Media Literacy and Media Ancestry

So, last year media literacy maven Renee Hobbs published an anthology she edited entitled, Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy Through Personal Narrative through Temple University Press. The volume includes a chapter I wrote for Renee on Marshall McLuhan, in case you were wondering. Here's the write-up for the volume:

Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy through Personal Narrative provides a wide-ranging look at the origins, concepts, theories, and practices of the field. This unique, exciting collection of essays by a range of distinguished scholars and practitioners offers insights into the scholars and thinkers who fertilized the minds of those who helped shape the theory and practice of digital and media literacy education.

Each chapter describes an individual whom the author considers to be a type of "grandparent." By weaving together two sets of personal stories⏤that of the contributing author and that of the key ideas and life history of the historical figure under their scrutiny⏤major concepts of digital media and learning emerge.

And here is the Table of Contents:

Introduction ■ Renee Hobbs

1 Historical Roots of Media Literacy ■ Renee Hobbs
2 David Weinberger on Martin Heidegger ■ David Weinberger
3 Lance Strate on Marshall McLuhan ■ Lance Strate
4 Dana Polan on Roland Barthes ■ Dana Polan
5 Cynthia Lewis on Mikhail Bakhtin ■ Cynthia Lewis
6 Srividya Ramasubramanian on Gordon Allport ■ Srividya Ramasubramanian
7 Michael RobbGrieco on Michel Foucault ■ Michael RobbGrieco
8 Gianna Cappello on Theodor Adorno ■ Gianna Cappello
9 Douglas Kellner on Herbert Marcuse ■ Douglas Kellner
10 Henry Jenkins on John Fiske ■ Henry Jenkins
11 Amy Petersen Jensen on Bertolt Brecht ■ Amy Petersen Jensen
12 Donna E. Alvermann on Simone de Beauvoir ■ Donna E. Alvermann
13 Jeremiah Dyehouse on John Dewey ■ Jeremiah Dyehouse
14 Renee Hobbs on Jerome Bruner ■ Renee Hobbs
15 Vanessa Domine on Neil Postman ■ Vanessa Domine
16 Peter Gutierrez on Scott McCloud ■ Peter Gutierrez
17 Susan Moeller on Roland Barthes ■ Susan Moeller

Epilogue ■ Renee Hobbs

And you may notice that the title of each chapter follows a strict formula, so I want to stress that this was not a bit of narcissism on my part. In fact, the title I had given for my essay, not knowing that it would take this final form, was, "The Medium, the Message, and Me: Marshall McLuhan and Media Education" (just so you know).

By the way, Renee's Introduction to the volume can be read online on the Temple University Press's website. And of course the book itself is available for purchase there, and on Amazon:

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And just recently, Renee launched a website entitled Grandparents of Media Literacy that you might want to go check out. Here's the welcome message:

Welcome to the Grandparents of Media Literacy website! You can explore the many people who have influenced the field of media literacy through their work, ideas and creative contributions. These intellectual grandparents may come from fields including philosophy, sociology, literature and more. You can contribute to the website by uploading information about an author, scholar or creative individual whose work influenced your own. You can also share your own story of how an intellectual grandparent influenced your work in media literacy.

And here is some further explanation of the site:

A CROWD-SOURCED NARRATIVE APPROACH TO INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Reflect on your experience with media, technology, society and culture and think about the writers, artists, filmmakers and others who have influenced your work in media literacy. People with interests in media literacy come from a variety of fields, including writing and composition, media psychology, literacy education, technology in society, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and communication arts. As an transdisciplinary topic, media literacy scholars and practitioners do not all share the same foundational knowledge. We do not all rely on the same canonical texts that "tell the story" of our shared values and beliefs.

Personal storytelling can help people discover how we have been influenced by the generation of scholars and thinkers who came before us. Anyone can upload an intellectual grandparent, providing information about their work that will enable readers to understand their key ideas and contributions. Anyone can share a story about any grandparent, explaining "how they influenced you." Through this website, we aim to discover threads of previously overlooked connection to understand the subjectively-experienced history of media literacy education around the world.

So, anyone can sign up, log in, and leave their comments and stories. As one of the contributors to the anthology, there's a page already set up for me. Not the best photo of me, but what can you do? And there's an excerpt from my chapter that can be found under the profile set up for McLuhan, along with any other comments left by others (as of this writing, there's one other comment on McLuhan). It can also be found on my page, under "Stories" and, why not, right here as well:

The experience of suddenly getting McLuhan has been described as akin to a religious experience by some or in more general terms as an epiphany; to use a term popular during the sixties, I was able to grok McLuhan (grok was coined by the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land to refer to an extreme form of understanding and empathy). In visual terms, it was the kind of experience depicted in comic strips of a light bulb being switched on over a character’s head, which would certainly be fitting, given that McLuhan argued that electric technology and electronic media constituted the basis of a revolution that was reversing the course of some three millennia of Western civilization.

