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.

Of Patterns and Parabolas

So, I've been thinking a bit about formal cause, thinking inspired by the book by Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Media and Formal Cause, which I've discussed here before, notably in a post entitled, appropriately enough,  Media and Formal Cause, and do note that the book can be ordered directly from Amazon by one of those widgets over on the right.

So, anyway, not too long ago I completed an essay on the subject for a book project I'm working on with fellow media ecologists Robert K. Logan and Corey Anton, and I'll share more about the project here when the time comes, which it hasn't, not yet. And I'm not going to post the essay here, sorry about that, but I did want to share some thoughts.

One aspect of formal cause involves pattern recognition, a mode of perception and way of knowing that Marshall McLuhan stresses in Understanding Media.  Pattern recognition is especially needed, McLuhan argues, with the speeding up of communications, because it becomes harder and harder to engage in linear and analytical, step-by-step thought processes. When information is coming at you rapidly, there's no time to think things over, and you have to employ a different, more intuitive or right-brained, holistic form of perception. 

In my own experience, playing first generation video games like Space Invaders, Missile Command, and Galaxian helped me to fully understand pattern recognition as it relates to electronic media. It's the idea of being immersed inside an environment, rather than objectively distanced from a scene, which corresponds to McLuhan's notions of acoustic space (which surrounds us) and visual space (in which we are an outsider looking in).

Pattern recognition is holistic, in playing video games it meant not focusing on a fixed point the way we use our eyes when we read, but rather scanning the environment, almost in the mode of peripheral vision. And even at slower speeds, it's the kind of approach used by skilled chess players, as opposed to the brute force of computation that chess programs rely on, running through all the possible moves at inhuman speeds (which is why philosophers say that computers don't really play chess—which is to say, computers are cheaters, at least that's the answer that was given when philosopher Hubert Dreyfus's claim that no computer could play a decent game was chess back in the 60s was shown to be in error by Seymour Papert, as Dreyfus was soundly beaten by a computer).

Pattern recognition relates to formal cause in that the pattern or form is recognized by the individual, and therefore in the eye of the beholder. In the most modest sense, the individual applies the pattern to sensory data in order to make sense of what is being taken in, and that active  organization can be considered a kind of causality. To use a phrase favored by Gregory Bateson, as well as Edmund Carpenter, we're talking about the pattern that connects, or to invoke Bateson's famous quote:

What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the back-ward schizophrenic in another?

Bateson also used the term metapatterns to talk about patterns that recur across many different contexts, and this became the subject of Tyler Volk's fascinating book, entitled, appropriately enough, Metapatterns.  According to Bateson,

The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that metapattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns which connect. 

And according to Volk,

A metapattern is a pattern so wide-flung that it appears throughout the spectrum of reality: in clouds, rivers, and planets; in cells, organisms, and ecosystems; in art, architecture, and politics.

Volk, in his book, discusses patterns that occur in space, such as spheres, sheets and tubes, borders, binaries, centers, and layers, and also in time, such as calendars, arrows, breaks, and cycles. 

So now, connecting Bateson with McLuhan, I am arguing that formal cause can best be understood as patterns that direct. That is to say, patterns are not just effects, but that there is a tendency for things in the universe to fall into certain patterns, based on physical laws, not the least of which is the Second Law of Thermodynamics which establishes the ultimate triumph of entropy. The tendency of material phenomena to fall into certain patterns, even as they move towards increasing chaos, is also discussed in very insightful fashion in Terrence Deacon's recent book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, and Deacon does relate that tendency to formal cause.

In this sense, forms are real, not in the ideal sense that Plato thought them to be, but in a dynamic sense as patterns associated with events. Entropy itself is a pattern that directs.

Now, in another previous post, They Became What They Beheld, I brought up the wonderful videos of Vi Hart, and in particular one inspired by Edmund Carpenter. This time I want to introduce another video of hers entitled Doodling in Math Class: Connecting Dots, which she describes as "anti-parabola propaganda, plus musing on math class, cardioids, connect the dots, envelopes of lines, even a bit of origami." It's really quite marvelous, so please take a look:






Now, Vi only emphasizes the many ways that we can encounter parabolas and their cousins in mathematics, but what also emerges is that this is a great example of a metapattern, or pattern that directs, as it relates to gravity, ballistics (Angry Birds style or otherwise), seashells and other biological forms, not to mention planetary orbits.  

