Flies of Our Fathers
Read Our War by David Harris to celebrate the sacrfices, valor, PTSD flashbacks, and moral clarity of the chief draft dodger of the Vietnam generation.
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October 26, 2006
October 25, 2006
The Autobody of Red
Red is the color of desire - chrome wheels the yellow wings of freedom.
El Camino's are cool.
They are cars and trucks.
They usually have big engines.
October 17, 2006
Johnny in Carbomite Freeze
I remember Johnny, my brother in carbomite freeze.
October 11, 2006
Robeson, Othello, Bigger Thomas
Start on the web....end at the library!
Step 1: Open a research log!
Careful records are the foundation of any college research project.
Word file.
Blog post.
Pen and paper.
Step 2: Assess your topic online.
Google - to get your bearings.Paul Robeson - favorite son.
Othello - literary icon.
Bigger Thomas - anti-hero.Wikipedia - to get basic facts.
Evergreen Library - to get scholarly information acceptable for college research.
Peer review.
Paid subscriptions.
Step 3: Conduct library research
Evergreen catalog page
Physical library collection
Summit consortium
Online databases and services
JSTOR
Humanities Index
Specialist - Gender Watch, Ethnic Watch
Step 4: Close your research log.
Save and organize your notes.
Back them up.
Print them and look them over.
Build a paper file to go with your electronics.
Contact info
Jules Unsel, unselj@evergreen.edu
Ref desk Weds nights
October 04, 2006
Cool Websites Discovered because of Downes
Here's one about Joey, Bettleheim's autistic machine boy called Delusional Circuitry.
Here's the one about Alberti's Window again, in case you missed it in my extended epistle.
And here's Virtual Jerusalem - send your own cyber-prayer to the Wailing Wall!
Was Reading Interactive Realism Really an Act of Interactive Realism?
The Daniel Downes book was chock full 'o ideas and astute observations about the internet and what it may mean and continue to mean in the future.
One of his best achievements, as far as I'm concerned, was his explication of what he calls in places the "pessimistic view" of internet technology and its kaleidoscope of consequences. He pulls together diverse ideas. Internet technology is ideological (exploitative of popular naivete), patriarchal (it is a boy's club), “culturalist” (it creates fake vs real cultural experience). On top of this, it's at the root of a totalizing, untested, mostly involuntary, and potentially disjunctive transformation of both individual subjectivity and collective memory. It may take over, either through Skynet or the the Terminator himself, or heaven forbid, BOTH at the same time! Downes doesn't agree with this pessimism, and it's in explaining his disagreement that he is so articulate in laying out its full scope.
Still, Downes is not an uncritical advocate of internet technology or its cultural content, which he distinguishes in the two interdepenet terms, "the internet" and "cyberspace." He makes this distinction early in the book, in order to unclutter from his literary exploration the political, economic and sociological critiques that are well underway in other fields.
That deft move early on freed him to proceed to the following insights -
He excavates the role of post-structuralist orthodoxy in framing the broad pessimism aamong liberal arts types bout the digital turn - the Ong/Foucault/Heim story that the technologies of language - orality vs print literacy, for instance - shape the interior sense of self, or "subjectivity," of the individual. In this view, human psychology is not fixed or natually occuring but is radically historically dependent or "relative" to language and related cultural symbolic systems. He doesn't argue that this is not true. He only raises the point, refreshingly, that it may not be. If it is true, the widely accepted corellary that each shift in linguistic technology away from orality is alienating of authentic experience (alienating in a Marxist sense). Ong romanticizes his noble Irish savages, who could see a circle only as a wheel or a pie, when he suggests that the gift of literacy would only rob them of their "pristine" innocence. This sense of loss and nostalgia - classic indulgence of romantics - is a key element of fear and loathing of the the monstrous, "prosthetic other."
He also sidesteps the popular neo-Marxist "mode of information" critique that the OFH school of post-structural linguistics both relies on and reinforces - the notion that the "Mode of Information" – as opposed to mode of production – radically determines both the materiality of society and subjectivity of the individual in that structure/superstructure/historical dialectical way so familiar to us now. The grand march of history - as wrought on the material world and the mind of the individual - is marching on, and this is the latest grand turn to be taken. Capitalism still contains it own seeds of destruction, just not in the way we thought. Or, maybe, the socialist utopia is still coming, it just had to go transnational - something Marx didn't see coming - and commercial interet technology is the new (steam) engine of transformation.
I could go on .... there are so many interesting ideas in this book:
Immersion and interactivity as elements to consider in the OFH debate about language and psychology. Opacity vs transparency of technology to the user as a measure of user immersion and interactivity within cyberspace.
Prosthetic other (dystopic) vs Cyborg (utopic) polarity within the cyber-romantics (there, I coined my own term!)
The power of metaphor in human understanding to make meaning and create knowledge - the thing that may distinguish us from machines in our thinking - the power of metaphor to crush the metaphor of mind as machine.
The amazing coincidence that Alberti was looking through a window when he understood linear perspective as a way of visual representation and then used windows as his principal metaphor in explaining himself. (Use Windows to open this window to see a great mixed text-visual exploration of Alberti's metaphorical uses window).
What i really love about this book is his really smart suggestion near the end that we might remove the many veils of cyber-romanticism from our eyes, as we struggle to understand what's happening before them (our eyes, that is), by making this simple shift in our thinking. Maybe linguistic technology simply recallibrates consciousness, doesn't transform it in some irrevocable, sinister way. As he says on page 31, “It is consistent with Marxism and poststructuralism that ideology creates the unified self not as a concept but as a deception.” Maybe it's not a big deception or some sinister plot, or some fall from primitive innocence and grace, but simply a change. Maybe it's not the end of the world after all.
October 03, 2006
Embodiedness of Self?
The question has been answered in the NEW YORK TIMES!
Scientists have discovered that "the self can be detached from the body and can live a phantom existence on its own, as in an out-of-body experience, or it can be felt outside of personal space, as in a sense of a presence.”
This according to a New York Times article on brain research. This profound existential question came up in our reading this week - the Downes book, Interactive Realism, about cyberspace, human social interactivity, and the authenticity and/or inauthenticity of cyber experience.