Dear friends and readers,

Those who have followed this blog over the years have probably noticed a substantial drop in production. There are many reasons for this, but an important one is that Facebook and Twitter have channeled some of the creative energy that the blog was used for in the past, such as linking and sharing. For this reason, I hope you will follow my Twitter account as well (@mediacology) or check out the box in the right column with my Twitter updates. I’m not a massive Twitterer, but usually that is where I filter things that I think others would be interested in.

The other reason has to do with my writing time getting eaten up by my current book project. I’m prioritizing my creative flow by channeling it into the book, but occasionally some half-baked thoughts surface and I find that blogging is a good way to process. Fingerscrossed, the manuscript is due in two weeks, so I’ll have a chance to get back into the flow again.

Peace out!

PS I posted the following request elsewhere. If you have any suggestions, please post in the comments section:

We all know intuitively and rationally that the no-longer mainstream media represent the interests of the 1% (re. the occupy wall st. meme). I would like to compile some stats to make this point more clearly. Aside from the most obvious fact of media consolidation, can anyone suggest a way to connect the 1% economy and media with some grounded statistics or facts?

Lots of buzz this week about the new Amazon Fire, the Kindle update primed to take a big bite out of Apple (OK, I couldn’t resist such a silly cliche). Upon viewing its first TV ad (posted above) I’m struck by the use of the fire metaphor for describing communications, something I’ve also been doing in response to the meme model of media. The idea of memes is too mechanical for me–it implies that an idea is an object that gets replicated from person to person. I prefer to think of an idea as a kind of flame that inspires or ignites new understandings, but doesn’t just repeat itself. My initial inspiration for this understanding comes from Buddhism which sees thoughts as impermanent.

Amazon borrows the concept from Voltaire, whose pithy little quote makes an excellent argument for how ideas belong to the public sphere and cannot be owned:

“The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.”

Unfortunately, as DefectiveByDesign.org points out, Amazon’s digital rights management strategy is more about restriction than sharing. For example, even though you purchase books through its service, you don’t actually own them. You can’t trade, give away or resell them in the same way you can with physical books. By storing your media on its cloud drives, Amazon exerts complete control over your content and can delete books if they choose (it has happened). This also represents more of the creeping privatization of our data. We have to trust Amazon to not abuse their power of surveillance, data tracking and censorship. Remember that they deleted Wikileaks from their servers when it became politically uncomfortable.

While the media will likely focus on the titanic battle between our gods of capitalism– Amazon’s Jeff Bezos versus Apple’s Steve Jobs–our rights under their control freak purview will increasingly diminish. As the African proverb states, when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. So be mindful for how these new gadgets get fetishized in the absence of a healthy debate about their impact on the public sphere.

For what it’s worth, I own an iPad and I happen to like it, but I’m also not that impressed. I have been mostly disappointed by how limiting it is in terms of my power to create and do stuff with it. It is certainly a perfected media consumption device that makes reading Twitter and PDFs a great pleasure. But when it comes to making media, even something as basic as a PowerPoint presentation, forget it. Even my favorite presentation tool, Prezi, is rendered useless by the iPad (I can view Prezis with an app, but i can’t edit them because iPads don’t have Flash).

In sum, though I’m a fan of tablets for reading and viewing media, they reinforce old media regimes and increase the monopolization of our mediasphere. It’s probably why big media companies really love them. If we eventually migrate from flexible laptops to restricted tablets, it will probably mean a general regression to the one-to-many media model of old rather than to increased participation that should be the promise of the new. I hope I’m wrong.

I just came across a sympathetic and thoughtful review of my book on the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Website (I swear I wasn’t looking for myself on the Web!). This review was far more appreciative than the last one I read in which the author expressed a desire to throw my book in the garbage (I hope that she at least put it in the compost). Reading reviews is incredibly painful, but thankfully the AEJMC reviewer got what I was trying to say while ignoring all the typos!

One thing the reviewer points out is that Mediacology was not an easy read. Agreed! Mediacology was my first book and was done in the midst of heavy readings of McLuhan and the Media Ecology tradition. I was playing with academic jargon, perhaps as an exaggerated response to the boring newspaper journalism I had been doing for so many years before. Every venue demands a different style and over the years I have become schizophrenic from writing in so many different formats: punk fanzines, magazines, newspapers, blogs, academic journals, academic books and popular culture books. I’m hoping that I’m finally hitting a sweet spot between all of these with my current book project. But that remains to be seen. The main thing I realize is that my first book didn’t exactly practice what I preached: though I was calling for participatory educational practice, its language was a bit too inaccessible. Let’s hope I do a better job on the next round.