Vi Hart is, in my opinion, the contemporary equivalent of Hypatia, the 4th century Greek philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer who, remarkably for her time, became head of the neo-Platonist school in Alexandria. She was the subject of the 2009 film, Agora, which I was very impressed with:






The trailer doesn't do the film justice, focusing as it does on action and conflict, which is a part of the story, and indeed much of the emphasis is on early Christianity's intolerance of Greek paganism and the philosophy associated with it, resulting in Hypatia's murder or execution. 

But for me a key theme in the film was Hypatia's attempts to understand the movements of the planets, trying to reconcile the conflict between the assumption that the planets would follow the perfect form of the circle, and the reality that their movements do not. The film speculates that she arrived at the answer of the ellipse, but never had a chance to relate her realization before her death.

The relationship among circles, ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas were first explored by the ancient Greeks, with the understanding that all are conic sections, as illustrated above (and as shown in Agora). That these patterns in geometry represent patterns that different physical phenomena fall into is, in my view, a form of formal cause, and an example of patterns that direct.

Now excuse me while I go play with some parabolas on my phone...

The Science and Scientology of Sponsored Content

So, Alfred Korzybski published his magnum opus on general semantics in 1933 under the title of Science and Sanity,  because he believed that scientific method gives us our best understanding of the world, our most accurate maps, as it were, of a territory that we can only really know indirectly. As a scientific approach to mental health, education, and social, political, economic, and ethical progress, general semantics caught the imagination of many science fiction writers, among them Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, and A. E. van Vogt.  As a form of quasi-therapy, general semantics influenced a number of significant therapists, including Albert Ellis, Fritz Perls, and Albert Bandler of Neuro-Linguistic Programming fame.

Another well known figure who credited Korzybski and general semantics with having had an important impact on his thinking was L. Ron Hubbard.  Understandably, many individuals associated with general semantics do not want to be associated with Hubbard, or have general semantics be connected to him in any way. And arguably, whatever Hubbard took from Korzybski he didn't use in a way that Korzybski intended or would have approved of.

But Hubbard was, early on, a science fiction writer. I haven't read his books, I must confess, but I did see the one movie that was made based on his work. It wasn't very good, but John Travolta was quite amusing, unintentionally of course, as an alien:

Now that's what I call Saturday Night Fever!

Anyway, Hubbard eventually shifted his focus from fiction to psychotherapy (well, some say he never shifted his focus away from fiction, but that's another matter). That's when he came up with his own brand of therapy, called Dianetics. That link will take you over to the Wikipedia entry, where it says:

When Hubbard formulated Dianetics, he described it as "a mix of Western technology and Oriental philosophy". He said that Dianetics "forms a bridge between" cybernetics and General Semantics (a set of ideas about education originated by Alfred Korzybski, which received much attention in the science fiction world in the 1940s)—a claim denied by scholars of General Semantics, including S. I. Hayakawa, who expressed strong criticism of Dianetics as early as 1951.

Be that as it may, after coming up with his Dianetics, Hubbard went on to create Scientology, and note the link here between Science and Sanity, science fiction, and Scientology as a belief system. And as you no doubt know, Hubbard established Scientology as a religion, founding the Church of Scientology in 1953. It's a religion that has been embraced by a number of celebrities, and quoting now from the Wikipedia entry on the Church, here's the section on celebrities:

Hubbard envisaged that celebrities would have a key role to play in the dissemination of Scientology, and in 1955 launched Project Celebrity, creating a list of 63 famous people that he asked his followers to target for conversion to Scientology. Former silent-screen star Gloria Swanson and jazz pianist Dave Brubeck were among the earliest celebrities attracted to Hubbard's teachings.


Today, Scientology operates eight churches that are designated Celebrity Centers, the largest of these being the one in Hollywood. Celebrity Centers are open to the general public, but are primarily designed to minister to celebrity Scientologists. Entertainers such as John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, Lisa Marie Presley, Nancy Cartwright, Jason Lee, Isaac Hayes, Edgar Winter, Tom Cruise, Chick Corea and Leah Remini have generated considerable publicity for Scientology.