Television was the specific electronic medium that had pushed our culture over the edge, he argued, and one of the characteristics of television was its low resolution image, which McLuhan compared to that of the printed cartoon, which elevated the comics medium in importance (see Scott McCloud’s insightful, McLuhan-inspired graphic nonfiction, Understanding Comics [1993]).

This idea had no small significance for me because I had been reading comics since before I could read (my parents read them to me), despite the fact that the hybrid medium was often disparaged by teachers and others arguing in defense of elitist literary culture. The fact that comics crossed—or, if you like, transgressed—the boundary between literate and pictorial media contributed to my own developing awareness of differences among media, differences in their biases towards different types of content, differences in their effects on the ways we think, feel, act, perceive, and organize ourselves, differences that McLuhan famously summed up by saying, “The medium is the message” (1964, p. 7).

The image of a light bulb turning on is a visual metaphor for an idea (the word is derived from the Greek term for seeing) and perhaps the most basic way of describing the effect of my reading The Medium Is the Massage was that I was suddenly able to see the world from an entirely new perspective (in addition to being a field or intellectual tradition, media ecology has often been referred to as a perspective, although I prefer to use approach in order to avoid the visual metaphor). Or, to invoke Aldous Huxley’s well-known phrase, used to describe his experiments with hallucinogens, the “doors of perception” suddenly opened for me. The reference to perception is particularly significant because McLuhan’s specific approach to media ecology emphasized the primary role that sensory organs play in our thought processes.

Although there are differences between media literacy and media ecology, there is some significant overlap, as can be seen by the inclusion of Neil Postman as well as Marshall McLuhan in the anthology, as well as comics creator and theorist Scott McCloud. And depending on who you ask, other "grandparents" such as Heidegger, Barthes, Bakhtin, Foucault, Brecht, Dewey, and Bruner would also be characterized as media ecologists (not that anyone on that list would necessarily be excluded). 

The Grandparents website itself is an interesting experiment in fostering participation in this project, and perhaps exploring possibilities for a second edition or volume of the anthology. So I would certainly recommend it to you, to at least go take a look, and maybe even sign up, log on, and share your stories.

Swimming Up Mainstream

So, I had an interesting exchange with Andrew Hoskins, a professor at the University of Glasgow, based on my quotes in the New York Times, as discussed in my recent blog post, How Netflix Is Deepening Our Cultural Echo Chambers. 

Andrew is currently working on a book about news and the concept of the "mainstream" and how that ideal or myth or sociological reality (take your pick, or view it as some combination of all three) might relate to changes in the media environment. As he put it, "You are spot on when you say that broadcast TV at its height served very significant social, cultural and political roles, but I wonder then to what extent its absence/demise today has shaped the current crisis in faith in the ‘mainstream’?"

Here now is my response, with a bit of editing to make it suitable for Blog Time Passing readers:

I think it might be fruitful to trace the idea of the mainstream back to that of the public. At the start of The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan states that the public was a product of printing. And I think that when you look at Elizabeth Eisenstein's study of typography and its effects, the argument that the printing revolution formed the basis of the public sphere as outlined by Jürgen Habermas, among others, makes a lot of sense. 

This is the basis of Jay Rosen's notion of public journalism. Like me, Jay was a student of Neil Postman's, and his idea parallel's Postman's in Teaching as a Conserving Activity in looking at print-based institutions as needing to work against the biases of the electronic media environment. That's why  Jay argues that journalists need to create a public, and not only try to reach one. 

Of course, the problem is that the public is no more in an electronic environment, the effects of which include the blurring of public and private, as McLuhan, Joshua Meyrowitz in No Sense of Place, and others have noted (much more has been said about the decline and disappearance of privacy, but the fate of the private and the public are intertwined).

I would also note that Jacques Ellul, in his book Propaganda, explains how individualism, in breaking down ties based on tradition, locality, tribe, etc., leads to the mass, which consists of large numbers of individuals without any organic ties. Perhaps we can break this process down, so that the first stage of individualism, which McLuhan, Walter Ong, and others connect to the isolating effect of literacy, results in the formation of the public. 

Detribalized, able to free themselves from the need, in the absence of any external storage medium, to preserve knowledge through collective memory, able to view and review their thoughts and engage in critical evaluation, to think independently and to think novel thoughts, a group of readers becomes a public. As individual members of a public, they share a common literate culture, but one that also depends on orality in the form of public speaking, discussion, debate, deliberation, etc. We associate this type of speech with the agora and other gathering places, from Eisenstein's printers' shops to Habermas's coffee houses, but again it is an orality produced by literate mentalities, as are the dialogues Plato attributes to Socrates. 

