media: January 2007 Archives

I received many of these photos of daily life in Tehran in an email last fall.

Whatever our political-economic competition, I resist the path to war. Religious difference is an excuse, a justification, mere rationalization cloaked in moral self-righteousness. To alter the apparent inevitability of another war, we - as "a people" - must begin to create new bases for the global economy. It is up to us to shift the PPF from guns to butter.

The Production Possibility Frontier is a graph of the most efficient way an economy can produce goods and provide services. In a recent college classroom, the basic benchline diagram (at the macroecnomic level, such as global and national economies) is plotted between military expenditures ("guns") and domestic expenditures ("butter"). Interestingly, the links I'm finding with a general google search for "production possibility frontier" on the Internet give the example of two domestic products. What a subtle convenience! Let's just pretend that only the domestic matters! This is what drives consumerism - if we spend, the economy will grow. However, this is only half the equation, or - more realistically - less than half. "Wine" and "bread" is the (everyday living domestic) part that is currently dependent on the other, on the "guns" and bombs and armored uniforms and tanks and military expenditures generated ad nauseum when the US goes to war.

There are more roads to peace than there are to war. We must find the will to choose them.

"In his novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson uses the term [actually a name from mythology] Nam-shub to indicate a self-replicating meme." I am truly enjoying this novel. The plot involves a neurolinguistic virus - language that causes physical changes to brain cells: a radical version of the co-construction of meaning.

At the root of this tale's "philosophy of language" is binary code (computer programming is all done in 1's and 0's). Stephenson plays the mind-as-computer analogy to the extreme, suggesting that the insertion of a certain meme (Enki's nam-shub) into language altered cognitive functioning. In other words, that this "speech with magical force" (p. 211) introduced a disease into human thinking. Maximizing complexity, the argument Stephenson presents is that religious belief is the carrier of this disease.

So, what is a meme? The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (The Selfish Gene): "A unit of cultural information that represents a basic idea that can be transferred from one individual to another, and subjected to MUTATION, CROSSOVER, and ADAPTATION" (Glossary based on Flake); a "viral encapsulated idea, with built-in feedback loop" (adapted from "a broad theoretical model of human communication, which [Weaver] defined as 'all of the ways by which one mind may affect another'; premised upon Shannon's foundation of "electronic signal transmission and the quantitative measurement of information flows"; and (originally) "a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation); 'memes are the cultural counterpart of genes'" (Princeton WordNet).

Dawkins' original definition (focused at the level of the gene) has been expanded to apply to a wide range of cultural phenomena, including a particular use in blogging. I have to challenge the deliberateness of someone "post[ing] memes on a daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis" because it implies a guarantee that whatever is posted will be picked up. As I understand Dawkin's sense, what makes a meme a meme is precisely its operation at a level "below" or "pre" consciousness - at the genetic level. The question might be the extent to which such changes can be (if ever?) intentionally co-constructed through increasing attention to consciousness at the level of, say, the synaptic connections of the brain's neural net.

Watched The Last King of Scotland last night. Strong Minor Bridge thought it was a mild depiction of the horrors Idi Amin wrought on his country in a mere nine years, enough to rank him with Stalin, Lenin, and Pol Pot as the worst dictators of all time. As a character study, I wondered about the historicity of the role of the Doctor as the foil for showing Amin's volatile and manipulative nature. The character of Dr. Nicholas Garrigan in the film is a fiction, however there was a real "white rat" (as opposed to the "white monkey" Garrigan is labeled in the film), Bob Astles.

While there is no doubt that Forest Whitaker is brilliant as Amin (absolutely creepy), I was intrigued by the portrayal by James McAvoy of a young, naive, and very "white" Dr. Garrigan. What is that element in human character that is so prone to worship, so heedless of cautionary warnings, so bent on idealistic vision that hard evidence fails to convey meaning? How frightening to be pulled so far "in" as to be unable to escape, yet how consequential. The lines concerning racism in the film are compelling: all of them point to the power of "whiteness" as an unconscious (in Garrigan) and deliberative (as experienced through the lens of "blackness" or "Africanness") force.

Coming in March to a PBS station near you:

Quoted in full from an email by the Justice for All moderator and passed along...thanks!

PBS Documentary Explores 200 Years of Deaf Life in America

"Through Deaf Eyes," a two-hour PBS documentary exploring nearly
200 years of Deaf life in America, will air early next year. The
film was inspired by the exhibition, "History Through Deaf Eyes,"
curated by Jack R. Gannon of Gallaudet University.

The documentary will air nationally on PBS on Wednesday, March 21
at 9 p.m. ET (check local listings).

The film presents the shared experiences of American history
family life, education, work, and community connections - from the
perspective of deaf citizens. Interviews include community
leaders, historians, and deaf Americans with diverse views on
language use, technology and identity.

Bringing a Deaf cinematic lens to the film are six artistic works
by Deaf media artists and filmmakers: Wayne Betts, Renee Visco,
Tracey Salaway, Kimby Caplan, Arthur Luhn, and Adrean Mangiardi.

Poignant, sometimes humorous, these films draw on the media
artists' own lives and are woven throughout the documentary. But
the core of the film remains the larger story of Deaf life in
America -- a story of conflicts, prejudice and affirmation that
reaches the heart of what it means to be human.

Major funding for "Through Deaf Eyes" is provided by the National
Endowment for the Humanities, Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
PBS, The Annenberg Foundation and the National Endowment for the
Arts. Private individuals have also contributed to the funding of
this project. The extensive outreach campaign is funded in part
by Sign Language Associates. Outreach partners are the National
Association for the Deaf, Gallaudet University, the National
Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of
Technology, and California State University-Northridge. As part
of the outreach campaign, numerous local organizations, some in
association with their public television stations, will mount
events and discussions exploring the issues raised in the film.

A comprehensive Web site, found at http://www.pbs.org,
accompanies the film. The site includes interviews with the deaf
filmmakers whose work is featured in the documentary, while also
inviting viewers to submit their own stories, photographs, and
films. These will become part of the archival collection of
Gallaudet University. A companion book is being published by
Gallaudet University Press.

Source: PBS
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/soundandfury/culture/deafhistory.html

This sentiment haunts The Jacket, a film about consciousness. Although no plausible physical mechanism is provided for time travel, we witness the lead character adapt proactively to the most improbable scenario: discovering himself in a future timespace in which he has already died. Instead of engaging a futile struggle to avoid what has been foreordained, Jack uses the forays into the future to identify, strategize, and act to change elements in his present that influence the unfolding of time for others. The physical fact of his own death cannot be undetermined, but the trajectories of others’ lives might be shifted just enough to lead to (at least potentially) more satisfactory, less painful unfoldings.

“I know the difference between reality and delusion,” Jack asserts. “I’m not delusional, the real events that have happened to me are crazy.” ("Quote" based on memory.)

The craziness of real events is a theme in the other film I saw last week, Children of Men. Although it seems too far-fetched to be believed that all women might become infertile more-or-less simultaneously, that “reality” serves as the backdrop for the dissolution of society in the face of events too dramatic (apparently) to be managed on the human scale. While viewing the movie, which depicts an escalation of immigrant-baiting and an intensifying police state in England, I kept thinking about institutional and interactional fallout from global warming. Given the existing gaps among socioeconomic classes – globally (between countries and regions) as well as internal to national populations – the spread of anomie seems quite likely. Such chaos can conceivably be countered by cumulative acts of individual and collective consciousness such as that demonstrated by Jack as he moves between wearing and not wearing the jacket, back-and-forth in timespace, discovering a way to maintain the continuity of his be-ing.

The combined image of possibility presented by juxtaposing the two movies reminds me of Shemaya, who recently gave me her take on global warming. “It’s dramatic change,” she said, “just like disability. You’re going along, having your life, and suddenly things change drastically.” Dramatic change requires adaptation and issues of survival. I agree with the parallel of the microsocial experience of disability with the macrosocial event of weather-disrupted institutional systems; the distinction of scale seems relevant. The challenges that confront the newly disabled to retain, maintain, and reconstruct a social world fit to live in are magnified by the scale of cooperation required to shift major global societal flows.

As I’m going about formulating a frame for my dissertation research, it becomes clearer that it matters where I draw the line between what will be “in” the project and what must remain “outside” of it. I always knew this, but the difference now, perhaps, is a better sense (?) of what is do-able, particularly in terms of promising an outcome. I don’t mean predicting a particular or specific result, because I do not know, now, the answers to my research problem. I do mean guaranteeing with some assurance that the problem is significant and the results of rigorous examination will be worthwhile and beneficial to the narrow field of language and interpretation studies as well as to (I hope) a broader social science. But I cannot say how the leap from the subfield of interpretation to larger fields will occur. Probably there are several possibilities. I don’t want to foreclose some by too close an interest in others. I cannot see any of them; I only intuit that the connections will become evident.

That penultimate goal must wait. I have been learning a different kind of trust the past few years and I must continue to exercise it. My mind is quick on a few things (sometimes too much so), medium with most, and just plain slow with others. Within my consciousness, a vague sense of understanding floats around definitive knowledge for a long time before it suddenly congeals into sharp coherency. Formulating the kernel of research into the institutionalization of interpretation and language processes has been like this: I've written nearly a dozen papers seeking clarity, all of them “promising” but insufficient. Then, last week, while taking notes of a lecture by my (!) cultural codes instructor, a foundational structure leapt into view. I apprehended what my intuition has been telling me lo-these-past three years.

My interest in epistemology (how we come to know what we know), cognition (more precisely, neuroscience), and perception (haphazardly categorized as “phenomenology”) suggests to me that understanding the productive effects of discourses might influence particular, relational communication choices. I’m going to have to wean myself away from the popular science literature elucidating what specializations have come to accept as knowledge. I resist, for just awhile longer. For now I relish the odd sensation of perceiving new synapses making new connections. There have been several specific time periods throughout doctoral coursework when I’ve experienced understanding snapping into view – ”Aha! – in a cascading sequence of minor revelations. ”No wonder,” I sometimes think, “some of my colleagues think I’m such a dweeb!” :-)

I'm observing a colleague teaching Cultural Codes of Communication. Homework for the first night included reading James Carey (foundational) and a series of questions, including what might be of interest for students to explore in this course. I've already snatched a quote from the Carey article for teaching this spring (!), and my brain is in high gear concerning my prospectus. Wow. Did I intuit that observing this class would provide some structure and motivation?! :-)

I've also got the blog on my mind. As a mechanism for transmission - it (I) seek to disseminate information, but not really. I've always hoped it would be more dialogic than monologic. It is true that through the blog, I organize certain symbols in a more-or-less personal attempt to impose order on my experiences. Blogging has become - for me - a ritual that positions me to/with the world in a certain way. I've noted several times over the past year or so that a function of writing publicly as I do is to write myself into being. By projecting a certain performance of self, of identity, into the public sphere (invoking accountability among other things), the effect doubles back, enabling me to better live up to the ideals I espouse.

It isn't as simple as that, though. The words I write, the symbols I use, become me - rather, I become the sign of the words (see p. 12, referencing Burke). Carey says, "We first produce the world by symbolic work and then take up residence in the world we have produced" (p. 16).

Finally, I better understand some of the unease about my blogging "real life" (as perceived, experienced, and interpreted by me), because my writing establishes a context which also positions those whom I mention in particular roles or even identities. It may be a matter of establishing a "history of order" on a minute, microsocial scale. For years, colleagues and I have debated the way my blogging "endow[s] significance, order, and meaning in the world by the agency of [my] own intellectual processes" (Carey, 13). We (or at least I) was confused with the positioning of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. into roles relative to "the blog": of being readers, nonreaders, commenters, noncommenters, advocates, and/or adversaries. That was a limited view.

I keep recalling a friend who said, "If I don't read it, it's not there."

I am thinking, at this moment, that much of this kind of framing is with the transmission model of communication uppermost in mind. Surely I am taken with the ability to transmit my words across spacetime. Maybe the tension could be better explained through an overlay of the ritual lens? The transmission model is premised upon control as the goal of communication: control over distance and control over people. I resist the accusation of power-mongering, but ritually....what sharedness is at risk?

...but it is happening somewhere. Look carefully at the poster.

What is "it"?

To see more images, go to http://www.walker.ag, pick your language, then "work", then Amnesty International. There are posters in China, Iraq, Liberia, Myanmar, and Sudan.

Shared via email from David, thanks.