Media Permaculture
Great news! Mediacology is the featured book of the week at the wonderful Website, P2P Foundation.
Also be sure to check out P2P’s Michel Bauwens who wrote a terrific essay at Reality Sandwich, The Peer to Peer Manifesto: The Emergence of P2P Civilization and Political Economy.
From the comic book scare to video games. Author David Hajdu talks The Ten-Cent Plague and being a father in the digital age.
Comic controversy a cautionary tale - On the Level- msnbc.com:
Parents, politicians, religious leaders have gone after virtually every art form associated with youth culture – comic books, rock music, and now, video games. And with comic books, these efforts eventually had a chilling effect (on the industry). How is it that current “objectionable” entertainment products avoided that same fate?
The question is, why did comic books lose that battle? The main reason that comic books lost is that their advocates didn’t have much voice. The advocates were kids and no one was listening. Nobody cared what they thought.
Another reason is simply economic. The big corporations weren’t publishing comics.
You write that the comic book industry was comprised of outsiders: ethnic minorities, women, people who were disadvantaged financially and perhaps couldn’t gain entry to prestigious schools or professions. How important was that diversity to the success of the medium?
It was immeasurably important because comics of all kinds — even superhero comics — were explicit, overt, opulent in their portrayal of the pride of (their) outsider status. Superman was the ultimate immigrant. He was an immigrant from another planet.
It’s essential. I think it’s the main thing that comics were here to say, was that outsiders of every sort were not lesser for their outsider status. That had, in one way or another, something over the orthodoxy.
The Pirate’s Dilemma is slightly maddening. The intention is valid: to steer people towards thinking about piracy in a new light. The “pirate’s dilemma” is whether to persecute and shut down piracy, or to recognize it as a kind of creative competition. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. The thrust of Mason’s argument can be summarized by the two models of music industry approaches to P2P file sharing: either go the route of Apple and create a cheap, viable option for consumers, or the RIAA route and sue its customers.
As a former DJ, Mason cuts and pastes his way through the book with anecdotes. At first I found the approach a little obnoxious– a kind of overly cheerful airline-style of magazine writing. As a former punk, I found the whole chapter on punk capitalism a little superficial, and lacking a discussion of a really important DIY capitalist operation, Dischord Records. The section “Tao of Pirates” was also missing an important discussion of historical pirate culture, i.e. the black beard types that are so debated so interestingly in Wilson’s Pirate Utopias. I think the word pirate is used too generally. Basically, anyone under 50 is a pirate these days, and I don’t thing that’s true. Finally, the remix section failed to credit Dada.
But as I read on, I warmed up to the book and found the discussion of guerrilla marketing and hip hop pretty good. There was some history and anecdotes that I wasn’t aware of, so I was pleasantly surprised here and there. Still, if you want a more in-depth analysis of the economic situation of open source, read Benkler’s Wealth of Networks.
Ultimately I think Mason’s intentions are good. I’m not sure celebrating the cooptation of underground culture by capitalism is something that is to be happy about, but I suppose as the pirates become more mainstream, maybe our society will be better for it, and that to me, is the ultimate Pirate’s Dilemma.
Some of you may have noticed that I put a little Amazon link to the right for my book, Mediacology. I didn’t want to make an announcement until the book was actually in physical form. Well, that day has arrived, and after lots of blood sweat and dead brain cells, the book is now in stock and available. For more details you can click the tab above to view a synopsis, chapter-by-chapter breakdown, a short Slidecast presentation and more. I’m hoping that if you enjoy or support my efforts, please order the book, consider it for your class, tell a friend, and leave a nice review at Amazon.
A little background
The ideas in the book had been in the works for many years, but didn’t take form until I was approached by my editor, Shirley Steinberg, who asked me to make a proposal for her publisher. She edits a series of books on education for Peter Lang called, “Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education.” It was during this time that I was also writing an essay on digital media and education for the MacArthur Foundation’s Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media. It became the perfect opportunity to expand my thinking for MacArthur, and to make a lengthy critique of media literacy practices.
My initial concept was to call the book, Media Mindfulness. I had been practicing mindfulness meditation and became convinced that it was one of the only real ways to change one’s relationship with media’s tremendous influence on our minds. The problem was that as I was writing someone else came out with a book with the same name, so I had to change the title, and hence the book’s emphasis. This was fortuitous, because in the process of writing, though my ideas were fairly solid, I was a little stuck, and was trying to find a way to incorporate my evolving thinking about making media education more sustainable. Once I started to apply alternative ecological concepts– inspired by a Native American epistemology I developed in my MacArthur essay– it all started to come together. What I found was that by being ecological, my approach was also truly multicultural. And I don’t mean that in the sense that we apply Western educational theory to ads that feature people of color. When marketers change the color and codes of their ads to appeal to niche markets, they are only multicultural in the sense of who is being represented. I wanted to argue for a real multiculturalism that incorporates ways of thinking outside Western epistemology.