Media environments are always built on and incorporate the environments that came before, so the ideal of the Enlightenment is based on a balance between literacy and orality, as Postman has suggested. And maybe there is an inverse relationship between the amount of dialogue and speech that mediates between print media and readers, and the shift from a public to the mass. 

The shift goes along with new technologies, steam powered printing for shifting the orality-literacy balance away from hearing and towards reading, the mechanical reproduction of images and photography as antagonistic to the word in all modes (spoken, written, and printed), telegraphy and further developments in telecommunications as increasing the potential for mass communication. It would follow that what Daniel Boorstin in The Image describes as the graphic revolution, based on these and other innovations, results in a shift from the public to the mass.

Anyway, what I would say is that electronic technology amplified the effects of print, at first, for example in the way that telegraphic messages took the form of telegrams and wire service reports in newspapers. With radio and then television, print became the content of broadcasting, as McLuhan would put it, as programming was often scripted, including news reporting, while programming following a schedule is also very much a typographic type of structure. 

So typographic biases were initially amplified, but it is important to keep in mind that amplification often turns into distortion. 

It was the internet that fully unleashed the potential of the electronic media, bringing back in a new way a kind of neo-tribalism. This relates to McLuhan's laws of media, specifically the law of reversal, as the mass, as an effect of the first stage of electronic telecommunications, flips into siloing, a reversal from the anonymous heterogeneity of the mass into groups based on affinity and shared identity. And/or, maybe the mass in and of itself is ultimately unsustainable, certainly going against the grain of human nature? 

Certainly, printing was associated with homogenizing culture and society, and electronic media always had the potential and the actuality of undoing that effect, that potential muted as long as print remained the content of broadcasting, but now unleashed as broadcasting and telecommunications become the content of online media.

It follows then, that the crisis of the mainstream, or its actual disappearance, is an effect of the electronic media, and quite possibly an irrevocable one at that. 

So, those are my thoughts on the matter, more or less, at least for now. Where do we go from here? That is a hard question to answer.

The Enola McLuhan

Let me start this off by saying that I think it's only natural to look at the world you're living in when you're growing up, and expect to enter that very same world and take your place in it when you finally are an adult. And there undoubtedly is a resulting sense of disappointment that is universal to the human condition, because the adults that we looked up to as children will have almost certainly revealed their flaws and weaknesses, their essential humanity, as we grow up. And more importantly, as there is no way to arrest the passing of time, those adults will have inevitably aged, sooner or later growing weaker, less capable, less healthy, and will ultimately pass on.

No matter what, we cannot enter the world of our childhood as adults, not unless someone invents a time machine of course (something I believe to be impossible, but that's another story). But in traditional societies, there is at least the comfort of entering a world that is more or less the same as the one you grew up in, with the roles essentially the same, just new actors taking filling in for the older ones. The rules don't change, nor does the environment for the most part. With the exception, I hasten to add, of catastrophic events, like natural disasters, epidemics, famine, and of course war.

Another catastrophic occurrence, albeit one that has come with a multitude of benefits, has been the revolutionary changes brought about by technological innovation over the past few centuries, social, cultural, psychological, political and economic changes, and biological, chemical, and physical change as well. The phrase future shock, coined by Neil Postman and made famous by Alvin Toffler, refers to the accelerated pace of change that we live with, in which the future is now, and the world of tomorrow is radically different from the world of today.

The point I would stress here is that the worlds that we moderns enter into as adults bear little resemblance to the worlds in which we grew up. I remember full well watching the 60s unfold as a child, mostly seeing it play out on TV, and finally going away to college in August of 1974, and upon arriving, wondering, where are all the hippies? Where are all the cool counterculture types I had heard about and watched and expected to become a part of?

They were gone, of course. Not entirely, but mutated into freaks (that was the 70s term that we used), similar but not the same. The point being that things had changed drastically over the course of just a few years. So the idea that the hippies would still be around for another entire generation was entirely unfounded. But back in the 60s, there was quite a bit of speculation about what would happen if the counterculture ever took control of the culture, if it ever became the mainstream culture, if the hippies ever took charge, and ultimately, what would happen when they became adults and moved into the leadership roles occupied by the generations that had lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War?

One example of this sort of speculation was the 1968 film, Wild in the Streets, directed by Barry Shear, based on the 60s baby boomer slogan, Don't Trust Anyone Over 30! The film posits a scenario in which a young radical turned rock star gains voting rights for 14-year-olds, and is elected to the House of Representatives, and ultimately becomes President of the United States. He doesn't exactly play fair in his rise to power, and once in charge, establishes a kind of police state where all the members of the older generation are moved into retirement homes and forced to take LSD.






I know, I know, it's hilarious, isn't it? A cautionary tale, the real message being, don't trust anyone under 30. Hey, they didn't call it the generation gap for nothin'! 