I’m loath to make historical analogies, simply because every historical moment has its own unique characteristics that would not be possible if we impose nonexistent conditions. So as the clutch mechanism of time slips, it would be unfair to compare the unreal moment of democratic potential in Egypt with those events in Spain when the libertines of Catalunya tasted freedom but were feeling Franco’s fascist forces pushing against the edges of their dreams for autonomy. Unfortunately for the Republicans of Spain, history didn’t side with them, and the freedom fighters of the Spanish Civil War were crushed and wiped out as the world’s leaders stood by, or as was the case of Stalin and Hitler, made sure that they were destroyed.

So why are my thoughts on Spain during these days of North Africa’s fight for democracy? As I read via the twitterverse the incredible ways in which everyday Egyptians are self-organizing to fill the space of a collapsed state, I’m reminded of George Orwell’s profound passages about free Barcelona during the early days of the Spanish Civil War (if you haven’t yet, you must read Homage to Catalonia). In it he describes a spirit of cooperation and brother/sisterhood that permeated cafes and barber shops alike, one in which a temporary autonomous zone of human potential was freed from the restraints of state terror and mechanized control. To behold such a space is a beautiful thing. To live it is a miracle. To unlearn it is impossible.

Now, one thing (among many, which makes this just a thought exercise) that differentiates the current situation from Spain in 1936 is the global interconnectedness of the events unfolding on our screens. Though the Republicans defending against Franco were shored up by a vast solidarity movement from around the world that sent volunteers and fighters to aid their embattled democracy, few could monitor and mobilize support in real time to prevent the horror that was unleashed by Franco and his allies. Though I’m not on the ground in Egypt to provide any physical assistance, through the Internet* I’m able to track, share, connect and extend an invaluable resource that drives any revolution: empathy.

I know it is vogue to decry net Utopianism, and to invoke something as woo-woo as “empathy” seems rather weak in comparison to the kinds of assistance that foreign brigadistas gave the Spanish Republicans. But I would argue that solidarity is a powerful force that feeds the people engaged in real struggle. The worse feeling is to be in an isolated cell somewhere, subject to random torture, knowing that you are completely alone and without help, as was the case for Spanish libertines who were abandoned after the fall of their republic. People are wired for connection and thrive from positive feedback. (For more about this, I highly recommend watching the Jeremy Rifkin’s RSA animation of his “empathic civilization” thesis.)

On this note, then, I want to balance some of the skepticism coming from the likes of Morozov who argue that net activism is as much a tool of repression as liberation. We could all point to Iran’s Green Revolution as an example of both the failure of the Net and empathy to save the situation. However, it is also not over, and the fact is that through our interconnectedness, we are stronger and more able to keep the struggle alive than to let it disappear into some dungeon in the periphery of an Iraqi or Afghan war zone. Let’s not shut down the optimism that empathy drives. And let’s not so quickly dismiss the role that media can play in supporting the hard work of organizing and rebelling that is now stripping old emperor’s of their illusions, parading them naked across the world’s screens.

PS A note on the strange irony of my historical analogy. Franco launched his attack on the Republic with his North African brigades.

* FYI, my own particular formula for monitoring events is a combination of Al Jazeera English’s Internet stream, the Guardian UK’s live news blog, Twitter, and Mother Jones’ “explainer” page. From these primary portals I’m able to link into a variety of sources. In particular I’ve been able to diversify my Twitter stream to be more inclusive of non-Western perspectives. Compared to the universe of American MSM, this is really a whole different reality. Here you get pointed questions from intelligent and independent thinkers who don’t feel compelled to ask the kinds of ridiculous questions that the Wolf Blitzer’s of the world are asking, such what role al-Qaeda has in the Jan. 25 movement. Give me a break. And while I’m at it, why hasn’t anyone in the MSM pointed out that new Egyptian VP Omar Suleiman was a key figure in the CIA’s rendition to torture program? Is the American press that cowardly?

In response to last weekend’s tragedy in Tucson, I feel fairly small and insignificant in terms of what I have to add to an already bloated mix of hyperbole and moral panic. But I do know what it’s like to have a gun pressed into my temple (a real one, this is not a figure of speech), so I feel a great deal of empathy for any victims of gun violence. The vile feeling of gun violence is indescribable, and once you have been victimized by it, you find yourself shying away from the ubiquitous presence of guns in-your-face imagery: from video game billboards to T-shirts. Sadly, this perverse sickness permeates our media and our culture, so it is very difficult to look away. Most often we have no choice.