I have two audiences in mind. The first is those involved with the media literacy and reform movement, and the other is for those wanting to bridge ecology with media. I had some unfortunate experiences arguing for media literacy in the green movement, being rebuffed by a rather famous environmental media critic who thinks teaching literacy makes media too interesting. As for my media lit colleagues, I also wanted to challenge conventional thinking about media because I felt that fundamental assumptions concerning media are held up as unchallenged truths, and that these assumptions were hindering the movement’s success among cultures outside the Western paradigm of intellectual thought, and also preventing a truly ecological pedagogy. I tried to balance a conversational tone with academia. Whether or not I succeed depends on your reaction.
Ideas change
I had a year to write the book, during which my daughter was born. Sleep deprived and mentally exhausted, I patched this together and downloaded every possible idea in my head. In this sense, I probably could break the book into three or four other ones to delve a little deeper into the topics that each chapter touches upon. It’s probably true that all authors feel like their books are never finished, and I am no exception. But I feel good about the final product, and look forward to writing more. Now the creative part is done, and it’s on to real work of the text: getting it out there.
Thanks in advance for your input, feedback and help spreading the news. As always, I’ll be here, reporting back to you new ideas and announcements as they develop. Peace! Antonio
PS I took the photo that is used in the cover art.
“True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (Farhad Manjoo)
I just finished True Enough, which challenges the conventional thinking that new media democratize information and will lead to greater vetting and truth. On the contrary, the author argues that new media encourage the retreat into reality tunnels. The greatest benefit of the book is a detailed analysis of the psychological factors that go into propaganda. It explains why “Swift Boating” works. Manjoo– a Salon.com columnist whose platform is the Web– makes an insightful and correct analysis, but I’m also wondering if there is also a nostalgia for solidity, to the days when there were less media, and diminished freedom of expression due to the top-down model of the one-to-many media structure of old. I think the warnings he makes about our tendency to regress into info tribes should be headed. Does he want to a return to the Jeffersonian ideal of educated elites, or a newspaper saturated public sphere? The solution, I think, is rather old, which is to rely on the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, which is to not hold onto some notion of mediated truth, but to surf it as an engaged, mindful observer.
For more insight follow the debate about the book’s conclusions between Manjoo and Steven Johnson, author of Emergence.
Looks like a great doc and book on copyright, Freedom of Expression.
Finally some sanity in the video game debate. As noted in a previous post, there’s a lot of moanin’ about the new Grand Theft Auto, with lots of hot air, but little oxygin in the debate. Thankfully in Grand Theft Childhood? some *real* researchers have actually looked at the evidence to see what is really happening with gamers. For a sneak peak, Definitely check out the “myths” page.
Here’s a teaser from the Grand Theft Childhood? site:
Coming to the project with no agenda except to conduct sound, responsible research, their findings conform neither to the views of the alarmists nor of the video game industry. In Grand Theft Childhood, Kutner and Olson untangle the web of politics, marketing, advocacy and flawed or misconstrued studies that until now have shaped parents’ concerns.
What should we as parents, teachers and public policy makers be concerned about?
1. The real risks are subtle, and aren’t just about violence, gore or sex.
2. Video games don’t affect all children in the same way. Some children are at significantly greater risk. (You may be surprised to learn which ones!)
The “real” McCandless
It’s rare that a work of art—of any kind—lingers with me the way Sean Penn’s screen version of Into the Wild has. And I want to know why. The basis of my query is decidedly nonliterary. I’ll admit that I’m fairly non-literate, not in the writing sense, but the reading sense. I am not steeped in the great traditions that Into the Wild is build upon– not the story itself– but of the vast literary history of writers abandoning the society to probe deeper truths out there, literary pilgrims, so-to-speak. From Walden Pond to On the Road, Americans have probed the wild and the road. Krakaur’s book, Into the Wild, most likely speaks to that impulse. Trouble is, I haven’t read the book, so all I have to offer is how the film itself impressed me, not in dialog with Alex Supertramp’s story (or the book about it), but how as a cinematic experience it connects with ours.
It’s curious that the bus that served as his grave has become a modern pilgrimage site. Alaskans don’t get it, because to many of them Chris was a fool for doing what he did: venturing into the bush ill-prepared with few provisions and a kind of middle class arrogance that all will be fine. Indeed, as the case of his demise has been extrapolated and explored, one gets the sense that he may have had an unconscious death wish. He must have known on some deep level that what he was doing would end badly. No doubt, when he did decide to return to civilization and found the summer runoff too difficult to ford, it doesn’t take much to try other routes. And had he walked a few more miles, his escape would have been complete. Did he accidentally poison himself? We’ll never know. All we can be sure of is that he rejected the dominant values of civilization, and in that courage I think we find the core gestalt of his appeal.