And then there were the stories that predicted that the children of the hippies would rebel against their parents and reject their values and way of life, just as the youthful baby boomer had rejected the values and way of life of their parents. This revenge scenario, in some ways reminiscent of the universal argument that parents give their children, just wait until you have children of your own, then you'll see, was amplified and intensified to an extreme by the severity of the generation gap between boomers and their parents. 

Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange, is best understood as incorporating just this sort of extrapolation into the future. It is often not recognized as a science fiction film, even though it posits a dystopian future, and highlights the introduction of a major new technology, the Ludovico technique, an advancement in behavior modification, based on aversion therapy. This takes what was in the 60s a relatively new idea that criminal behavior is a mental illness that needs to be treated, the goal being rehabilitation, rather than a moral failing that needs to be punished, and pushes it to its extreme. 








Politically, the future dystopia is based on the liberal to socialist principles ascendant in the 60s, albeit with roots that go back to the New Deal era, with an expanded welfare state, housing projects, and permissive parenting. And whereas the counterculture youth preached peace and love, their children rejected the idea of flower power, as it was known, and that fictional rejection in some ways anticipates the advent of punk rock in the mid to late 70s. But beyond rejection, the children of the future embraced violence of every variety, to the extremes of rape and murder.

Moreover, the hippies emphasized the consciousness-expanding potential of hallucinogenic drugs, notably LSD, but also peyote and its derivative, mescaline, as well as the mild, mellowing quality of marijuana, while some got hooked on the comfortably numbing opiate, heroin. Drug use in general was condoned, but stimulants were generally used either to balance out the effects of depressants, including barbiturates and alcohol (drinking and popping pills was an activity they shared with their parents, albeit engaged in without parental or legal permission), or in the service of consciousness expansion, for example in the form of the psychedelic drug, STP. In A Clockwork Orange, their children favored stimulants, not for their mind-altering qualities, but to enhance their ability to engage in violence and sex. And they ingested them in the form of milk plus, milk being exactly the kind of wholesome, mainstream beverage rejected by the hippies.

The counterculture style was all about color, the psychedelic and the florescent and dayglo, paisley prints and the rainbow (an emblem adopted by Apple Computer, silicon valley being largely a Californian off-shoot of the counterculture, and in politics first by Jesse Jackson in the form of the Rainbow Coalition, an extension of the 60s Civil Rights movement, and later by supporters of gay rights, marriage equality, and the LGBT community generally). In Kubrick's film, their children dressed in colorless white, and black, a stark rejection of the psychedelic style (again, anticipating in some ways the punk style of the 70s).

The rejection of the baby boomers by their parents extended to their music . You might say that the call to arms of rock music was, roll over Beethoven, while in this narrative, their children, or at least the main character, Alex, preferred classical music, and Beethoven above all. 

I should note that the film is an adaptation of the 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, which of course predates the hippies, but not the counterculture itself, which had not fully flowered but was certainly firmly rooted by then. And in the United Kingdom, Burgess being an English writer, the Social Democrats had dominated the political scene since the end of the Second World War.

 And if you've never read the novel, I highly recommend it, if for no other reason than for its highly sophisticated emphasis on language. Burgess was a linguist, putting him in the same class as J.R.R. Tolkien, and much like George Orwell, he included a fictional future language based on English, in this case called Nadsat. In large part, Nadsat consists of words borrowed from Russian, such as droog, meaning close friend, devotchka, meaning girl, and Bog, meaning God. In some instances the Russian words are adapted into more familiar English ones, such as khorosho, which means good, turned into horrorshow, and golova, meaning head, turned into Gulliver. And according to the Wikipedia entry on
Nadsat, the name of this argot comes from the Russian suffix that is the equivalent of the English suffix -teen, implying that it is the speech of the fictional future's youth. Presumably, the use of Russian is a reflection of an increased acceptance and influence of the Soviet Union, in conjunction with the strong left wing political tilt of the dystopia imagined by Burgess.

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I remember reading the novel as a teen, and seeing the film when I was in college, and I just have to note the difference between narratives like this one, and the present day penchant for young adult fiction with simplistic dystopian scenarios.

There's also a bit of the revenge scenario in the character of Alex Keaton, the role that first brought Michael J. Fox into national prominence, on the 80s TV sitcom, Family Ties. Alex's parents were former hippies who remained very much in the liberal, progressive camp, while their son turned out to be, much to their surprise, a young Republican, a conservative, and a Reagan supporter.

But putting all that aside, this has turned out to be a rather long preamble to the main point of this post, which is to continue my series on Firesign Theatre, and most recently on their first album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him. As I've mentioned before, the album was released in 1968, making it a product of the 60s, a product of the counterculture, its humor satirizing both the mainstream culture of the 60s, and the counterculture itself. This is apparent in the first two tracks on side 1 of the album, the focus of my previous posts, Waiting for the Firesigns, and especially Sending Up the 60s.