Now I don't know about you, but I was a bit surprised when, while watching the Superbowl a few weeks ago, this commercial popped up:





According to a piece by Cavan Sieczkowski in the Huffington Post entitled Church Of Scientology Super Bowl Ad Raises Eyebrows, the Church did not actually buy a Superbowl ad, the most expensive of all possible commercial placements. A small portion of advertising time is reserved for the local and regional stations running the Superbowl network feed, and the Church bought time on the stations in a few major markets, including New York and Los Angeles, a much cheaper proposition, but one that gave the impression that they were willing and able to afford the highest advertising rates in the universe. Sieczkowski goes on to relate the following:

This is the second time in recent weeks a Scientology ad has broken into the mainstream media.

In mid-January, the Atlantic published promotional, sponsored content by the Church of Scientology detailing how the church's “ecclesiastical leader,” David Miscavige, had led it to its best year yet. The advertorial package was denounced by readers, and the Atlantic promptly removed the post after receiving a wave of backlash. 

 And this brings me to the point that got me onto this topic in the first place. In a story over on gawker.com, with a headline of The Atlantic Is Now Publishing Bizarre, Blatant Scientology Propaganda as ‘Sponsored Content’, Taylor Berman wrote

The Atlantic –- the one time publisher of Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edith Wharton –- is now publishing Scientology propaganda. The "sponsored content", bought and paid for by the Church of Scientology, went up Monday around noon and features all sorts of breathless praise for Scientology and its alleged growth last year.
 
The post—an example of the kind of advertising many publishers are turning to as display ad revenue stagnates—is basically one long tribute to David Miscavige, the "ecclesiastical leader of the Scientology religion":

 And here, Berman provides a quote from the sponsored article in The Atlantic:

Mr. Miscavige is unrelenting in his work for millions of parishioners and the cities served by Scientology Churches. He has led a renaissance for the religion itself, while driving worldwide programs to serve communities through Church-sponsored social and humanitarian initiatives.

Berman goes on to note that the article focues "on Miscavige's plans to expand the religion's already existing churches" and adds another quote from The Atlantic:

David Miscavige spearheaded a program to build every Church of Scientology into what Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard termed "Ideal Organizations" (Ideal Orgs). This new breed of Church is ideal in location, design, quality of religious services and social betterment programs. Each is uniquely configured to accommodate the full array of Scientology services for both parishioners and the surrounding community. Ideal Orgs further house extensive public information multimedia displays that introduce every facet of Dianetics and Scientology, along with libraries, course and seminar rooms for an introduction to and study of Scientology Scripture. Chapels serve to host Sunday Services and other congregational gatherings.

It is from these Ideal Churches that Scientologists extend their humanitarian programs to mitigate intolerance, illiteracy, immorality and drug abuse.

And Berman then adds

The post then lists the "unprecedented 12 Ideal Scientology Churches" built around the world last year, including locations in Germany, California, Italy and Israel, with accompanying pictures of each opening's celebration.

And let's not forget the comments. Of the 17 comments posted as of this writing, 11 are so pro-Scientology they read as though they're an extension of the original post. A bold, proud day for The Atlantic and its fine history of journalistic excellence.

Well, it is not surprising that The Atlantic removed the piece, given this sort of scathing criticism. Berman's critique ends with the following update:

The Atlantic took down the post, writing: "We have temporarily suspended this advertising campaign pending a review of our policies that govern sponsor content and subsequent comment threads."

In a story that appeared in Business Insider, Jim Edwards explains

A lot of magazines sell sponsored content to advertisers. (Business Insider has several sponsored content series running right now, for instance.) The usual rule is that such stories must be clearly labeled so that readers can see whether editorial may have been influenced by advertisers. Normally, however, both the publisher and the advertiser try to make the content credible or useful in some way, because readers can spot blatant propaganda a mile away -- and that's of no use to anyone.

Blatant propaganda, however, is exactly what The Atlantic appears to have published. The article, titled "David Miscavige Leads Scientology to Milestone Year," was an encomium to the the "ecclesiastical" leader of the church and his many accomplishments (which mostly include buying old buildings and turning them into new churches, according to the article).

The Atlantic is a highbrow magazine known for it famous writers and agenda-shaping journalism. This, decidedly, was not it.

So now for the good part. A journalist by the name of Mike Daly writes for an online news site by the name of Adotas, described as where interactive advertising begins, and Mike's bio goes like this:

Mike Daly is an award-winning writer and editor with nearly 30 years of experience in publishing. He began his career in 1983 at The News of Paterson, N.J., a long-since defunct daily paper, where at age 22 he was promoted to the position of Editorial Page Editor. Since then he has served in managerial capacities with several news organizations, including Arts Weekly Inc. and North Jersey Media Group in New Jersey and Examiner Media in New York. His work has been honored on numerous occasions by the New Jersey Press Association and the Society for Professional Journalists.

So he's the real deal.  And Daly does a feature on Adotas called Today's Burning Question, and on January 18th the burning question was, "What can be learned from The Atlantic’s Scientology Sponsored Story debacle?" He then collects answers from industry contacts, which in this case includes

• Ari Brandt, CEO of MediaBrix 
• Dave Martin, SVP, Media at Ignited 
• Ari Jacoby, CEO of Solve Media 
• Richard Spalding, CEO, The 7th Chamber 
• Laney Whitcanack, EVP of Conversational Marketing at Federated Media Publishing 
• David E. Johnson, CEO, Strategic Vision, LLC 
• and me

And if you want to read all of the replies, especially of these other folks, by all means, go check it out over at Adotas, under the heading of Today’s Burning Question: The Atlantic’s Sponsored Scientology Story Debacle.  But for my quote alone, well, you know it's gotta make an appearance here on Blog Time Passing:

“The Atlantic’s embarrassed retraction of sponsored content serves as a reminder that the established ways of doing business for traditional media industries are no longer working. When print media dominated, it was easy to specialize and compartmentalize content and operations, leading to the journalistic ideal of strict separation between advertising and news, and more generally between financial considerations and editorial judgment, often invoked metaphorically as “church and state”. The public relations industry sought to scale the walls by providing ready-made content for news media, for example in the form of press releases, but this content was typically offered free of charge and taken up by news media free of charge. For this reason, public relations professionals were previously viewed with great suspicion by journalists and advertisers alike, but today emerge as having superior ethics overall than many news and advertising professionals. As electronic media came to dominate the culture, beginning with broadcasting, but more fully with the Internet, we’ve seen the boundaries between different types of content blurring in many different areas, such as docudrama, edutainment, infomercials, advertorials, and product placement in motion pictures and television programming. And online, the boundaries grow even fuzzier, as it is often not clear whether the source of a particular blog or YouTube video is a private individual, organization, or business. Digital technologies have presented new challenges to advertising that have led to efforts to break out of the compartment of a labeled advertisement, as it becomes easier and easier for audiences to ignore that type of content, while the same technologies have severely undermined the business model of periodicals such as The Atlantic, so both of these traditional media industries are struggling financially, and sponsored content must seem like a marriage made in heaven. What they failed to take into account is that in the electronic media environment, there are intrinsic values that differ from those of the print media environment. Print media favored content, facts, logical structure and organization. Electronic media favor transparency, honesty, self-disclosure, and a sense of genuineness in the presentation of real personality and appearance. Much of what is valued in the electronic media environment was missing in the way that The Atlantic presented Scientology’s sponsored content, and so the content and the sources were immediately rejected and ridiculed by audiences, and this can have a negative effect on the reputations of the magazine, and possibly the sponsor as well.” — Dr. Lance Strate, Professor of Communication and Media Studies and Director of the Professional Studies in New Media program at Fordham University.

Now, that is rather long winded, I must admit, and it is the longest of the responses. How it stacks up to the others I leave up to you to judge. One thing is certain, however, and that is that the science of sponsored content has a long way to go yet before it reaches a state of sanity, and that the new media environment is very unforgiving of maps that mislead us about the territory they are supposed to represent.