In terms of the the war of words (sorry for the military-like metaphor) about the role of language in the mediapolis (to borrow a term from Roger Siverstone), I agree that it is impossible to prove whether or not the militant verbage and graphics of various national figures caused the shooter to commit this heinous act. I also agree we can’t blame society for every cowardly act by a human. But I don’t mean to align myself with this same defense emanating from the echo chamber’s most vociferous haters: O’Reily, Beck and Palin. Because this is a disingenuous defense. If Beck says you can’t prove Loughner listened to a word he said, this still does not excuse Beck from discharging sewage from his mouth, let alone pay him to do it. It may not poison me directly, but I sure don’t like the stink.

It would go against my own theory of media to argue that a pundit’s words can program someone to act in a certain way– this view is far too mechanistic and assumes that ideas are things that can be placed into people’s minds. Humans are not programmable computers. However, the general atmosphere can be poisoned by attitude which makes certain cultural expressions more acceptable than not. Words set tone and when amplified to the Nth degree they can frame cultural norms. Coke can’t prove that an ad convinced me to buy a coke, but that doesn’t deter them from crowding my mindspace with the idea of Coke.

The metaphors and disinformation deployed by the Right enables a certain level of self-interested intolerance to be permissible and pushes a cultural perspective that is not healthy for any community, be it Tucson, Baghdad or Kabul. Nor is it worthy of any culture that claims to be civilized. Likewise, these views are not accidentally detonated, but are in service of a hierarchical system predicated on fear. These acts of verbal bullying are a control strategy, and even more cynically, an economic one. Murdoch, who deserves a lot of blame for this toxic atmosphere, wouldn’t employ such strategies if they didn’t make big bucks.

Psychologists calls this “pre-conventional” behavior, the kind associated with little children who are incapable of understanding the needs of others. “Post-conventional” behavior is marked by empathy and the ability to look beyond self-interest, but this also requires critical thinking about one’s own beliefs. The Tucson massacre is begging for a post-conventional dialog. Will the mediapolis respond accordingly?

The reviews are mixed. The media pariahs showed their true colors, to be sure. For example, how crazy is the claim that criticizing Beck and Palin puts the Republic in danger? Hmm, their speech doesn’t endanger other people, but criticism of them does? Which way are they going to have it? Moreover, deployment of the dreaded blood libel and lynch claim seems like a bit of paranoid thinking for a bunch of rich people who get paid millions to rant incoherently. To claim they were victimized at a time when the guns were aimed at other people and to equate their plight with the persecution of blacks or jews is really despicable. Have you ever heard such privileged elites whine so much?

I don’t mean to sound like a hypocrite here, but this is one situation where my capacity for empathy is really stretched. We can chalk it up to the sad rantings of confused, suffering and narcissistic individuals. On the other hand we are obliged not to be rugs: psychic boundaries are important. In light of the state of our planet, if ever there was a need for a time out for media cry babies, it would be now.

From a media ethics point of view, polluting the public sphere with lies, hypocrisy and hatred constitutes irresponsibility. This is not a call for censorship, but for restraint and basic human dignity. Right speech (not right-wing speech), from a Buddhist point of view means refraining from lies, harmful speech, gossip and slander. There is an ethical and practical reason for this. The moral reason is the gold standard of Kantian ethics and the Christian tradition: don’t do onto others that which you would not want done to yourself. Words included. The practical reason is quite simple: harmful speech will always bite you in the ass. Such is the case with Beck and Palin who are now having to defend there diminished characters, attempting to salvage their parasitic media personas in hopes that people will look beyond their hypocrisy and verbal misdeeds. No doubt many will, and that is simply the tragic result of demagoguery that mixes codes and flattery to appease the closed reality of traumatized, hardcore nut cases.

I have a fairly simple syllogism for media ethics. It is as follows:

1) We are all interconnected.

2) As interconnected beings, we live in communities.

3) Healthy communities require communication to function well.

4) For communication to work we need trust.

5) Trust requires credibility and reciprocity.

Is this too much to ask for? If our economic structure, and hence media system, cannot get past point one, then our reality is in serious need of a make-over. In the very least we can start with the premise that words are energy. The difficult question we must all ask ourselves is, What is the quality of energy we want to share? The Mayan greeting, Lak’ech, means “I am another yourself.” Imagine if all of us started our interactions in such a way…

After hearing so much about Hurt Locker and its Best Picture award (I’ve always been intrigued by war movies), I thought I’d give it a whirl. For starters, this ain’t Apocalypse Now! or Full Metal Jacket, let alone even close to some of the better, more complex war films that delve into the distorted and demented politics of its leaders. In particular I’m thinking of Major Dundee by Sam Peckinpah, which is set during the so-called Indian Wars. Hurt Locker also lacks the psychological nuance of something like Terrence Malick’s brilliant The Thin Red Line.