The third and final track on side 1 could be grouped in the same genre as Wild in the Streets and A Clockwork Orange, as a future scenario based on the present, circa 1968,
extrapolating what things would be like if and when the youth took over, the hippies were in charge, and the counterculture became the culture. And while there is a hint of dystopia in this satire, for the most part it's a comedic celebration. 

The title of the track, "Le Trente-Huit Cunegonde," is a bit mysterious. Cunégonde is a character from Voltaire's philosophical novel, Candide, itself a satire, and perhaps suggests a warning against the optimistic if not utopian sensibility of the counterculture, that the best of all possible worlds as imagined by the hippies might not be the perfection they would have believed it could be. I'm just speculating here, of course, and I have no idea what the reference to 38 in the title (trente-huit) refers to. But it really doesn't matter, as it has not bearing on the piece itself, which is almost 7 1/2 minutes long (one of their shorter bits, like the first two on side 1).





I find it interesting to recall that during the 60s, concern about police brutality was not simply or even mainly a race issue, and that cops were often referred to as pigs by members of the counterculture. The idea of a hippy police force may seem like an oxymoron, but there is a sense in which reform movements, when successful, turn their radicalism into a new orthodoxy.

The roots of 60s counterculture can be found, in part, in the Beat Generation of the 50s, writers and poets who began their careers in the 40s, and rose to prominence during the postwar era. Also known as beatniks, they had a major influence on and were greatly admired by the hippies. Prominent among them was the poet Allen Ginsberg, perhaps best known for his poem "Howl" published in 1955, which begins with the line, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..." When the woman at the beginning of the sketch asks the cops if they want to hear her rap, back in the 60s the term just meant talk, with the specific connotation of speaking in a sincere and truthful manner, a heart-to-heart. So when she starts to recite "Howl" she is actually not rapping as it was understood back then, plus while she uses Ginsberg's poem to try to demonstrate her hippy credentials, her choice also reflects the fact that she's an old-timer in this brave new groovy world, and therefore not with it, much like her faded body paint.

Dr. Benway is a reference to a fictional character created by another beat writer, William S. Burroughs, who was, among other things, a student of Alfred Korzybski and general semantics. And of course it's 8 million copies of the best known novel by Burroughs, Naked Lunch, that the hippy air force drops on the last stronghold of unhip resistance.


And the name of the plane they drop the literature from? Why, it's the Enola McLuhan, bet you were wondering what the title of this post had to do with all this, weren't you? The Enola reference is of course to the Enola Gay, the name of the aircraft used to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. And not to make light of that horror, but it could be said that McLuhan's impact on the intellectual and artistic scene of the 60s was quite the detonation, in and of itself.

It's quite fitting that the Enola McLuhan drops books rather than bombs, and on a third world nation with low literacy rates, as McLuhan had argued that the social and psychological impact of the introduction of writing, the alphabet, and printing has been explosive, and militant in its own right. The medium is the munition! Indeed, arguably, the homogenizing effects of the alphabet and print far outstrips the flattening impact of the bomb.

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As I've suggested in my previous posts about Firesign Theatre (A Nick in Time for Firesign, Of Flip Sides and Firesigns, Waiting for the Firesigns, and Sending Up the 60s), their approach to sound recording has produced a form of comedy that has been compared to music, and that is based on the creation of a soundscape or sonic environment, along the lines of what McLuhan referred to as acoustic space (aka auditory space). The repetition in this particular radioplay of the 60s slang word groovy, by the way, also invokes an acoustic metaphor, as groovy is derived from grooves, which is how music is recorded onto vinyl and earlier recording media such as wax cylinders. So, back in the 60s, you might also say, dig those grooves, man, to refer to a musical recording that you like, and more generally to being in the groove, for settling into a routine in a positive sense (as opposed to being in a rut), for getting into something in depth, having a very positive experience, getting into the zone, etc.

There is also some play with media in this bit, involving telephone and television. But it is the direct reference to McLuhan that, for me, confirms the fact that Firesign Theatre represents a great example of media ecology praxis.

Now all that's missing is a breakfast cereal called Granola McLuhan!

The Medium is the Muesli

Well, I guess this all goes to show I'm probably better off living in this world, rather than the world I thought I'd live in when I was growing up, even if this world is not the best of all possible worlds. Not that I have any choice in the matter, or in the fact that, when it comes to media and technological innovation, it's bombs away, over and over again!

Another Non-Listless Summer

So, it's getting to be a ritual, me providing Roy Christopher with my selections for his annual summer reading list feature. My picks were included on his Summer Reading List, 2015 post on June 22nd, along with those of about 20 others, including Howard Rheingold, Steve Jones, Peter Lunenfeld, and my friend and colleague Paul Levinson, as well as Roy himself, and you can read them all, if you care to, by clicking on the old link and taking a trip down to his website.

