THE STATE OF THE ART
by Bobby Campbell
updated 2/22/08
Blue text belong to Marshall McLuhan.
I think of a medium's bias as having two major properties:
A.) How the structure of the interface determines what kinds of information may or may not get included in the message.
B.) How the activity of engaging w/ the medium impacts the human nervous system.
Additionally... It makes a case for value neutrality.
I think the more we understand about a media's bias the more we can begin to account for its distortive effects.
Also, considering media as extensions of the senses, any understanding of media bias feeds back into our understanding of our own perceptive faculties, (our understanding of our own understanding!?!) a strange loop indeed!
I find evaluating info in terms of the medium's bias makes for a more active, conscious process, and such ATTENTION can help invalidate bullshit. (Unnecessary conclusions, w/ or w/out vested interests embedded therein.)
A META-METAPHOR
T: TRUE
X: FALSE
A: MAYBE
From different POVs the object/idea can appear to take on each quality/shape, but each evaluation condenses the object/idea from 4 dimensions to 2. THE MENU IS NOT THE MEAL! Helps me to remember Nagarjuna's idea of Linguistic Closure, all words only refer to other words and not to the actual phenomenological processes.
I think coercive programming works to limit hyperspace to flatland, this sigil resists such reduction.
We certainly change due to our info technologies, though to qualify these changes as beneficial or detrimental wouldn't we need to know where the process will takes us? and what we could accomplish without it? All of this seems so very IN PROGRESS to me, "up for grabs" I feel very enthusiastic about technology, but not because I think it has inherent virtues, but because its what I have to work with.
Though just because we hold an issue as indeterminate doesn't mean we can't consider degrees of probability, and react accordingly.
Currently I can only hack existing code, I don't know how to build it from scratch yet, So when I look to externalize an idea I have to work w/ existing material, so I see a finite resource environment. The adept programmer on the other hand has this option of directly externalizing their interior process, so maybe they see an infinite resource environment?
I like that line about invisible environments: "We don't know who discovered water, but we're pretty sure it wasn't a fish"
Users are limited to the tools already available, and if their ideas extend beyond the currently possible, what can they do?
The programmer has the ability to make new things possible, they can offer design solutions to problems which can fundamentally alter the situation.
Though I don't think this applies to computer programmers exclusively, the resource environment seems to have MANY levels, and I should like to imagine a multiplicity of infinity!
I think that there is a technology of implementation as well as implement.
And maybe if we don't understand the possibilities of what we could say, then we also don't understand sufficiently what we already do say. Modeling the medium as the message, when we use prefabricated methods of communication (for example) do we unconsciously affirm Homogenization?? and if so, so what and so on, etc.
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say."
Problem solving via design solutions requires attention on current resources/processes, which is used to make a new situation directly, don't believe the future until you see it!
"when something is current it creates currancy"
So maybe currency acts as the social interface? A medium through which our functions and assets get translated into compatible but unequal access to system resources. Access to these resources gets restricted because supposedly demand exceeds supply, and this model of scarcity (perhaps a left over bias of primitive commodity money?) acts as a self fulfilling prophecy, because those with insufficient access to resources atrophy and the system as a whole experiences a balkanization of productivity. and this doesn't really work for anyone I don't think, when the building burns what advantage does the penthouse have?
I think also of RAW's idea that communication can only exist between equals, and that a ruling elite makes for an authoritative hierarchy wherein the exchange of information becomes qualified by the consequence of displeasing those above you. Deception proliferates, and the system malfuctions, Garbage in-Garbage Out.
The ethical problems of control makes for practical problems of dysfunction, and the practical problems of dysfunction makes for further iterations into ethical problems of control.
Right, but if we could adapt our method of exchange to reflect the holistic nature of our situation (using co-operation rather than competition) We may not only find sustainability, but abundance, PLENUM?
I don't at all know how something like that would emerge as a global, national, or even local phenomenon, but everyday I find it more applicable on a personal level.
I made a currency for Mr. Wilson in 2007, I offer it freely to all to enjoy, print, and/or whatever.
PRINT FRONT
PRINT BACK
RE: THE RABBIT ANALOGY
So, like, y'know how decentralized, unquantifiable, surplus production disrupts any commodifiable supply/demand ratio?
I think the parameters of self definition have changed and continue to change so rapidly that perhaps they have slipped out of our own control, but I don't think anyone else has gained control of the parameters, at this point I see them as running wild.
Not that we have become completely independent from institutional influence, but the relationship has certainly changed into a more free form, open situation. It just becomes easier and easier to make and distribute our own media (Active participation seems more galvanizing than passive consumption) Maybe we still imitate the established forms, but there's nothing stopping anyone from reinventing the forms of communication, we are only limited by our own creativity.
