Mediacology

If you are migrating here from my old MediaMidnfulness blog, welcome! This is what’s happening in our world today:
So the baby book says: an infant needs to sleep so that she can grow new brain cells. And what about papa? Well, I’m getting by, joyfully, but with little time to focus on work, thus my long absence from the blog. The good news is that my daughter was born healthy and strong. There is no real bad news, except that my normal time management strategy has been completely destroyed.

As for life in Rome… well you probably heard the news that the air quality here, depending on your disposition, is something special. With traces of cocaine, marijuana and caffeine, makes me wonder if Darth Vader found his recent tour of the city intoxicating in more ways than one. No doubt when he left there was tear gas added to the mix. As for the Lord Emperor’s whirling death flotilla, we are more than relieved to have our quiet neighborhood back and our nights filled with the baby’s cries rather than the drone of the aerial death bubble.

Before coming back I decided that I wanted to rework the blog. For a while there were several changes I wanted to make but the time between my initial coding and the latest software versions was too long and it was too difficult to simply over right the old template. Moreover, as I have been working on my book, my ideas are getting clearer; I’ve wanted to create more of a distinct identity for the blog with a unique URL and domain. Please keep in mind that everything is a work in progress, so I’ll be making tweaks here and there, and I’m a new parent, so time is precious!

The main reason for the switch from MediaMindfulness to Mediacology is a change in emphasis and pedagogy. Mindfulness is a technique I learned from my meditation practice, which is about observing and being fully conscious and aware of what is happening in any moment. As I have been working on my book of the same name I came to realize that what I was really probing was not just mindful engagement of media, but to advocate for a deeper kind of understanding that delves into the very operating system of our cultural consciousness.

Most media literacy that I am aware of just focuses on the analysis of media. For me that is not enough. Our technological world is running on faulty thinking that goes to the core of economics, communications, education and ecology. Therefore, what Deep Ecology is to environmentalism, Mediacology is to media literacy. It’s an effort to move from a dualistic paradigm I call GridThink, to one that is holistic, which I am calling HoloGrok. More on these terms later. I will be testing some of the ideas of my book at the new blog, and also post about interesting things that cross my browser.

And now for some other mundane things. There was a period of a few weeks with no Internet, and to be truthful, it felt great. I got a lot of writing done and a sense of anxiety that pervades a lot of my probing and searching on the Web was abated. I was a little gloomy, to be honest, when the service was turned back on, and even sadder when the TV arrived. Yet I do miss writing and connecting in the blogosphere and sharing with all of you as you have so bravely ventured into my little world. So I plan to continue posting as much as I find interesting and relevant, but not with so much urgency. I want this to be fun again. I hope it is for you too. See you at my new studio!