assume that's not a problem, holding aside the accidental shootings that occur among hunters, and the fact that hunting rifles and shotguns can be used to harm human beings. Let's say that hunting is acceptable, and allow for the limited class of firearms that have traditionally been associated with the hunting of game, as long as ownership and use involves careful registration and licensing.

So, what other reason is there for gun ownership? Target practice? A sport? Or a hobby? Collecting? Sorry, that is a poor reason for putting others at risk.

So what then? Self-defense? Certainly a legitimate concern, but how about using non-lethal weapons, like tasers, stun guns, and pepper spray? Granted, tasers can be lethal too, especially for anyone with a weak heart, but they certainly are less likely to kill than a bullet through the heart or brain, and cannot be used the way automatic and semiautomatic weapons can, to spray bullets rapidly to mow down a group of people. If more police were equipped with tasers, we'd avoid incidents like the recent police shooting in Leonia, New Jersey. Not to mention the well reported Trayvon Martin shooting by a neighborhood watch coordinator.

Again, there are no absolutes, no guarantees, any object can be used to cause harm or even kill. Framing the problem as either-or/all-or-nothing is wrong (that's what's called two-valued orientation in general semantics). It is painfully apparent that right now there is too much violence, and even if we can't eliminate it, if we can reduce it then that is what we ought to do.

Some point to the fact that in cities, counties, and states where gun control laws have been enacted, shootings still occur, and might even be more frequent than elsewhere (no surprise when we're talking about poverty-stricken urban areas). In some cases, it's because the guns used were legally obtained, as was the case in Newtown, which suggests that regulation and restrictions have not been strong enough. If one person can obtain guns legally, and then they can be used by another person illegally, how do you prevent gun violence? Not by making it easier to obtain guns legally. And if the guns were obtained illegally, then that suggests a need for stronger enforcement. 

Part of the problem with local gun control is that you can just travel across city, county, or state lines and obtain the firearms you want. There are no customs searches or x-ray screenings across these borders, the way there would be if you were crossing national borders. If anything, this argues for the need for homogenous regulation and restriction nationwide. Anything less and the efforts at gun control cannot be more than partially effective.

And if the problem is that the shooters in Newtown and elsewhere are mentally ill, how do you keep guns out of the hands of such individuals? How else than by restricting access in general. How do you keep guns out of the hands of children? Hiding or locking them up may work, assuming the child doesn't know where the hiding place is, doesn't know where the key is, or can't figure out the combination, so the safest bet is to not have any around in the first place.  How do you keep guns out of the hands of criminals? If they can't be obtained legally, even by proxies with perfectly clean records, then at least we're making it harder for criminals to obtain them, and easier to spot when they have them.

Even if we eliminate gun sales today, there already are so very many guns in circulation, and that will remain in circulation for a long time to come. There is no quick fix, and any short term assessment that indicates that gun bans aren't working ought not to be taken seriously, just as early studies that showed that anti-smoking advertising on TV actually increased smoking did not take the big picture into account. This will take cultural change, and especially generational change, just like smoking did. It won't be easy to kick the habit, but it can be done.

At this point, some reference to the second amendment may seem overdue.  Well, okay, consider this. The Bill of Rights is not the Ten Commandments.  It is an historical document that made sense in the late 18th century. It's something to be proud of. But it's not scripture. Consider the fact that the third amendment is largely irrelevant today, and would hardly merit mention in any contemporary document enumerating individual rights:  "No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law." It's quaint, and that's all.

Now, let's look at what the second amendment says: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Now admittedly, this is by the same somewhat grammar-challenged authors who gave us unalienable rights instead of ones that are inalienable. But the tortured syntax here, and the deliberately ambiguous phrasing suggests a conflicted mindset behind this amendment, and a compromise that made sense only in that earlier era. As many have pointed out, we no longer deal in militias, we have a standing army. But the bottom line is that, unlike the first amendment which states firmly and clearly, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances," the second amendment is decidedly unclear and confusing. It should be stricken on account of that, if for no other reason.

And yes, I said stricken. It's not written in stone, not handed down from on high. The Constitution itself was designed to be amended as future generations see fit. The amendments themselves can and have been amended, and that includes being repealed. So why not repeal the second amendment? What if the Bill of Rights had included an amendment detailing the right to own slaves? That's certainly not outside of the realm of possibility, and we'd surely have a different attitude about the first ten amendments to the constitution if that were the case. There is no rationale for continuing to include the second amendment as a fundamental human right. Repealing the second amendment wouldn't automatically result in the banning of all firearms, but it would help to remove the irrational opposition to gun control.

What is the point of the second amendment anyway? I mean, the real, underlying rationale? I'd say that the fundamental human right involved is the right to defend yourself if you are threatened or attacked, and to defend others as well. So let's dump the crazy language of the Second Amendment, and add a new one that says something to that effect.

You have a right to defend yourself, yes. But that does not excuse putting other people at risk, let alone causing harm to others. There are reasonable ways to approach self-defense that doesn't require resorting to firearms. And if your concern is defending yourself against the government, or a foreign invading force for that matter, well, forget about it. Governments have missiles, bombs, tanks, etc. The days of the Minutemen rallying to the defense of fellow citizens are over.

