Draft Final Paper for MSU (Make Shit UP)

Emergent + Fuzzy = Autonomous (Draft)

Abstract
In earlier formative years, a strong personal enjoyment was garnered in watching a great deal of television, never considering its impact on the mind, thoughts, or reactions. Blissfully unaware, there was no personal awareness of what Marshal McLuhan and his contemporaries in the field of media ecology were hypothesizing - that television, and all emerging media technologies, connect with and interplay with our nervous systems. This idea of technological somnambulism stands in direct opposition to the Western world’s social construct of freedom, liberty, and autonomy. It also questions social capacity to construct a civil society in the current storm-like media environment. These media effects are now known and studied, and at this point, we cannot un-know them; therefore, in our knowing, we must each ask ourselves, in all that we do, how we go about understanding the ecology of what we do, and know if we are engaging in acts of freedom, autonomy, and liberty, or if we are essentially partaking in deception and complicity.

Introduction
“‘We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad’ said the Cat. ‘How do you know I'm mad?’ said Alice. ‘You must be’, said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn't have come here.’”
-Lewis Carol-
The literature herein reviewed lays a foundation by which to define real life participatory social development practices as media. It will also serve to develop an ecological framework to study these social development media with the intent of determining their potential to facilitate mass conditioning, or alternatively, autonomy, freedom, and liberation. Within the area of social development, grassroots participatory approaches to development have increased over the years. The drive to liberate oppressed populations by developing and implementing practices which reclaim the vast knowledge base within these marginalized communities often brushes aside longstanding traditions of knowledge generation, and it has turned control of knowledge and social development over to the mass media, the true picture of an Orwellian Society in action. Professional engagement with communities at the grassroots level is common in highly politicized environments where application of sometimes subtle and delicate variations of community engagement in poor, urban communities, where physical and economic decline, social isolation, and political disempowerment are the norm. Community development and the implementation of social engagement techniques have sought to improve neighborhood conditions and the well-being of individuals and families. The prevalent civil society meme, or social construct, is the framework upon which social development processes seek to build life-enhancing opportunities. To accomplish this calls for the patient development of the skills needed to mix, balance, and integrate dialogue and careful reasoning.

It may seem absurd to question the intent to development and support processes that promote the ability to think carefully and integrate genuine caring for others as well as the world we live in. However, despite widespread social development, social inequity stubbornly persists. Initiating, this review assists in determining the potential for successful triangulation of the outwardly techno deterministic theories of media ecology to the tools of community engagement, which offers an opportunity to explore and reveal hidden dynamics of the unseen social influences under conditions of overwhelming technological change. In addition, the literature herein reviewed develops symmetry between the social development practices extolled in the SAS² canon (Buckles &Chevalier, 2008.) and the theories of media ecology, which are largely drawn from percepts developed by Marshal McLuhan. The intention is to create a media ecology sieve through which the SAS² development tools can be filtered.

A movement for change represents an important stage of social innovation. This stage begins when people start to feel outrage or discontent towards the larger system forces, such as changes in the economy or a disease epidemic. When such people begin to feel as if they can no longer endure such large system forces, they start to connect in a variety of ways. It is often at this moment that social innovators step in to help achieve a degree of synchronicity. Part of the dynamic of social innovation, which is responsible for moving a movement from an exploration to a movement for change, occurs when social innovators connect to a larger group of people. A social innovator can help to develop movements for change in a number of ways (Chevalier and Buckles, 2009. p.7):
1. They are able to articulate the general malaise.
2. They are able to articulate and reflect a group’s discontent and contribute threads for a new way of doing things.
3. They are able to feed off of the movement so that it can move much more quickly.
Innovations can occur anywhere in a system. As social innovators seek transformation, it is important that they shake loose the resources that are invested in the old ways of doing things.

Media Ecologists study the impacts of different forms of media on human beings, including the inventive philosophical approaches to seek, reveal, and test the truth of ideas. It is in this regard that a media ecology framework is a unique test for community development practices, given that both rely on altered, sometimes fuzzy, observational standpoints or states of consciousness that enable the emergence of new perspectives on situations and life; “deliberate violations of social conventions to create new awareness of old forms” (McLuhan, 1997, p. 5). Utilizing Marshal McLuhan’s media ecology also stands as the fulcrum by which to balance how one understands communication through a ritual lens, as a tool in the social development process, which is a process in and through which society is created, maintained, and transformed (Carey, 1989). Alternatively, consideration to the understanding of communication through the transmission lens, for the purposes of control, where messages are viewed as things that are injected into the heads of receivers by senders and media are mere channels for the sending; in the ritual view, messages and channels are experienced by receivers within a complex of previously internalized and enacted cultural experiences. Indeed, the concrete ‘thingness’ that the word message connotes makes it awkward to use in defining a ritual view of communication: the ritual view is more concerned with processes than with products (messages), with biases of media than with neutral or noisy channels, and with active participants than with manipulated or resistive receivers (Carey, 1989).

The process of exploration, revelation, and possibly even discovery from the juxtaposition of various disparate elements is precisely the process of the laws of media. These constructs include McLuhan’s tetrad of four media laws – extension, reversal, obsolescence, and retrieval. McLuhan’s quest and question could be considered as follows: how can one create conditions so that the “deeply willed deceptions” that prevent accurate observation are eliminated? Is there a corrective lens that reverses the prism of self-deception (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988, p. 116) Studying community development juxtaposed with McLuhan’s media ecology does not assist in reaching a greater understanding of the world, but rather, it is the underlying effects of development practices that are used to construct the content that will. Indeed, early in his writing, McLuhan warns his readers that “it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 8).

Method
This literature review is guided by the desire to uncover obscure knowledge and ideas which help define social development processes as media and provide a mélange of media ecology theory upon which to assess the autonomous and liberating qualities of social development processes. The qualitative and hypothetical nature of media ecology is perhaps its most compelling quality. Its practitioners achieve little when attempting to apply empirical linear standards to a theoretical field of study where the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly defined. Media ecology constructs an aesthetic useful for countering and probing the many cultural assumptions herein, with specific focus on those upheld by social development processes. Furthermore, media ecology offers an aesthetic that upholds the importance of a questioning that shakes people out of their reality.

Literature Review: A Theoretical Mélange
“If you don’t like those ideas, I have others.”
-Marshal McLuhan-
Typically, from a social development perspective, social engagement processes are categorized and framed as affecting co-generation of knowledge and advancing the common good (Buckles & Chevalier, 2008, p.11). Social engagement processes are crucial to group dialogue as well as for creation and mobilization of practical and authentic decision making (Chevalier and Buckles, p. 19). The primary value expressed within social engagement techniques is that collaborative and cooperative interactions build consensus and produce meaningful outcomes (Chevalier and Buckles, p.15). In addition to social engagement the intent of community development or participatory social engagement techniques, such as Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space Technology, Conversation Cafe's and others, is to help people uncover shared culture as well as to modify and transform culture.

More specifically, Chavalier and Buckles have produced the Dimensions of the SAS² Social Weaver (Chevalier and Buckles, 2009.): Planning, Inquiring, and Evaluation. Planning creates logical schemes for doing things in order to achieve goals with appropriate inputs; Inquiry examines and explains facts and situations using appropriate diagnostic tools, Evaluation assesses results against goals using well-defined criteria and markers of progress; a learning system combines all three processes, and it also grounds them in meaningful action, mobilizes stakeholder participation, and applies a wide range of tools at proper times that are scaled to the right level of detail.

SAS² processes urge participants to increase their own critical thinking, and thereby, increase the chances to reform civic and economic life. Critical thinking is defined by Stephen Brookfield as the ability to reflect on the assumptions underlying the ideas and actions of ourselves as well as those of others and to contemplate alternative ways of thinking and living (Chevalier and Buckles, 2009. P. 51). Critical reflection includes the ability to reason logically and scrutinize arguments for ambiguity. Brookfield believes critical reflection incorporates emancipatory emotion motivated learning.

Emancipatory learning for empowerment is the process by which community members gain an understanding of forces in their environment in an attempt to enable them to act to promote both individual and social change (). Literature on empowerment and emancipatory learning from Paulo Friere has supported the importance of critical consciousness, in other words, that which welcomes contradictions, paradoxes, and the presumption of constant change in communities. As each community action creates contradictory outcomes and the continual cycle of collection reflection on the outcomes, new actions and new reflections emerge. Friere’s critical consciousness in the reflection/action cycle is achieved when people make the connections between themselves and the broader social context, when they reflect on their own role in society, when they understand the history and conditions of a social problem, and finally, when they believe they can participate in collective change.

For Marshal McLuhan, his definition of media includes all technologies, their forms, and structures due primarily to their affect on how we perceive and understand the world around us (McLuhan, 1964, p.8). McLuhan uses interchangeably the words medium, media and technology. Analogously, social engagement techniques affect how we perceive and understand the world around us, and therefore, fit appropriately within this definition of media.

McLuhan observes that any medium "amplifies or accelerates existing processes" (Levinson, 1999 p. 36) introduces a "change of scale or pace or shape or pattern into human association, affairs, and action" (Levinson, 1999 p. 36), resulting in "psychic, and social consequences" (Levinson, 1999 p. 36). This is an especially relevant interpretation of media; a social and psychic message dependent wholly on the medium itself, regardless of the content produced (Levinson, 1999 p. 36). This is basically the meaning of McLuhan’s the medium is the message.

Of primary consideration is looking for evidence of the power of the media as an example of technology exerting control over human destiny. Often viewed as a mechanism of change, media are almost invariably manipulated by special interests, whether public, corporate, or governmental (Ellul, 1965). Foucault (1966) contends all periods of history have possessed specific underlying conditions of truth that constituted what was acceptable discourse to us and that these conditions have changed over time, in major and sudden shifts. However, if the electronic environment interplays with all the sensory faculties (Levinson, 1999 p. 36-37), cultures are merely ‘hoicking up’ their own titillation by new media responses framed incorrectly as cultural preferences or interests; this theoretical paradox creates a dilemma. If you work with these technological electronic media, you may merely be servicing the need for cultural, sensory, or electric titillation. The person who makes video games, movies, books, music, and TV may present an idea, a concept, a clever presentation of psychological intrigue, but the communication is to an audience who needs more and more electric media as a consolation or a message. The manipulation in this sense is not corporate, or even truthful, but rather, banal lust for sensory stimulation. The need is now generated for this study to further refine and understand the degree to which the development of social engagement techniques meet an aesthetic lust for sensory stimulation.

The prevalent construct when considering social engagement techniques is the meme of the fully integrated multi-stakeholder collective. Defining social engagement techniques as media reframes the mass mind not as a homogeneous public, but rather, as a group of people who have instantaneous, simultaneous communication with each other (Kroker, 1984). The cyborg meme operates on the idea that everyone becomes simultaneous within the electronic media context. This study will assist in the exploration of liberation, freedom, and autonomy as understanding, not separateness - an awareness of the effects of the media environments.

Haraway (1991) uses the cyborg as a metaphor to explain how the fusion of machine and organism exposes ways that things considered natural, such as the human body, are not, but rather, they are constructed by our ideas about them. Haraway feels that this cyborg myth has the potential to free us from a desperate search for similarity with one another and again uncover a paradox worth exploring in this study. Dienst (1994) shows television can be imagined in a number of ways: as a profuse flow of images, as a machine that produces new social relationships, as the last lingering gasp of Western metaphysical thinking, as a stuttering relay system of almost anonymous messages, and even as a fantastic construction of time. These works assist in demonstrating how mediated social engagement processes can be imagined in a number of ways: as a profuse flow of images, as a machine that produces social relationships, as the last lingering gasp of western metaphysical thinking, as a stuttering relay system of almost anonymous messages, and as a fantastic construction of time.

Further, Eisenstein (1979) demonstrates why it is important to understand the problems of media, especially in the light of submission en masse to control by programs of our social and emotional lives. Eisenstein carefully examined the transition between the eras of script and print, finding in the latter transition a disregarded feature of Europe’s transformation from  its Middle Age to its modern era, that is, how printing effected the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science. Viewing social engagement techniques as media and the effects they create as well as understanding these as causes of and affect upon the nature of a particular environment, as Eisenstein has done, could accelerate the advance to true autonomy, liberty and freedom. Social engagement techniques are understood to have the capacity en masse to reframe the previously explained “hoiked up electric titillation” (see above) as prevalent social profiles and nuances. Studying systemic oppression, racism, poverty and other memes of social oppression as media fads will take a fresh discipline in this study beyond the traditional socio-political memes. Defined as media, understanding the ultimate message of social engagement techniques and what they are trying to get across takes on a fresh dimension through the perspective of media ecology. From this perspective, the consideration for assessing then arises defined by the construct of considering if social engagement techniques are merely miming the total release of the ‘hoiked up electric titillation’, or are generating genuine release allowing one to be as free as the wind. This framing also leads us to postulate how the opposing impulse, i.e. domination over freedom, can be understood. This is why the understanding of social engagement techniques as media has the potential to better understand that impulse for dominance over human freedom, human discipline or human inspiration.

Illich (1988) posits that changes can be attained if individuals "awaken" to the fact that each person has taken for granted their understanding of the world is seen as being formulated and handed down over the centuries. However, it is important to mention that these conventional perspectives lock individuals into certain solutions and prevent recognition of new ways of living in the world. For example, Illich reflects that the computer has created a change in which thoughts are arranged more by the logic and efficiency of media than by the natural meanings embodied in a live discourse.

Fortunately, Marshall McLuhan did not seemingly feel the need to be constrained by the doctrine of formal logic that he considered to be merely an artifact of a literate society (McLuhan, 1962). Instead, the McLuhans broaden the applicability of their methods, discerning a subtle interplay between our physical bodies and the media; the bodies come and go, but media keeps building itself through time: we come to the point where the media builds itself and completes itself merging with our bodies. Another glance down the media ecology rabbit hole also reveals more clearly Baudrillard’s description of the “Great Game of Exchange” (p. 7), referring to an endless exchange of nothing; a game that leads in the end to the liquidation of everything and, “passing around the debt, the unreal unnamable thing you cannot get rid of” (p. 7). Baudrillard’s description of the hyperreal and in particular his description of the “Great game of Exchange” ( Baudrillard, p.7), a game grounded in an endless exchange of nothing, is a portrayal of a media environment which creates and converts data into content which can be bought and sold. From this vantage point, social development processes could be viewed and merely cultural tools serving to keep the economy operating. The phatic, jabbering, texting, flip charting, typing, and talking serve as a digital matrix in the endless exchange of nothing; it is not the messages, but rather, it is the actions of everyone participating. As long as people are consuming and generating media we have an economy.

Results
"How are you to argue with people who insist on sticking their heads in the invisible teeth of technology, calling the whole thing freedom?"
- Marshal McLuhan-

A ‘McLuhanesque’ construct of an android hallucination that keeps us fixated on the content and not the effects, McLuhan directs our attention to an important foundation of his own work – the deeply willed deceptions every person practices upon themselves. The idea that we deliberately and willingly ignore reality in favour of a comforting fantasy of social harmony may support new ways to observe interpersonal and intra-societal dynamics. McLuhan sought methods that would allow him to reveal a hidden context of human interactions. Working with highly politicized communities where social agencies and nonprofit organizations come to a greater understanding regarding the invisible dynamics which impede or support the work.

Marshall McLuhan, with his son Eric, sought a predictive framework, consisting of a set of heuristics that could be tested against any, and all, human artifacts. Their objective was “to draw attention to situations that are still in process, situations that are structuring new perception and shaping new environments, even while they are restructuring old ones...” (p. 116). What they discovered became known as the laws of media, articulated as four questions:
What does it extend, enhance, accelerate, intensify or enable?

When pushed beyond the limit of its potential, will it reverse what were its original characteristics; if so, into what does it reverse?
What does it displace or obsolesce, that is, render relatively without dominant power or influence?
What does it retrieve from the past that had been formerly obsolesced (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988, p. 98-99)?

These four questions are arranged as a tetrad of four quadrants. The tetrad structure is meant to suggest that these four aspects occur simultaneously, and they are inherent properties of the media under consideration. Insisting that there were precisely four laws, the McLuhans claimed that in “over twelve years of constant investigation...we have been unable to find a fifth question that applies to all media or to locate a single instance in which one of the four is clearly absent or irrelevant” (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1998, p. 7). Indeed, the introduction to Laws of Media contains a challenge to the readers to find a fifth law and/or to discover an instance in which one of the specified four laws does not apply. A reader might be excused for concluding that such a pompous claim of completeness, and the almost belligerent challenge, is merely an expression of McLuhan arrogance. However, interpreting these rather bold statements through the prism of satire – envisioning, for instance, the challenge being issued with a broad, knowing wink – might suggest something else. If interpreted using the devices of satire, and specifically Menippean satire, hypothetical anomalies may well be revealed. That path of exploration begins by considering the derivation of the four media laws.

McLuhan’s writings focus on the impact of communications technology on culture. In many ways, his work shows a bias for the oral over the written, wherein the oral is more inclusive, less alienating than print, and oral communications fostered community and involvement, print culture fostered isolation, the distancing of perspective. McLuhan’s commentary on the media is characterized by a playfulness and creative manipulation of ideas. He conveys a sense of optimism in the face of confusing media sensory overload. His ideas about the media are communicated by means of analogy, metaphor, and other poetic figures. For McLuhan, "The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation" (Laws of Media, 98). The artist connects the linear, analytical left-brain activity with the analogical, holistic right-brain activity. The trickster is the cultural archetype who mediates between these two functions--to keep society in balance--and McLuhan fashioned himself after the trickster. His work constantly asks us to abandon our fixed points of view so as to perceive what we take for granted in new ways - the perfect juxtaposition to community development. Not simply views which imply an idealized literate culture corrupted by popular, commercialized, and manipulative media. McLuhan is especially insistent that an analysis of media content is meaningless--misses the point--since it is the medium which carries the lion’s share of the communication. Simply put, the medium affects the body and the psyche in relatively unconscious ways; thus it is more powerful than the message, which largely appeals to the conscious mind. McLuhan was untroubled by paradox, and in fact, reveled in paradox,
by stressing that the medium is the message rather than the content, however, I am not suggesting that content plays no role--merely that it plays a distinctly subordinate role. Even if Hitler had delivered botany lectures, some other demagogue would have used the radio to retribalize the Germans and rekindle the dark atavistic side of the tribal nature that created European fascism in the Twenties and Thirties. By placing all the stress on content and practically none on the medium, we lose all chance of perceiving and influencing the impact of new technologies on man, and thus, we are always dumfounded by--and unprepared for--the revolutionary environmental transformations induced by new media (McLuhan, 1960. p. 247).

Central to McLuhan’s method was the conviction that communications media alter the equilibrium of our senses. Media, in extending the senses, emphasize certain senses at the expense of others. Therefore, in an attempt to maintain a sense of balance, the psyche alters in a corresponding way. McLuhan owes the idea of media as extensions of the body to Edward Hall, stating "Today man has developed extensions for practically everything he used to do with his body. The evolution of weapons begins with the teeth and the fist and ends with the atom bomb...Money is a way of extending and storing labour.." (McLuhan, 1964. p. 79). In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan elaborates on this central premise: the wheel extends the feet, the automobile the whole body, writing the eye, clothing the skin, satellite the planet, and radio the ear. If the mechanical/industrial age extended the limbs and external organs, the electronic age extends the central nervous system.

McLuhan extended Hall’s concept with his insistence that the extension of one or another of the senses disturbed all the other faculties as a result. His books of the early 1960‘s, The Gutenburg Galaxy and Understanding Media strike a chord while seeking a greater understanding of social development, given that they trace the psychic disturbances of the electric age to a global level of consciousness. The overall message regarding the price we pay for special technological tools, whether the wheel or the alphabet or radio, is that these massive extensions of sense constitute closed systems. Our private senses are not closed systems, but rather, they are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious (McLuhan, 1988. p. 101).

Overlaying the McLuhan/Baudrillard constructs, media culture and its analysis become an international common hallucination, a hallucination triggered by unprecedented visual interplay with our physical selves. The very act of engaging in theoretical constructs, arguing for their validity, becomes an act of international common hallucination triggered by the digital matrix. Phatic discussion of who is and how we are free merely serves to further amplify a kind of paranoia of our digital age with its linch-pin being Orwellian allegory. As objects of ocular surveillance, our lives are no longer depicted as anything but a gigantic simulacrum. Promoting the study of surveillance, culture ultimately will deter any reference to the real, and instead retrieve Orwellian analogies and further reaffirm our belief in the values associated with a mocked-up representation of the real; merely reaching, responding, and creating more content.

What people have been subjected to, i.e. the media completing itself and merging with our physicality, is beyond comprehension when held in comparison to the default Orwellian surveillance meme. Analyzing the digital matrix as a maturation chamber for emergent peep habits, or as a tool of surveillance, is based on simple sender-receiver constructs. On the other hand, McLuhan and Baudrillard show us that media is about an experience which is beyond the dimensions of the physical body. We are all connecting our bodies into a massive network, creating a massive calculator. In retrospect, Marshall McLuhan's description of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch forty years ago hits the bulls-eye when applied to our interactive-media world:

... Burroughs, whose world is a paradigm of a future in which there
can be no spectators but only participants. All men are totally
involved in the insides of all men. There is no privacy and no private
parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one
another, there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is
the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global
membrane of enclosure (McLuhan, 1964).

It can therefore be posited whether social development processes are producing these matrix feeding weapons of mass instruction (a phrase borrowed from a book of the same title by John Taylor Gatto). The very processes they are attempting to subsume by illumination are relished by the media monsters craving to imbed android-like interaction, which is facilitated by the flickering of millions of screens literate culture becomes a function of algorithms and digital outputs. What we regard as meaningful exploration of emerging social constructs is merely a media pantomime, an illusion of individuals participating in forms of media which is merely spectacle for the processing analyzing, filtering and transmitting of digital data into machines. Rather, it is the construct of digital computer networks building, completing, and merging themselves to the banality of a literate society flailing in the after-image of capitalism (Bauldrillard, 2001).

Conclusions

“Mud sometimes has the illusion of depth.”
-Marshal McLuhan-

This review provides the rudimentary cornerstones to build symmetry between media ecology and the processes of community capacity building in the SAS² canon. The direct, yet often overlooked influence of Marshal McLuhan has immense potential to ripple into and permeate the ground of social development. This adds up to a clear pattern demonstrating that Marshal McLuhan and his contemporaries provide an amazing reveal of the hidden dimensions for studying mediated communication that are the processes of social development.

Community development must not be reactive, but rather anticipatory - along the lines of what McLuhan would call a "media ecology" orientation. Thus, the skillful means of SAS² represents a type of mediated communication control, which anticipates future social development rather than reacting to social development.

Juxtaposing Media Ecology and Social Development possess the potential for discovering the dialectic between culture and technology, striving to ‘hoik up’ the political; seeking culpability, compliance, and legality by emphasizing a need to think about the very nature of privacy as it relates to each individual. I have just begun to probe my own rabbit hole and I see that culture and technology have merged and come alive. Indeed, technology has truly taken on a life of its own. Perhaps some may feel my adventure is more aligned to what McLuhan is credited with saying, which could explain their stubborn confidence in the face of the myriad conflicting evidence. The system counts on the diversity of opinions generated in an information-overloaded society in an attempt to conceal what should be a very simple operation in many ways; this is a mere fraction of the phantasmagoria that comes twirling about . Basically, that is what you are doing; you are just trying to encourage people to recognize the patterns for themselves, but people are having a hard time with the notion of effect: how to perceive the new environment because we are so saturated with social media - literally technology is being generated at the same or greater speed than perception absorbing information at a faster rate the experience with relationships how we are interacting and communicating.

“This information is top security. When you have read it, destroy yourself.”
-Marshall McLuhan-

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