Of course, as a public service, I will also reproduce my list here, on Blog Time Passing. So here it is:

I have great admiration for poet and essayist Diane Ackerman, and this summer I plan to dive into her most recent book, The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us (Norton, 2014). I also want to catch up on one of her earlier volumes, Deep Play (Vintage, 1999). And this may seem like something out of left field, but my list includes Revolution for the Hell of It (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1968) by Abbie Hoffman, partly out of sixties nostalgia, but mostly because I understand that Hoffman was under the influence of Marshall McLuhan, among other things, and I’m curious to see how much media ecology he incorporated into his own ideas about subversive activity.

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I imagine it would be appropriate to include a book on reading in a reading list, and I’ve included Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (Penguin, 2009), which comes highly recommended. To balance out a book on literacy, I have also added a book on orality, Myth, Ritual and the Oral (Cambridge University Press, 2010) by the great anthropologist and media ecology scholar, Jack Goody. Of course, reading also includes rereading, and I plan to return to J. T. Fraser’s seminal volume on the study of time, Time: The Familiar Stranger (Tempus Books, 1987), in preparation for a research project I’ll be tackling in the fall.

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It seems that the term affordances comes up quite a bit in discussions of technology and media these days, and I think it will be worthwhile to go back to the source, James J. Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Psychology Press, 1986), as it also constitutes an important contribution to the media ecology literature. Additionally, I think I’m going to learn a great deal from Zhenbin Sun’s recently published Language, Discourse, and Praxis in Ancient China (Springer, 2015), and I think the time is right for me to tackle Bruce Kodish’s massive Korzybski: A Biography (Extensional Publishing, 2011).

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One of the books I am most looking forward to reading is Where Seas and Fables Meet: Parables, Fragments, Lines, Thought (Guernica, 2015), by B. W. Powe, a leading Canadian poet, literary theorist, and media ecologist. Another is J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). And for a science fiction fix, Paul of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson (Tor, 2008) should do nicely.

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 And there you have it, my 2015 Summer Reading List, for what it's worth. And since you asked so nicely, here are my previous lists: 

• 2012: Some More Reading List 
• 2013: S'more Reading Listed 
• 2014: Some More Reading for the Summer 

Perhaps you will find something of interest in these lists, or maybe this will move you to make a list of your own. As Jack Goody has make clear, lists are a format, and a medium, that were made possible by the invention of writing, so it is only appropriate that we use them in the service of reading, and reading, and reading some more...

Penning Our Stories

My most recent op-ed in the Jewish Standard  was published on May 29th, and entitled Penning Our Stories. And as is the custom here on Blog Time Passing, you can click on the old link to read it over there, or stick around and read it here:

“The last time I got a fountain pen was for my bar mitzvah.”

That line was uttered during the two-part season finale of the ABC television network’s popular series Once Upon a Time, which aired on May 10. It was a little inside joke inserted by series creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, who co-wrote the episode; both of them may well have received fountain pens as gifts for their own bar mitzvahs. There was a time when a fancy fountain pen was as commonplace a gift as savings bonds for bar mitzvah boys, so much so that an often repeated bar mitzvah joke was, “Today I am a fountain pen.” (This was a play on the cliché declaration “Today I am a man,” this being a time before the bat mitzvah was fully instituted as an egalitarian religious practice.) Michael Hilton, in his book Bar Mitzvah: A History, reports that “in July 1946, Barry Vine of New Haven Connecticut, received sixteen fountain pens as gifts”! Now that’s the write stuff!

Fischler as Jimmy Barrett

Once Upon a Time’s bar mitzvah boy was played by the actor Patrick Fischler, who perhaps is best known for his role as the Jewish comedian Jimmy Barrett on the recently concluded AMC series Mad Men, and who also appeared on the series Lost, a series that Kitsis and Horowitz previously had worked on as writers. Fischler’s character was introduced in March, during the final story arc of the series’ fourth season, first through references to a mysterious “Author” whose writings set the course of the series’ storybook characters, such as Snow White, Prince Charming, Rumpelstiltskin, Captain Hook, Robin Hood, Maleficent, and Regina (aka the Evil Queen, Snow White’s nemesis); as “The Author” he also had the power to rewrite their stories, and change their fate.

Fischler as Phil from Lost

By the end of the season, we learned that the “Author” is a title and status that has been bestowed upon many different people, that this particular Author is named Isaac, that his last name is Heller (possibly a tribute to Jewish novelist Joseph Heller of Catch-22 fame), that he was from Brooklyn, and that back in 1966 he was a novelist who was having great difficulty getting anything published, working to support himself selling television sets, a job at which he was also unsuccessful. Selected to become the next in a long line of magical authors, he is asked to select a pen to use, prompting his remark about his bar mitzvah. Although that comment was the only instance in which the character was directly identified as Jewish, his name, voice, place of birth, look, and manner all allude to his ethnicity, and presumably his religion.