The ball is in our court, let us play.
I maintain a fairly buddhist notion of self, so would tend to agree that it seems like a primarily artificial construction to me.
Nagarjuna's idea of Pratityasamutpada (Ontology as a whole-interdependently transforming, to overly simplify!) seems useful here. We adapt our conduct to match our surroundings and our surroundings change due to our conduct. Nargarjuna suggests we have no essential self, and defines our true nature as Sunyata, or Emptiness/void. This usually gets misunderstood as meaning we have no self at all, but more exactly he means that we have no self created essence, or to say it another way, we have no closed system absolute identity, but rather we have an Open System Self.
E-Prime helps this situation because it acknowledges the fluidity of the open system (I no longer AM, but rather DO) but it also maintains functional boundaries by positing realities in the plural. (It no longer IS to ALL, but SEEMS to ME)
I think that humans have an essentially selfless nature, but that inevitably we begin to play certain roles within the society, and that these roles shape our frame of reference into unique/narrow lenses with which we begin to identify. We repress our undifferentiated point of view so that we may better focus on our personal point of view. The illusory nature of the isolated ego often becomes apparent within the constant flux of circumstance, so self interest becomes increasingly necessary to maintain the charade.
This lack of immutable, sovereign identity seems very much what consumerism appeals to, the product offers to fill this void, to close the system, to define w/ certainty the boundary lines of self/other.
w/ the Freudian paradigm's process of conforming to established patterns of social behavior/values as the model of mental health, the consumption of mass produced products became a virtue! The self became material?
And when shifts like the human potential movement came about; the human desire for self expression and the new technologies of versatility in production came together to further ingrain the materialist situation. The self became even more deeply entrenched in definition via possession. As people began to identify themselves with the things they owned, they began to think of themselves as things, solid objects, material, nouns.
When solid objects encounter one another you get impact, friction, violence. This is how parts of a machine interact, force against force. Materialistic persons in a mechanistic universe!?! That seems like a rather controllable entity to me.
okay, but maybe if people identify themselves w/ what they do, with what processes they interact, they may think of themselves as infinite potential, as hyperspatial verbs, as mystery itself.
When we make open source contact, perhaps the yield of such synergetic exchange is the INFO plenum, and you'll see it written everywhere around the MLA: INFO=SURPRISE, how can anyone control our actions if they can't predict them?
I don't know any "stupid" people, I know people who have adapted to different environments and different cultural situations, some in ways so different from my own that I don't understand their actions, but I think if there is even a way forward at all, we may have to try assuming everyone has worth while intelligence and perspective on the total situation.
Okay and so there's that whole deal about how The Global Village really means that electronic media are devolving our sense ratios such that the whole planet is reverting to tribalism, and hence vulnerable to totalitarian rule. I think if nothing else the web has changed that situation by allowing public access to the means of simultaneous resonance. Isn't the tendency to bow and submit to the larger than life powers/icons/gods diluted when everyone has access to their realm of influence?
Mcluhan also had this idea that since we had entirely surrounded the planet with satellites we had enclosed Earth within a digital envelope, thereby eradicating nature!? Our world had become the contents of an artwork, our environment now consisted of information, and nature now needed to be programmed.
So, yeah, I'll play that hand, that mediated coercion may operate ubiquitously. (Though I don't think there's a central organization in control of this process; pratityasamutpada!)
Who coercies the coercers?
Though the best/worst of these cats may live up on high, they do not live in a vacuum, they too live within the proscenium arch of the satellite environment. If we're modeling this situation as US/THEM, then I say WE can control THEM as much as THEY control US. (and WE're all coercers...)
"US & THEM" OR JUST "US" LIKE WAVE/PARTICLE DUALITY
I think the myth of the people as helpless victims and powerless rubes under the jackboot of the mighty corporations plays right into the hands of those who WISH it was so.
I think that the military-industrial-corporate complex's attempt to co-opt any implement of resistance is ultimately/eventually what could initiate appropriate social transformation. They will use any medium that gets fed to them, they will use this medium to spread their propaganda, their arbitrary messages, as the medium itself transforms the invisible landscape.
As they embrace internet, so too do they embrace the decentralization of control and communication, that's the bias of the internet as I see it, and they're going for it.
It's like JAWS, that goddamn shark will eat anything, a barrel of explosive substance? chomp! "smile you sonuvabitch!"
Okay and say internet doesn't do it, the basic idea that we have access to influence the superstructure remains. We just need the right trogan horse.