Hurt Locker is neither adventurous nor cutting edge, and not much better stylistically than a TV show like CSI. Ultimately it’s a really boring movie with bad dialogue that poorly fleshes out a series of tension and release sequences that draw on music video and video game aesthetics. It is full of cliches about poor American soldiers who cannot make sense of a chaotic environment not of their choosing as they enter the labyrinth of a surreal war landscape populated by an alien Other. Framed as an “American tragedy,” once again an invaded country becomes a purification drama for Hollywood’s liberal consciousness.

So I hope no one thinks Hurt Locker is a serious anti-war movie, because if this is what passes these days as war criticism, then the depoliticization of Iraq has truly succeeded to permeate the pop culture landscape.

Just compare, for example, the Americans–self-identified as “USA friendlies”– versus the zero-dimensional Iraqis who seem to have no history or personality beyond the usual tropes and stereotypes (see my list below). The only insight into how the other side thinks comes from an Iraqi professor who is allowed three lines of dialogue, one being that he is pleased to have the CIA in his home. Moreover, the film forces you to sympathize with the military every time they kill Iraqis. Army recruiters most love that.

The only hint of the film’s consciousness comes at the end of the movie. We transition from a closing shot in Iraq with kids throwing stones at the Americans to the returning soldier’s existential crisis at home when he faces a wall of cereal in a market– recalling the clash’s prescient protest song, “Lost in the Supermarket.” In the end, cleaning rain gutters is not as thrilling as war, so this middle class soldier–a cypher for our system– has to go back to Iraq because now he is addicted to the adrenaline of war–like our consumer economy. The last shot has him transformed as a technologically shielded man who lurches suicidally towards another bomb. Like our militarized system, he has lost his humanity.

Though the last shot is a pretty strong image, compare it to some of the dialog when two soldiers complain about the war. Soldier 1: “How do you deal with it?” Soldier 2: “I just don’t think about it.” Wow, heavy shit.

If “I fucking hate this place” and “Let’s get out of this fucking desert” are the strongest statements the film’s characters can make, then Hollywood is as spineless and addicted to the military as the Democrats. Because in the end, though Hollywood cast a guilt vote to make this their best picture, in the film industry the war machine will continue to march unabated as a primary partner in the development of animation and other block-buster special effects technology to be prototyped for war training VR.

Ultimately I concur with Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (a much better and more introspective book/picture than Hurt Locker), who wrote that there is no such thing as an anti-war movie:

“There is talk that many films are antiwar, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill, they turn their fighting and killing everywhere, they ignore their targets and desecrate the entire country, shooting fully automatic, forgetting they were trained to aim. But actually, Vietnam War films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended… [soldiers] watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrate the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real first fuck. It doesn’t matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar—the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not.” (pp. 6-7)

It seems to me that the film’s Best Picture award is driven by a sense of shame about the war– a need to feel and say something about it, but even in the Obama years no one (that is, anyone in a position of power) is willing to stand up and call the Iraq war for what it is: a crime against humanity. So when a dramatic film can make this case, then it will certainly get my vote. But I’m not holding out hope. At least not for it to be made by Hollywood.

Here is a quick an dirty laundry list of unoriginal war film tropes from Hurt Locker:

• Inane dialogue as indication that somewhat will die (also used in horror films).
• Kid Iraqi (“Beckham”–yawn) who learns American black slang (and sells DVDs) as symbol of the hybridized, Utopian future of Iraq.
• Zero-dimensional Iraqis except as The Horrible Evil Enemy Without Any Consciousness (unlike the technocratic warriors of America who kill with high technology but also have feelings of guilt).
• A cameo of the sadistic yahoo commander (we only get a momentary glimpse of him).
• War-stressed, PTSD soldier who doesn’t have the capacity (or stomach) to “hold it in,” and of course is the one character who gets wounded right before he is supposed to finish his tour.
• Veteran perverted by horrors of war harbors an idiosyncratic secret obsession.
• Strange and creepy intellectual analyst whose healing powers are over-shadowed by his naivety and lack of warrior purification (and of course is killed).
• Depersonalized death/massacre of the other/enemy.
• Spectacularized violence as cleansing ritual for do-gooder Americans.

“Most of that “many,” of course, are the ancient Mayans, who had the good sense to die out as a culture before any of the real apocalyptic pain was visited upon the earth.”

Look, sorry to say this, but the majority who are obsessed with 2012 are non-Mayan (as a story on HoffPost mentioned already). And I think contemporary Mayans would object to this characterization that they died out. What they did do is reorganize. Mayans are alive and well throughout Central America and Mexico, their culture is quite alive and in may ways much stronger than ours.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost