Results tagged “mcluhan” from Uncivil Society
Carrot Top holding a rabbit on the red carpet of a Las Vegas poker benefit--this quintessential icon of celebrity do-good culture comes from the camera of talented teen-age photographer Nick Leonard, who is using shots of scenes from his hometown to build a killer professional portfolio.
UPDATE: For more on poker & charity, check out Betting on Poker to Change the World.
An Iranian woman in Austin, Texas embodies the role of communications media in mobilizing protests against the hijacked election.
As fate would have it, I had to be out of town at the very time Amazon held its Kindle DX press conference at Pace University, where I happen to teach. Nonetheless, since such a high-profile media event took place right by my office, I figure I might as well jot down my initial thoughts here.
Of course, as per my disclaimer below, I probably should add that that any thoughts here aren't those of Pace etc. etc.--these are just the ramblings of the dork what writes this personal blog.As I noted to my social enterprise class, the arrangement that Amazon apparently has with its five universities--essentially to demo the larger Kindle as a textbook killer--reflects the symbiotic relationship between charities and commercial providers that has been the norm in recent years, particularly in such areas as higher education, health care and museums. The notion that higher education has fallen from an Edenic noncommercial purity may be an appealing myth, but from a historical standpoint it has been misleading since, oh, about the twelfth century.
From a legal perspective, arguably the most critical issue is for the universities signed on to the Kindle venture is that of retaining control over activities expressing their exempt educational purpose. Were Amazon, say, to start dictating textbook choice or the substance of the curriculum, the IRS might question whether a university is pursuing a substantial non-exempt purpose. Judging from what we've seen--and I know no more than what is available to the general public--that won't be the case, so one would expect few if any problems on the legal front.
Still, the relationship between Amazon and its partner universities is bound to raise questions, especially among academics from outside relatively more commercialized disciplines such as law and the natural sciences. Essentially what we have here are universities helping a single company to establish dominance in the market for educational texts.
There are analogues throughout the university--exclusive deals for soda machines and big box franchises running student bookstores--but this venture is more central to the academic enterprise. Given the realities of Amazon's usage policy and proprietary DRM, one could argue that the university's control over its curriculum would be illusory should the Kindle become the academic norm. It's one thing to force an academic community to choose Coke; quite another to create an environment where student must buy Kindles and professors are expected to assign books that are available in the Kindle format.
We can also expect questions as to the ethics and practicality of requiring students to buy an additional, not to mention branded, device in order to pursue their studies. Even with the academic discount that is likely to become available (extrapolating from the deals available from computer & software companies), the Kindle is in the price range of a netbook, low-end laptop, PS3 or an iPhone. As any number of other people have noted, the market is primed to be more receptive to electronic texts that can be viewed in media students already own or would like to have another reason to buy.
Finally, the Kindle venture is also interesting from the perspective of the history of the university as a medium for processing and transmitting information. It's tempting to classify those who favor the Kindle as on the cutting-edge while branding those who question it as hidebound traditionalists, but that would be a drastic oversimplification. In fact, one could argue that the Kindle itself embodies a traditional approach to electronic communications media.
As Marshall McLuhan observed, our initial impulse when dealing with a new medium is to recapitulate more familiar forms--for example, early TV transmitted stage plays and symphonies before developing rhetorical styles that expressed the television medium. At base, the Kindle does little more than replicate the textbook. Sure, the Kindle weighs less and does not cost as much as a many required texts, but that's it. The fundamental model is still one-sided and top-down: the authors write a text that students read.
That's not the environment in which today's students live and work. To be valued in the marketplace--and yes, to live a more meaningful life--students need to do more than read books. They have to become adept at finding useful information from a wide range of resources and communicating ideas in ways that are useful & engaging.
Perhaps a more cutting-edge approach than replicating the textbook would be to shift away from the model of students as information consumers. Instead, we could focus on helping students become more effective and compelling information producers. Rather than requiring students to buy a fixed text, we could focus on creating opportunities to collate resources and to write material that would in turn help future students learn.
In this environment, the professor relinquishes the industrial age mantle of hallowed authority to assist students in becoming professors themselves. By this I don't mean professors in the sense of the contemporary academic guild, but in the classical meaning of the word from which "professor" is derived--the Latin profiteor, "to speak forth." What university professors do is no longer the province of a privileged few; today everyone has the opportunity--and the responsibility--to gather, produce and transform information. The sooner we stop pretending that university professors have a monopoly on expertise, the better professors will be at fulfilling their new social role.
That said, I'm curious to see how this Amazon venture will play out. Among its other functions the university is a place for experimentation, and this is exactly the sort of thing we should try--especially if it means I get a free Kindle!
Here's what's got me thinking as I write through today. Video experiments--more fun ones, less serious--will continue, but since I'm going to be away tomorrow, probably not until next week.
From WWD, one designer's thought about closing shop amidst a recession:
In New Scientist, re what the brain does when we're not consciously processing information:
Randy Buckner, a former colleague of Raichle's now at Harvard, agrees. To him the evidence paints a picture of a brain system involved in the quintessential acts of daydreaming: mulling over past experiences and speculating about the future (New Scientist, 24 March 2007, p 36). "We're very good at imagining possible worlds and thinking about them," says Bucker. "This may be the brain network that helps us to do that."
Fossil evidence of a positive correlation between evolving women's hip size and brain size:
To accommodate big-brained babies, humans must have developed larger and wider birth canals over time, but with few pelvic fossils, researchers had little idea when these changes began. The Busidima pelvis shows that a wide birth canal was already in place 1.2 million years ago. It underscores the importance of developing large brains in early human evolution, Simpson says.
"The most successful individuals in these populations will have positive selection for brains and larger pelvises," he says. "Brain size is driving the whole system here."
New speech recognition software reads brainwaves:
Social enterprise suffers from a serious design flaw: it focuses attention on commerce as the defining trait of a medium ostensibly distinct from commercial values. The peak of a business cycle can mask this--business becomes associated with success, and the relative contrast between types of business helps maintain the integrity of the charitable form. But the economy crashes, the commercial elements become more distinct--the social entrepreneur seems preoccupied by profit, self-interest and the business practices that created the problems we now need to solve.
A sign of the cultural shift to which social entrepreneurs need to adapt: the resurgence of business as the villain in popular entertainment.
I'm still busy with things that keep me from sustained writing here or on Blog@ & JustMeans, but over lunch I did get a chance to read highlights from the latest issue of New Scientist. Social enterprise types will love the special feature on renewable energy--I've been wondering about the tech re harvesting tides, so I really liked that part--but my hands-down favorite article is Tools Maketh the Monkey. Not only does it illustrate how scientists have come around to McLuhan's core theory about technology as an extension of the self that alters our perception, but it describes contemporary experiments designed to foster a human sense of self-awareness in other primates. The video above illustrates where ape communication will inevitably lead; below, a key excerpt:
Iriki's unique perspective on the problem is that tool use was the catalyst for a much more important mental breakthrough, albeit one that took 1.8 million years to unfold: the emergence of a sense of self. By this he means the ability to conceptualise one's own existence in time, plan for the future and understand "intentionality" - your capacity to change your environment.
So how did tool use give rise to a sense of self? Iriki believes the starting point is the way tools induce a modification of body image - the basic mental representation of "self" that consists of knowing where the physical body ends and the environment begins. When we use tools such as hammers or tennis rackets, we integrate them into our body image; our brains treat them as a temporary extension of our hand or arm. To turn a stone or a stick into a tool, our ancestors would have to have done the same. This, Iriki argues, led to the gradual dawning of a sense of self more sophisticated than the basic body image, creating a new evolutionary force that rapidly ratcheted up intelligence. "Once you have a sense of self, you can intentionally control the environment, and that modified environment in turn puts selection pressure on your brain," Iriki says. He has dubbed this dynamic, two-way interaction between brain and environment "intentional niche construction", and argues that it is the missing link in the story of human evolution.
Sense of self was crucial for another reason: it allowed our ancestors to conceive of the existence of other selves, each with their own intentions. This is the essence of "theory of mind", which is what underpins our shared understanding and hence communication, language, society and culture.
Marshall McLuhan saw the comic image as the key to understanding modern communication.
The picture above: Neil Gaiman at MIT.
Via Journalista: A Swann Foundation/Library of Congress grant to promote comics scholarship.
And yet most academics outside the tech world think that comics are frivolous junk.
Which says more about the academy than comics, I think, but it's the sea in which I swim.
Or drown, depending on how you look at it.
Ah well. La Resistance lives on!
Just got back from the Watchmen screening at Time Warner. The movie really does seem to have waited until Zack Snyder could direct it--his play with time is ideal for this story, making the film as much a personal statement as an adaptation of someone else's book. The Q&A that followed the screening was equally engaging, particularly when it explored translating visual vocabulary across media and balancing multiple interests within a collective creation.
But, as always, what most engages me at events like this is meeting a bunch of interesting people. One thing that shone throughout the evening was the passion everyone felt for their work--Zack and Debbie Snyder, Paul Levitz, Dave Gibbons, the Time Warner archivists and the publicity team made the evening feel like much more than a promotional preview.
And that's exactly how such events should feel, because that sense of something more is exactly what art conveys.
Art Lebedev's Fuck The Rain umbrella takes McLuhan's media-as-an-extension-of-the-self to its logical extreme. The umbrella does not merely extend our arms and skin; it expresses our frustration with having to need this covering in the first place.
Perfect for wet weekends when you have to go to work!
Mark Federman has a useful roundup on McLuhan on art.
As for the post's political point, I'm utterly ignorant of the issues in Canadian politics, but one response that comes to mind is to wonder whether government-subsidized art is truly a counter-environment or a mediated co-option of a counter-environment by the Emperor. The radical goes numb, the way The Rite of Spring has gone from riot-inducing to sleep-inducing at major metropolitan symphonies. Just asking!
The book above: Federman's McLuhan for Managers, which is excellent. Buy it, read it, live it.
Since hearing Yelle's A Cause des Garcons yesterday on the Nubian Queen Comics MySpace, I gotta confess I've become a bit addicted to it for my work background today.
What kills me about this video is the way it represents the effects of media in daily life--the integration of the hair dryer music into the sound, the anthropomorphic transformation of mundane tools into things that affect the singer's life in odd and unexpected ways--good stuff.
Another good one from the same singer is the Ce Jeu video, which is a clever play on color and form.
The emergence of social enterprise reflects a systemic breakdown in our understanding of an organizational medium that has become ubiquitous in contemporary life. We have become so adept at creating new identities that we no longer know ourselves, and social enterprise has appeared to remind us of the way things already are. Corporate form in its complexity is more than a mirror of emergence in nature; it is, to quote McLuhan, “an extension of the self.†We are all hybrids, every one of us, from the moment of our birth. When we remember this, and live accordingly, the work of this movement will be done.
- Back to the table of contents
- Complete article: Is social enterprise sustainable?
A history, via Soapsoane:
This is the first week of Lynn Johnston's recursive retelling of For Better or For Worse, and the res in which she mediaed could not have been better: Michael gets bored with watching a fish swim endlessly around and around his small bowl.
It's a comic strip Finnegan's Wake, as Johnston swirls us back to where she started, with images and words that seem somewhat familiar but resonate with deeper significance.
The whole process has been fascinating to watch, as Johnston has tried to reground her own identity. The personal betrayal of her unfaithful spouse has been part of the struggle, but just a part--the central drama is her relation to a medium that had truly become an extension of herself.
In a brilliant PR move, Google hired Scott McCloud to draw a comic book promoting Google Chrome, the company's new web browser project. Blogoscoped has scanned the whole thing. (UPDATE: And now the whole thing is available as both a slideshow & PDF download on Google Books.)
Old media heralding the new--in biblical terms, it's like Moses showing Joshua the Promised Land or John the Baptist preaching Jesus. Sure, in these stories the old one dies, but as Google's initiative illustrates, paper comics aren't going away quite yet. As one commenter notes, "What a great way to communicate complex ideas!"
"In the age of the bikini and of skin-diving, we begin to understand 'the castle of our skin' as a space and world of its own."
--Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Via EntreComics.com
Longtime readers of my sites are by now familiar with Marshall McLuhan's observation that in our age of convergence the skin is an extension of the self. The role of the flesh as a communications medium is nowhere more evident than in this stunning Wired slideshow of comic fans showing off their tattoos.
Above: Wonder Woman on the arm of Michael Boyce, a San Diego comic shop owner. His theme of choice: superheroines. "I want to have arms that look like comic book pages with the girls bursting out."
Below: Captain America, tattooed on a strip-club manager who is into the "whole patriotic thing."
Which reminds me . . .