Part of the humor of the bar mitzvah comment comes from the incongruity of inserting a bit of Yiddishkeit into a series that remixes characters from Disney’s animated films, most of whom are derived from European fairytales and folklore. (Disney owns Once Upon a Time’s television network, ABC.) After all, even during the two decades that Michael Eisner was CEO of the Walt Disney Company, the film studio added no characters to its pantheon like Fievel Mousekewitz of Stephen Spielberg’s An American Tail. And we certainly don’t expect to see anyone named Cohen or Levy in Cinderella, Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, or Frozen.

Fischler as "The Author"

There is, however, a long tradition of inserting inside jokes that only Jews could appreciate fully into Hollywood films. My all-time favorite is in the 1936 Marx Brother movie Animal Crackers, when the cast sings, “Hooray for Captain Spaulding, the African explorer,” and Groucho responds, “Did someone call me schnorrer?” I also love the subtle jab in the 1930 science fiction musical Just Imagine, in which characters from the future explain that people drive planes instead of cars, planes with names like Rosenblatt, Pinkus, and Goldfarb. In response, the distinctly Jewish character from 1930 remarks (in reference to the automaker’s anti-Semitism), “It looks like someone got even with Henry Ford!”

No doubt there also was a degree of identification between Kitsis and Horowitz, as the creators of Once Upon a Time, and their character, Isaac Heller, as “The Author” of the storybook tales that seal the fate of the series’ heroes and villains. And perhaps making Heller a villain involved a bit of self-deprecating humor. Certainly, it was ironic that Isaac’s status as “The Author” is revoked for changing the heroes’ and villains’ stories. That is exactly what Kitsis and Horowitz have done in the series, not the least by making both types of characters less black and white, more morally ambiguous, and therefore more realistic.


Still, portraying Once Upon a Time’s only Jewish character as a villain is more than a little problematic. There are echoes of Shakespeare’s Shylock in the explanation that Isaac gives to Snow White and Prince Charming, that it was “a lifetime of bad bosses” who “fancy themselves heroes, pushing around people like me,” that led him to resent the heroes and identify with the villains. The problem with having only one Jewish character in a popular narrative is that the character’s Jewishness becomes more than an individual attribute. Instead, the character becomes a representation of the Jewish people as a whole, in this case a negative representation, indeed, a negative stereotype.


But there is nothing negative about the Jewish connection to the role of “The Author” after all. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we pray that we may be inscribed in the Book of Life for a good year, and we wish the same for others. In our tradition, God is an author, indeed, The Author, an understanding that has been adopted by the other Abrahamic religions. Of course Moses, our greatest prophet, was also a writer, and through the Torah and the Tanach, we became the first people to write our own historical narrative. And the stories our ancestors wrote have changed the course of history for the entire world, and continue to capture the imagination of billions of people.


Upon doing a search for “Jewish authors” via Google, a listing of “authors frequently mentioned on the web” appeared, and cited 50 names, including Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, Franz Kafka, Bernard Malamud, Sholem Aleichem, Anne Frank, Joseph Heller, Isaac Asimov, J. D. Salinger, Elie Wiesel, Isaak Babel, Ayn Rand, Primo Levi, Marcel Proust, E. L. Doctorow, Amos Oz, Arthur Koestler, Leonard Cohen, Theodor Herzl, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Gertrude Stein, Emma Lazarus, Art Spiegelman, Tony Kushner, and Boris Pasternak. No doubt a full listing of every Jewish novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, screenwriter, comics writer, and writer of nonfiction would strain even the Google search engine’s enormous capabilities. Interestingly enough, Google’s list also included King David, Josephus, Maimonides, and Paul the Apostle, and it is certainly worth noting in this context that the Christian Gospels are to a large extent the product of Jewish authors, their impact immeasurable.

So maybe a fountain pen isn’t all that terrible a gift to give on the occasion of a bar or bat mitzvah? Certainly, research indicates that in the classroom, learning and retention is greater for students who take notes by hand as opposed to on laptops and tablets, and there is much to be said for taking pen in hand in regard to creativity. Our tradition of writing extends from Torah and Tanach to Talmud and Zohar, from Maimonides and Karo to the writings of our modern rabbis and lay leaders, from the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist branches as well as the Orthodox, and to the secular, scholarly, popular, and artistic works of Jewish authors all around the world. With the magic of the pen, we can continue to be authors of our own history as a people. And with the magic of the pen, we can inscribe our own names into a personal book of life that we each can write for ourselves.

Reflections on Reflection

So, my third op-ed for the Jewish Standard was published in their August 1st issue, and entitled Reflecting on Reflection, with the subtitle, "Jewish life needs—and provides—an opportunity to slow down, think, and soul-search."  And you may notice that I make use of some of the reading I mentioned in my previous post, Some More Reading for the Summer. Anyway, here it is:

One of the personal challenges we all face here and now, in 21st century America, is finding a time and a place for reflection. 

In the last century, it was said that no one has had a complete thought since the invention of the telephone, a device that we brought into our homes so that we could be interrupted by the outside world at any hour of the day or night. How quaint—and how naïve—that seems today, now that we carry our phones around with us wherever we go, and are continually bombarded by a variety of email and text messages, alerts, apps to play with, and yes, even actual phone calls. There seems to be no room in our busy schedules to simply sit and think, no escape from the deluge of information, interaction, and entertainment made available at our fingertips, the habitually twitching digits of this digital age.

Thinking, in and of itself, is not unique to our species, but human beings have developed a unique set of tools for thought that sets us apart from other forms of life.

First and foremost is language. Much of what we call thinking consists of talking to ourselves silently, carrying on an inner dialogue or monologue. Notice that for the most part, we do not think by somehow imagining that we are writing or typing, or reading our own words on a page or screen. Language is a set of sounds that convey meaning, and for tens of thousands of years—which is to say for most of our history as a species—human beings survived without the aid of the written word. And somewhere along the line, we learned how to internalize speech in the form of thought.

Compared to the spoken word, writing is a relatively recent development, dating back only about 5,500 years. Its purpose was to record speech in a durable form. Before writing, both speech and thought were fleeting, ephemeral, subject to the vagaries of memory. And while we should not discount the power of collective memory, writing gave language a permanence that we had never known before. Writing also made it possible to step back from our words, to see them as fixed signs, available for study.

In other words, writing gave us new tools for thought, allowing us to fix language in place, allowing our words to become the object of prolonged contemplation. Writing recorded the speech and the thoughts of others, allowing readers to view and review their statements and arguments. And writing gave us a way to step outside of our own thinking processes, to observe our thoughts from the outside.

Simply put, writing gave us a mirror for the mind. And in doing so, the written word made possible our capacity for reflection.

That capacity is the subject of an extended essay by Ellen Rose, a professor of education at the University of New Brunswick, which was published in book form, titled On Reflection: An Essay on Technology, Education, and the Status of Thought in the Twenty-First Century. In considering the meaning of the word “reflection,” Dr. Rose relates, “when I close my eyes and try to picture reflection, I immediately envision someone sitting in a book-lined room, reading or pondering silently.” She concludes that the essence of reflection is “deep, sustained thought for which the necessary pre-conditions are solitude and slowness.” Dr. Rose rightly argues that reflection is in decline—has been for some time now—because of our many technological innovations, particularly electronic media.

The decline of reflection is a cause for concern among thoughtful people everywhere, but it ought to be viewed as particularly alarming in regard to the future of the Jewish people. Our religion, tradition, and culture are based on the written word, on the Hebrew aleph-bet and the study of sacred texts, on Torah, Tanach, Talmud. Our rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, the bar or bat mitzvah, is a literacy test. Our houses of worship also are houses of learning, our synagogues also are schools.

It is worth recalling that one of the goals of Nazism was to wipe out the capacity for reflection, and not simply in the service of totalitarian domination. Consider the following observation on the part of historian Elizabeth Eisenstein in Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending:

"Anti-Semitic stereotypes attributed a soft, flabby, and sedentary lifestyle to the bookish Jew, in contrast to the masculine, muscular Aryan. Observers in 1933 witnessed the book-burnings of works by Jews and other “decadent” authors, along with the elimination of the same works from libraries and bookshops. The elimination of Jewish books served as a prelude to measures in the next decade aimed at eliminating the Jews themselves."

The problem we face today is not the elimination of books, but their growing irrelevance to our lives. Could the disappearance of the quiet time we need for reading and for thinking, for the solitude and slowness that forms the basis of deep, sustained thought, possibly be a prelude for a more serious threat to Jewish survival, as a culture or even as a people?

For Dr. Rose, the best hope for the future lies with education. But we also can turn to another opportunity to claim a time and space for reflection, in Jewish worship services of any stream, Orthodox or Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist. Prayer is a form of thought, an exercise in ways of thinking that differ from our everyday thought patterns. And prayer provides an opportunity for profound forms of soul searching, serious introspection, contemplation, and meditation. If we are to reclaim our capacity for reflection, and in doing so safeguard what is essential to our tradition and culture, we will need both our schools and our shuls.

As compared to my two previous op-eds (see my previous posts, On Jewish Characters in American Television Series and Jewish Movie Marvels), this one is less popular culture-oriented, and more media ecological in its approach. And while is specifically addressed to a Jewish readership, I hope it is clear that the ideas apply to other religions as well, and to other non-religous practices that encourage mediation and mindfulness.