If the culture is too diverse and complex for the fascists to unify and control, the hyperreality of the spectacle may crumble under the weight of its own inauthenticity, I don't think the spectacle can be maintained indefinitely, the light of day is peaking through the peoples' dissatisfaction w/ the charade. Prepare for social CONTACT!
Anarchy seems more likely than fascism to me.
Can brand sigils get hijacked?
Thinking of the organic nature of memetic diffusion, the ideas these brands encapsulate may develop in unexpected ways given sufficient environmental stress. These logos have formed overwhelming communicative pathways through the MEDIASPHERE, if these pathways can't be removed, can they be reprogrammed and used towards human purposes, towards livingry?
Joyce left the apostrophe out of Finnegans Wake so as to make it into a statement, though more specifically a warning to the ruling class that in every cultural cycle the oppressed people rise up.
Building towards a 'perfect' society will probably always be an insidious situation, but building towards an open society might be kinda fun. Maybe the whole world has become a market place, a store, but maybe the customer is always right? Just speculation based on my own anecdotal experiences, Could I do any less!?! I doubt my own reality tunnel as much as anyone else's, though I experience it sincerely, and share it likewise.
Neuromarketing, eh? I dunno, I think they might be grasping at straws. Just because they can stimulate targeted areas of the brain, doesn't give them control over what kind of activity arises. I get the idea that marketing is moving into this area, not because they think it will be a great success, but because their current strategies are starting to fail.
Marketing seems to depend on a mechanistic paradigm, upon which I do think the sky is falling. Only maybe, but what if!?
I have a pronoiac fantasy about marketers over stimulating the reptilian brain: it may provoke a more conscious apprehension of its functioning, like how information overload is supposed to provoke pattern recognition, or why you don't go to the well too many times. Adaptation!
Stimulation on the subliminal level maybe tuning/shifting sense ratios to a subtler frequency.
There's this passage from the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses that fits in here in a strange kind of way. And that Leopold Bloom was a freelance ad salesman, a persuader!
"What were habitually his final meditations? Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life."
Mcluhan on Joyce (as read by Mckenna)
As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious. The means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias is his "collideorscope". This term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components of human technology as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash: "deor", savage, the oral or sacral; "scope" the visual or profane and civilized."
Reality Tunnel Simulation!
I don't think we could calibrate an orientation that would work in every situation, except maybe something in the abstract like Confucius' Unwavering Axis/Unwobbling Pivot or Buddha's Immovable Spot, right umm... y'know like how fortune points to the rim (enantiodromia)& wisdom points to the hub?(sunyata) Similar to Nietzsche's line about a wheel rolling out of its own center. That's not very clear! Oh well.
What I mean about incorporating reservations into our actions involves subrating through whatever surface issues have got our goat, and problem solving on a subtler scale. Some people think Global Warming is the biggest threat, some people think Corportism is, or the War on Terror, or the Economy, or whatever. I think we should doubt the specific and work on the general, more birds w/ less stones, I'm saying.
You think my fallacy is all wrong!?
Well, what I mean about doubting the specific involves not getting caught up in one specific problem at the expense of the others, and trying to find solutions that have applications across a wider range of issues. I don't mean anything like that researchers or involved activists should stop doing their thing, but just to consider that they may be treating the symptom and not the disease, and to then spare a thought to the nature of the disease.
basically, I don't mean ignore the specific problems, but notice how isomorphic they are!! They all seem to involve the same basic dominance instead of cooperation disconnect. If we could address that, I'm saying again, lotsa birds fewer stones.
Content generated during Douglas Rushkoff's Technologies of Persuasion Class at The Maybe Logic Academy
EXPLAINING NOW MY EXPLANATIONS!
The alarm bell point (for me) about "JOHNNY" BEING UNABLE TO PROGRAM boils down to the idea that if the writers don't learn to program than the biases of this emerging meta-medium will remain invisible to them.
The resultant problems of this situation seem to be many and varied, I assume my take on it is a bit different than Prof Rushkoff's, but here's my try:
We're in the process of a paradigm shift from passive media consumption to active media production, BUT! This new paradigm will be as much a distortion of "reality" as the one before it, interface passivity will remain (the potential of the individual will remain finite), while the perfect prisoners think themselves free.
oh it's not that bad! but I do think accepting a new paradigm instead of NO paradigm is selling ourselves short.
- Along similar lines, I feel as though ideas develop in accordance w/ our capacity for expression, sort of like how a goldfish grows in proportion to the size of his fish bowl.
My words and images are only approximations of what I would actually like to communicate, though they are the best tools I have so I tend to develop ideas within their frame work, BUT! if I had recourse to a programming language I would have the ability to custom design a medium for the message and perhaps more directly externalize (and thereby intensify) the experience of my introception.
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