And if you're saying that repealing the second amendment is unreasonable, that what we need is reasonable gun control, well, let me point out that the National Rifle Association is unreasonable in its opposition to any limits being imposed on firearms. In that, they are serving the interests of the gun industry, of manufacturers and sellers of firearms, and not of citizens. But the problem is, what happens when you take a reasonable approach and the other side insists of being unreasonable? It's kind of like going in unarmed and trying to talk a gunman into giving up. Good luck with that. And the simple truth is, there is no reasonable argument for the extreme position on the right to bear arms anymore, and little justification for even moderate stances on the issue.

Take away the means and you go a long way towards taking away the act. Take away the medium, and you take away the message.

But invoking a truly ecological, systems view, it's important to note that gun control is only part of the problem. In many ways the main part, but it is true that it's not enough. So let's consider the mental health issue. While mental illness does not account for all, or even a majority of shootings, it does account for some, and some of the worst. So what can we do about it? Make mental healthcare easily available to all, whether they can afford it or not. This amounts to an expansion of "Obamacare" to cover therapy. We can't force mental health services on individuals against their will, not unless they are already acting violently, but we can make it accessible for anyone who is depressed, troubled, etc. And let's not forget that physical health problems can lead to psychological issues. The two are not all that distinct, and all the more reason to make sure we provide full healthcare for all.

Therapy often involves medication these days, and there has to be much stricter oversite of prescription drugs.  All too often, the pills people are given solve one problem only to create another. Any drug that, upon testing, suggests any violent side effects whatsoever should not be approved for use. We do not need cures that are worse than the disease. This means resisting the political pressure brought to bear by the pharmaceutical industry. They are not as guilty as the gun industry in creating an environment in which these shootings occur, but neither are they innocent. Caution has to come first, the Hippocratic creed of do no harm has to be the starting point. And if the trade-offs do seem worth it, anyone taking medication with potential side-effects leading to violent or suicidal behavior need to be closely monitored, a further role for healthcare professionals.

Of course, most shootings occur due to criminal behavior. And one of the main reasons for gang violence of this sort is the illegal drug trade. The solution, then, is to legalize recreational drugs. Eliminating prohibition will deflate organized crime today, just as it did back when we ended the ban on alcohol. It will certainly give our economy a much needed boost. Sure there will be problems resulting from increased drug use, which will require expanded physical and mental healthcare services, but increased revenues from taxation will more than cover such expenditures. And some health issues, such as the spread of AIDS, poisoning and overdoses, will be alleviated. There are trade-offs, sure, but this would reduce the prison population significantly, reduce the crime rate, reduce gun violence. This may seem to contradict my earlier point about medication, but the common ground here is the need to regulate use, and monitor individuals using drugs with side effects that can lead to violent behavior (say amphetamines as opposed to opiates).

Of course, there are other reasons for crime, and we may never eliminate it totally, but fixing the economy and doing all that we can to reduce poverty, making sure that everyone is given a minimum standard of living no matter what, and the opportunity to better themselves through education, and through hard work, would make a great difference. So yeah, there'll be some freeloaders. So what? It is absolutely wrong to refuse to help people in need out of fear that some may abuse it, or out of anger that some do. Let the abusers and cheats be, as long as they maintain a peaceful existence. Let everyone have enough to eat, decent housing, safe neighborhoods, and a measure of freedom and dignity, and fair opportunity to improve themselves and their lives beyond the minimum standard, and we will eliminate any sociological justification for violence, aggression, and theft. We can then legitimately deal will wrongdoing on the basis of moral/ethical conduct, or simple human frailty.

All of this speaks, I hope, to the restoration of some expanded sense of civil society, of personal responsibility and community ties.  It's an understanding that each one of us is a human being deserving of respect, and that we all need to agree on a basic sense of human decency.

And that does lead, finally, to the media of communication. Unlike the second amendment, the first amendment has served us very well, and has done so consistently over the history of the American republic. So, what's needed is not government censorship, or regulation, but public outcry among citizens, a consensus that there are lines that ought not to be crossed, and an expression of disgust when they are. Let's not leave it to the religious right and social conservatives, while we as progressives may privately feel uneasy about some of the media content, but are reluctant to side with our political opponents on these issues. Let's agree that there are limits, and that it is harmful to our collective psyche to have so much violence, so much sexual display, and for that matter, so much cursing, all so easily accessible to children. And let's especially consider the role of active simulations and gaming, because there is a world of difference between watching unethical and immoral behavior on the screen as committed by others, and engaging in it yourself in a virtual world. I understand the arguments about playing a hitman in Grand Theft Auto being simple fantasy in a virtual world, and cathartic in functioning, but would individuals say the same thing if there were a videogame that had people engage in rape? In the abuse and murder of children? I know this will not go over well with some folks who would otherwise agree with me up to this point, but taking an ecological view, we have to try to understand how all of these things work together. And we have to move beyond the tired old political divisions that result only in discord and stalemate.

I'll add here that encouraging limits on electronic media more generally would also be part of the solution. Technology sabbaths, fasts, and the like are needed. Making time to think, to talk, and to read, read books, real books, with print on paper. We need this balance to regain some measure of reason, of rationality, of critical distance

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  Life comes first, it must be protected from harm. Liberty must include freedom from threat and from want.  And the pursuit of happiness cannot come at the expense of the happiness of others. I want to believe that deep down, most of us know what is good and what is not, and with that understanding we can reason together and create a better, saner society for ourselves, and for our children.

Hearing and Media

So, back in 2008, I was contacted by Kathi Mestayer about an article she was writing about hearing loss, as she had seen me quoted in the New York Times (see my post from back then, The Secondary Orality of Social Networking), and liked my comment about the primacy of orality and speech.  So I sent her an extended reply via email on the subject, which she thanked me for, and that was that.  At least until last November, when she contacted me again about an article she was writing for Hearing Health magazine.

As you may know, I have a certain interest in disabilities, albeit relating to autism.  As far as hearing is concerned, well, I did sacrifice quite a bit to rock and roll, but that's a story for another time.  But I do want to note that when I was a student, both graduate and undergraduate, it was still quite common for communication departments, many of which had a longstanding connection to the study of speech, to include faculty whose specialty had to do with speech impediments and hearing loss.  And while some real connections were made, for the most part the scholars had little or nothing to do with each other, and that kind of combination is rare nowadays in American universities.

So, anyway, we had a few telephone conversations and several email exchanges, and the article finally appeared in the Spring issue of the magazine. If you click on that link, you can see the magazine online at a rather interesting site called Issuu.  I find it a great example of Marshall McLuhan's observation that the content of a medium is another medium.  On this site, we see the attempt to faithfully reproduce paper media, magazines, newspapers, catalogs, calendars, brochures, even white papers, not only in the manner of the PDF document, but in simulating the three-dimensional look of documents, and the experience of turning pages.  

Arguably, this is an example of what McLuhan called rear view mirror thinking, trying to do yesterday's job with today's tools.  It does make sense, however, as a means of archiving and increasing the accessibility of documents whose primary form is print, and also as an alternative for print media that have decided to go digital because of the cost of production and distribution, but want to retain their traditional format.

Anyway, having mentioned McLuhan, it should come as no surprise that his name comes up in the piece, and Kathi went so far as to title her article, "The Medium is the Message," which takes on an entirely new slant in an article associated with hearing impairment and loss.

Because of the format used, I can't transfer the text of the piece onto this blog post in the form of block quotations, which would make for easy reading, but I can show you what the pages look like.  Here's the first page of the article:

A good opening, and clearly in line with media ecology thinking, as she quickly moves from the apparent similarities to the truly significant differences that make a difference, and McLuhan (and me), not to mention the Media Ecology Association:

Phatic communication is small talk, a form of ritual communication where the goal is not the transfer of information, or influence, but merely the creation and maintenance of relationships, social bonds.  In this sense, relational communication is in effect a medium, and from a media ecology perspective, it is in essence a medium.  Following Gregory Bateson, Paul Watzlawick and his colleagues in The Pragmatics of Human Communication distinguish between the content and relationship level of communication, equivalent to the communication and metacommunication levels, and these correspond quite clearly to the distinction between content and medium that McLuhan makes.  Anyway, sorry to interrupt, carry on:

And there's that reference to the New York Times article that started it all.  And the quote from Helen Keller sums it all up perfectly (in my conversation with Kathi, I had mentioned that Hellen Keller, when asked if she would rather be blind or deaf, said that she would prefer to be blind, because people are kinder to the blind, whereas they tend to be annoyed with the deaf).  Vision objectifies, sound connects.  

Understanding the differences between the senses should also allow us to understand the differences between their corresponding impairments.  And that should allow us to better accommodate and aid individuals with disabilities, a truly worthwhile goal!

Making Healthy Media Choices

So, I was interviewed by Mary Rothschild of Healthy Media Choices for the program she airs on WVEW, Brattleboro Community Radio in Vermont.  The interview was taped at Fordham University, in the studios of our own station, WFUV (thank you very much), and was broadcast on June 8th.  I was very happy with the way that it turned out, especially since I wasn't at my best, health-wise, and was in a little bit of pain in fact, when we were taping (see my previous posts, A Minor Medical Mystery and Causation or Coincidence?).

So, anyway, the interview has been archived as a podcast by Mary Rothschild on two different sites, Healthy Media Choices which is devoted to media literacy and education and helping parents to cope with the overwhelming media environment that they and their children are immersed in, and Witness for Childhood, which a faith-based website that offers Progressive Perspectives on Media, Technology, and the Development of Young Children.  So go ahead, click on either of the links above, or both, and give us a listen, if you haven't already.

The interview is pretty wide-ranging, but centers on media literacy, with significant discussion about general semantics throughout.  And towards the end, the conversation turns to a discussion of religion and spirituality, based in part on my role as a Trustee of Congregation Adas Emuno, with emphasis on a progressive approach to those topics.

I really do think that the interview turned out well, and worthwhile--it was certainly a healthy choice to do it, even if my health wasn't 100%.  So, I hope you enjoy this bit of media, if you choose to check it out.