There is an inner Jack London in all of us that simply would like to burn the cash and credit cards, ditch the car in the arroyo and walk off into the sunset. In some ways it’s very American. McCanldles’ deathbed epiphany that joy only has meaning when it’s shared was perhaps the supreme lesson of his life, for we cannot say he was truly free. He was running from something and was so determined to make a statement to his father, his ultimate outcome is not much different than a son’s suicide as revenge.
The film is a hyperreal fantasy of nature. The real location was moved for better views of the mountains to satisfy the requirements of cinema. A love story here, and some exaggerated scenery there, glosses over the more mundane aspects of a boy’s journey into America’s interior. In fact, as I have pondered the film, I was wondering why something so innocuou–a person traveling, running from his famil–could resonoate so deeply with the culture and myself. At the end of the film when we see a picture of the actual Chris (not the actor), it becomes painfully clear that this was a real life. And at that moment I wept like I’ve never wept at the end of a movie. How could I love this anonymous character so much? Is it the power of cinema, or connection with a sense of loss and abandonment that is so often at the core of our daily neurosis?
To some he comes across as a Jesus-like character, to others, just a middle class American fool lost in his own convictions like America in Iraq. With Penn at the helm, we could say this is the anti-parable of the war. If you are going to lose yourself, do it for moral reasons, for god sakes, like connecting with the Great Whatever and the “wild” that alludes us high-tech capitalistas.
The wild is a construct of the literary culture: it was devised by the Greeks to be the first big cultural Other to permeate the psychosis of Modern Man. Now we want to reclaim it, but it means death. And how fearful were we as we watched the film thinking, I could never do that, but I wish I could. We are so deeply ashamed of our domestication and trapped by our worldliness that we hunger for that taste of authenticity Chris/Alex sought and tasted. You see it in his dying smile, one of the eerie media artifacts he left with his undeveloped roll of film.
Which begs the question, was he not a bit self-conscious that his experiment would impact the culture, and he would not survive to see it? What was the purpose of the journal and camera if he was so free of our civilized trappings? Photos embalm, as philosophers have noted, and these artifacts he left us contain the self-reflective traces of a Western man, a narcissus who only vouches for existence in the mirror of media. This is not a criticism, just a reflection of the zeitgeist. Chris was both and instrument and mechanic of the culture. He knew what he was doing, his determination and focus the clues that his legacy would impact the world.
Note: I initially wrote this piece for Reality Sandwich, but someone else wrote a really good article and beat my lazy ass to post it. I recommend that you go over and read Andrew William Smith’s article too.
Technorati Tags: Into the Wild, Sean Penn
As some of you may know, I have been a regular contributor at Reality Sandwich. This week we’re starting an online reading group for the book, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, which I’ll be facilitating. I hope you will participate. Below is the intro text for the group posted on the site. To find out how to participate follow this Reality Sandwich link.
Reality Sandwich | Multitude Reading Group:
Decentralized networks, smart mobs, collective intelligence, open source software, biopolitics, the emergent social Web and the integration of love percolate the New Edge, yet how do we use all these sexy, geeky, quasi-spiritual concepts to deconstruct the global empire of control and build a movement in response?
Welcome to the first Reality Sandwich reading group, featuring Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. As the subtitle suggests, the book grapples with two of the most pressing issues of our age. It can be argued that all other causes that we care about – health, environment, media, etc. – pivot on the dual problem of a militarized system trying to maintain global control while it pushes against the unfinished work of democracy. We’re led to believe that “democracy” is codified, set in stone in the guise of the world empire envisioned by the Neocons, yet the reality is that democracy is a work in process. We are constantly shaping it, evolving it, but often in unconscious ways. The goal of Multitude is to make more conscious the nuts and bolts of this process, and to demonstrate how it is evolving along with the emergent paradigm of network theory, immaterial production and knowledge work.
Comic book speech bubbles via LoveSickAlien.com
A review of The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind and Culture by Robert F. Logan. Looks like an interesting book.
Dr. Logan… suggesting that a language too is (literally) a living organism. He also suggests that writing, mathematics and the Internet are all different languages (not just alternative media for encoding all or part of our one, spoken language). Each of these languages has, under the pressure of increasing “information overload,” evolved – or rather “co-evolved” with our brains, “extending” them into minds. (According to this theory, other species apparently don’t really have minds!) This is co-evolution, because language too is an evolving organism. So is culture.
Technorati Tags: Robert F. Logan
If you haven’t read McLuhan’s The Guttenberg Galaxy, then you may get a lot out of this great video clip (click on the link below to view it) on the significance of the printing press and its relevance today as a way of explaining the explosive changes communications technology can have on a society.
The alphabet has been called the mother of all inventions. It dispensed its benefits and blessings unevenly - particularly when the entrance of the printing press industrialized its reach. This narrative around a collection of 15th century printed pages is a time stamp and reminder that information overload is nothing so new that a glance back 500 years may dimly reveal the dynamics of the digital road ahead.
Tom Brokaw was asked by the Wall Street Journal to name his top five books. Number five is Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death:
5. Amusing Ourselves to Death
By Neil Postman
Viking, 1985Neil Postman’s polemic is at once provocative, exaggerated, insightful, myopic and instructive. Instructive because Postman does raise appropriate warning flags about relying wholly on television as a medium for serious inquiry about ideas. Myopic because he fails to acknowledge television’s role as a catalyst for learning. Favorable attention for a book on television spurs many more sales than a newspaper’s positive review. He is right, however, when he observes that TV’s entertainment values can smother rational discourse if the two are not kept in balance. As for his claim that the medium’s “form excludes content,” it is an exaggerated judgment. Take the subject of global climate change. Scientific arguments are of course essential to making the case, but it would be hard to deny how much the images of shrinking ice caps, rising sea levels and parched landscapes reinforce the arguments. Nonetheless, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” a cautionary tale, should be required reading for all broadcast journalists — and perhaps for their viewers as well.
Technorati Tags: Brokaw, Postman
Today I photographed this image from the cover of an old book being sold at my local produce market in Rome. It’s from the late fifties.
Stephen Marshall, co-founder of Guerrilla News Network (GNN), has written an anti-globalization manifesto, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing, challenging Thomas L. Friedman’s creepy spin in The World is Flat. I’ve met Stephen and find him an intense, sincere investigator and artist. I have never met Thomas but every interview I have seen with him has gotten under my skin in a bad way. A brief scan of this chapter excerpt is chilling. I hope Stephan is actually wrong. My only caveat concerning the politics of dissident news organizations like GNN is how they define themselves in the mold of a negative “us” vs. “them” paradigm. I think there is a danger in the concept of the information-will-set-you-free strategy of the left, but in this case it may be necessary to be a better informed consumer of the feel-good cheerleaders of liberal global markets.
Marshall cites Samir Amin’s The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World as Friedman’s foil. I like the concept of the virus, but for real social change I’d like to propose that the most destructive virus is alphabetic literacy. It is one of the most cannibalizing mind fraks ever invented by human beings. It has the capacity to subsume the holistic perception of the right-brain. No doubt, a person trained in the left-brain print literate universe sees everything as flat. Is the alphabet evil? Not necessarily, after all, I’m using it as a tool for education, yet what is wrong is an imbalanced mind, one that only thinks in the materialistic capacity of the left-brain. The point of this small diatribe is that I hope critics will also avoid the materialistic, flat world approach to critical thinking.
AlterNet: Sorry, Thomas Friedman, the World Is Round:
If Thomas Friedman is the prophet of 21st century capitalism, then Samir Amin is his anti-Christ. But to hear Amin tell it, Friedman is the only one leading humankind into the depths of Hell. Writing from Dakar, Senegal, where he runs the Third World Forum, Amin’s thesis is essentially that liberalism, if allowed to continue on its path of creative destruction, will lead to an apocalyptic end. He likens the globalizing force of liberalism to a virus that has destroyed all ideological competitors and that is now making its final assault on its host species. According to Amin, the ethic of liberalism — “Long live competition, may the strong win” — is now ravaging societies of the Third World, causing further “social alienation and pauperization of urban classes.”
It’s nothing new from the far, far left. There are shelves full of books by anti-globalization writers from the developing world. What made me pick up Samir Amin’s essay, though, was the striking specificity of his warning. In Liberal Virus, he argues that liberalism’s most decisive effect will be to divide the world into an apartheid system that sees 3 billion peasant farmers pushed from their land and forced into the cities where they will die. This, he explains, will result from the implementation of a 2001 World Trade Organization (WTO) mandate that all agricultural markets be opened to the expansion of commercial agribusiness producers. Without the ability to make a subsistence living from their own land, half the world’s population will have to migrate to the urban centers where there is no work for them. And thus, he concludes, they will be trapped in an “organized system of apartheid” on a global scale.
Heavy. Sad. Shock. But this is not the whole picture. Don’t forget the love can encompass fear, but fear does not contain love.
The Shock Doctrine Short Film | Naomi Klein:
When I finished The Shock Doctrine, I sent it to Alfonso Cuarón because I adore his films and felt that the future he created for Children of Men was very close to the present I was seeing in disaster zones. I was hoping he would send me a quote for the book jacket and instead he pulled together this amazing team of artists — including Jonás Cuarón who directed and edited — to make The Shock Doctrine short film. It was one of those blessed projects where everything felt fated.” - Naomi Klein
Technorati Tags: shock doctrine