An i for an Eye

I have been fascinated with the development of augmented reality technology (see, for example, my previous post, The New Hyperreality ), and believe that it will play an increasingly more important role for the future of new media. Here's a video from a news report that I haven't included in any previous post. It's a few years old now, but gets across the basic idea:



And yes, I agree with this report, it seems quite clear to me that hands-free is the most effective mode for using AR, rather than looking through your cell phone's camera, just as we tend to favor bluetooth headphones or ear pieces over holding the phone up to your ear. So this suggests AR goggles will be very big at some point in the near future. Now, here is Nokia's projection of a future development of a hand's free visual display, Nokia future vision:



The eyewear is a substitute for a screen in this instance, as opposed to at true form of AR where the actual world we're looking at is augmented by electronic data. A more complete picture is presented in Google's vision for the future, called Project Glass: One Day...:



And here's the write-up  on it:

We believe technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don't.

A team within our Google[x] group started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.

Follow along with us at http://g.co/projectglass as we share some of our ideas and stories. We'd love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?

Now here's one of their follow-up videos, Project Glass: Skydiving Demo at Google I/O 2012:



To be honest, I can't imagine going skydiving myself, and this seems somewhat less ambitious than the previous video, simply a matter of adding a video camera to the glasses to record whatever it is you're looking at. This also seems to be the case for this other video from Google, Glass Session: Madame & Bébé Gayno:



Using the glasses for a live streaming video chat, specifically a Google Hangout, adds something new to the mix, admittedly, and makes sense in this context. But for a regular video call, such as you might do via Skype, I guess you'd have to look in the mirror, a technique used in this next video, DVF [through Glass]:



 You can see that, in this case, the glasses provided raw footage which was later edited. Here's the write-up:

Experience the DVF Spring 2013 show at New York Fashion Week through the eyes of the people who made it happen—the stylists, the models and Diane von Furstenberg herself. All the footage you see here was filmed using only Glass, Google's latest technology that lets you capture moments from a unique, new perspective. See what happens when fashion and technology come together like you've never seen before.

So, yeah, it all seems pretty cool, especially if you want to document your life, an idea that began with written diaries during the print era, became increasingly more visual with the addition of photography, especially as cameras were made increasingly more accessible and portable, and continued with the introduction of home movies, home video cameras, and now blogging, tweeting, social media profiles, status updates, Instagram and the like. So this is just one more step in creating a complete record of everything we say and do, and see.

But this is a far cry for the AR depicted in the first video, and that's because those much more sophisticated Google glasses are just an idea for now, and the video does not depict an actual technology.  But here's one that's much closer to realization, iOptik - a glimpse into the future -vers 1.1:



And here's their write-up:

Innovega's wearable transparent heads-up display, enabled by iOptik contact lens technology, delivers mega-pixel content with a panoramic field-of-view. This high-performance and stylish eyewear is perfectly suited for the enjoyment of immersive personal media. The first part of the video is a CGI compilation provided by CONNECT, San Diego and the second part is actual footage through our system.

One big problem that none of the videos I've included here so far makes clear is that there are limitations to what the human eye can focus on at very close range, so it may not be possible to simply have AR glasses that work in the way depicted. Remember that with AR on mobile devices, the devices are held at a much farther distance from the eye than glasses are.  This is a key point that Evan Ackerman discusses in an article on the DVICE website.  And according to Ackerman,

The way Innovega gets around this problem is by modifying your eyeballs to focus much, much closer. Innovega has developed a special contact lens called iOptik that is completely transparent, except that it can refocus polarized light (like the light from a display) so that you have no problems seeing it. And it's not an either-or thing: with the contact lenses in, the world looks completely normal, except that you can suddenly see a high resolution display that's projected on a pair of glasses, superimposed transparently across up to 120 degrees of your field of view.

Ackerman also notes that while Google glasses have a long way to go, Innovega's innovation may be ready roll out later this year. For a more technical explanation, here's Randall Sprague, CTO of Innovega, in a video called I Can See for Inches and Miles:



As well, this iOptikCameraDemo video provides a somewhat dry, technical, but revealing demonstration of the technology as it interacts with human vision:



What's also quite interesting are the markets listed by Innovega for its optical technology. They include augmented reality, of course, interfacing with mobile devices, and immersive video and 3D gaming, and also simulation and training, which makes sense. What may give some folks pause is that their list of markets also includes "defense and covert operations" and "field operations for warfighters," but if you think about it, this should not be surprising, as all of new media, and communication technologies in general, have military applications. What is quite valuable in human terms, especially given our longer lifespans and aging population, is the market for low vision. This technology will be a great boon for those suffering from Macular degeneration, and similar problems.

One further question comes to mind, from a media ecology angle. McLuhan argues that changing the way we use our senses changes our sensibility, our thought processes, and ultimately our culture and social organization. And recent research backs him up by showing that reading, along with other types of media, actually rewire the brain. So how will this new technology affect our sense ratios, the balance of our senses, and our outlook on the world, individually and collectively? This could be the most radical shift in vision since the introduction of reading itself!

Machine Gun Moloch

In a post back in June, Robert Priest, Dr. Poetry, and the Viral Verbal Vortex, I wrote about my friend Robert Priest, a poet and musician, and shared an essay I wrote about him for the online poetry and creative writing journal/magazine, Big Bridge, which was also entitled, "Robert Priest, Dr. Poetry, and the Viral Verbal Vortex". And in the essay, I included some discussion of his meme splices or meme switches, a technique he employs where he switches out similar sounding words in a series of familiar phrases and sayings, so that substituting splice for spice yields, "the splice of life," "the splice garden," and "the splice trade," for example. It's a great technique for poetry, humor, and also what in general semantics is referred to as consciousness of abstracting—in this instance by substituting one word for another, it makes us more aware and more critical of the meanings we attribute to the words we use.

And readers of Blog Time Passing are no doubt quite familiar with my views on gun violence and the second amendment by now. If not, or if you're in need of a refresher course, you can go back and read the following posts: You can start with What to Blame for the Colorado Shooting? from this past July, in response the Aurora movie theater shooting. And I shared a poem on the topic the following month, Second Amen Dementia. And then, in December, reacting to the unspeakable horror of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, I posted On Guns and More, followed by Human Sacrifice and the False Idol of Firearms.  And in that last post, I included commentary from Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie on how gun worship is blasphemy, and from a leading Roman Catholic intellectual, on how guns have become the new, American Moloch (Moloch being the most despised of false gods in the bible, because his worshipers required that children be thrown into the fire as sacrifices to him).

And so, it occurred to me to apply Robert Priest's technique to the terms gun and god, as another way to express the idea that idolatry and blasphemy is alive and well in America, in the form of gun worship.  I posted the result on my poetry blog over on MySpace last month, and I thought I would share it here as well. I will leave you with this poem, rather than try to add some final concluding words to this post, as I feel that at the end of this piece, there really is nothing more to be said.

Machine Gun Moloch (A Meme Splice)

I am the Lord, thy Gun
I, the Lord thy Gun, am a jealous Gun
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy Gun in vain
There is no Gun but Gun
To the greater glory of Gun!
In Gun we trust
Gun bless you
Gun is everywhere
You cannot hide from Gun
Do you believe in Gun?
Have faith in Gun
Praise be to Gun
Gun's will be done
Have you found Gun?
Pray to the almighty Gun
Our Gun and Gun of our fathers
May Gun bless you and keep you
May the face of Gun smile upon you
As Gun is my witness
It was an act of Gun
Gun damn you!
We are assured of victory for we have Gun on our side
He just thinks he's Gun's gift to us
Oh my Gun!
Have you heard Gun's voice?
Gun is our help and our savior
The law of Gun
Gun does not give you anything you cannot handle
Your arm's too short to box with Gun
Gun speaks to us
Gun wants us to worship Him
Gun demands our obedience
Give thanks to Gun
Can you feel the presence of Gun?
Walk with Gun
There but for the grace of Gun go I
Submit to Gun's judgment
Stand before Gun
Kneel before Gun
Approach Gun's altar
Know Gun's peace
Gun is just
Gun is love
Swear to Gun
So help me Gun!
It's in the hands of Gun
Await the kingdom of Gun
Gun willing!
For Gun's sake!
Honest to Gun!
Dear Gun!
Gun is a circle whose center is everywhere
If Gun did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him
I believe in Gun even when He is silent
Man plans, Gun laughs
Oh for the love of Gun!
You must fight for your Gun-given rights
This will put the fear of Gun into you!
Why Gun? Why me?
One nation, under Gun