Bob's Post McLuhan Paramedia Ecology

Definition: Android Meme - Automated self-replicating unit of cultural transmission; machines communicating with machines.

Remember, the parts of the Android Meme are the Chemical Body, the Astral Body, the TV Body, and the Chip Body. the AP position, which is post-Chip Body and post-TV Body. Human bodies are First Nature, the human bodies make Second Nature, which is media and language. There's a subtle interplay between the bodies and the media. The bodies as souls come and go, but the media keeps building itself through time. So we come to the point where the media builds itself, completes itself, and it's merging with the bodies.

The best way to express that is to show the bodies, show the Android Meme dominating them, which is just simple language dominating humans in this dimension, then the language resolves itself through the Android Meme. We've moved into the fused First and Second Nature situation, and therefore you can't tell the difference between First Nature and Second Nature. Cloned ESP. I mean, people don't need words to function today. They have a post-verbal language, which is the intuitive electric media. Electronic digital media. e-mail be considered language?

That's ESP. That's mainly your instant interaction with people with words that are a component but not the dominating medium. In fact, the post-moderns talk about the end of the logocentric, that's visual space language. Verbal written language, that disappeared in the 20th century. But you still have language in terms of tactile communication, which is, you use a computer, e-mail, the fellow responds back to you, like when you do instant messaging. That's not verbal language. Verbal is inside it, part of what you read, or you can send pictures, but the instantaneous, the medium you use, the digital environment, is the language, is your tongue. It's your means to communicate.

I would say the simple agenda is this. Whatever traditional images you have that make you think you're being affected in a certain way, get rid of those images! Break up those images you have. Don't think "psychosomatic," don't think this, don't think "organic food processes," don't think any of these normal ideas of what might be causing you pain. What's affecting you is something that you can't really visualize. So you loosen up the people's obsession on, "Oh man, I ate too much Wheat Germ, that's causing this, I better go get a doctor to give me a drug."

If you get lost in that thought form, and the doctors give you a "solution," then that'll cause you more problems. You need to just sit back and say, "Yep, I'm being massaged," and just accept it. Basically the population's being put on a collective LSD trip, in a more subtle way than TV managed to do. Because these refined vibratory devices are affecting our chi levels, our etheric bodies, which is then affecting the astral plane. So we're being affected in ways that no knowledge system can map anymore.

The media needs new content. Because the media want to be kept on and people want to live in that discarnate cyberspace of TV. They want to be part of it every day. So every form of human expression will be used and exploited and expressed. So, you can play a game where each one of us is both figure and ground. Every one of us in this planet is in a yin-yang situation - we're creating our own disease as well as curing it.

The hidden environment is what's really motivating everybody, and creating a lot of obsession or neurosis, and the stress of life is always caused by the new invisible environment. Therefore, an antidote or an anaesthetic to that is the past environments, but to use them as props. So, all human creativity is now provided as the content, but the mixed corporate-media create the stress on people, and they're trying to find out how that stress is affecting them. They'll never be able to find out how that stress is affecting them. But all they have to do is understand what I'm talking about.

"Process" is what is affecting all of us, that's the hidden ground, and they just reflected the need, subconsciously, for psychology to adapt to the new electric environment in the '60s and '70s, the electric environment being processual. So they came up with concepts of "process". Now that concept is obsolete because they've exhausted it, people are no longer using it, but they are stuck in an environment that is process incarnate. So, they've got a problem.

You are saturated with TV by the time you are 18 or 19, you want to know what to do, you want to develop an identity. Study something that has taken the best of what has happened in the last 40 or 50 years. You study that and then you realize that the understanding you got from that is obsolete. Then that's the apocalypse - finding out that you don't exist. You have to deal with the fact you live in an almost Oriental oblivion, you live in a resonating void. Once you realize you are gone, you are invisible, in terms of expressing that relation to anybody else, you might then realize "I'm still here!", and then you start to realize you've survived.

by Bob Dobbs - paramedia megalomaniac

Idle Praxis

The role of communication in creating and sustaining healthy communities and enhancing grassroots community participation has been my personal professional focus in two primary ways: (1) Which communication dynamics need to be strengthened or balanced to discover positive and negative trends within the community to facilitate change (2) effective communication lays the path to success for both myself and for the community I work in and for.
A tertiary analysis of communication theory has fortified a repository of many sage words of advice: the study of communication theory offers the opportunity to be reflexive, engaged and an active participant with the conversation about communication theory. (Littlejohn and Foss, 2008, p 77); communication is one of the most persuasive, important, and complex aspects of human life. (Littlejohn and Foss, 2008.). Scholars have made many attempts to define communication but establishing a single definition has proved impossible (Littlejohn and Foss, 2008. ). Theories are not just things to be read and learned, they are constantly evolving works. (Littlejohn and Foss, 2008). Theories are not mutually exclusive from social context and historical traditions, but perhaps a reflection of those (Craig, 2007). Communication theory serves as an avenue of thought to study specialized forms of discourse, cultivated means of thinking and talking (Craig, 2007). Communication Theory is intellectual refinement of ordinary practices; an acts of interpretation (Craig, 2007). Communication theory serves as a fruitful source of ideas and stimulated perfunctory thought (Craig, 2007).


Almost in contradiction to that safe repository, LittleJohn and Foss (Littlejohn and Foss 2008) classify communication as virtually indefinable. Peter Craig posits communication theory as practical while at the same time stating, “even as we do more theory, we become (collectively if not individually) less certain of exactly what we are doing or should be doing. (Craig 2007. ix) 2). Pursuing this professional uber quest within the context of communication theory his theory overload has lead to a dire personal diagnosis of analysis paralysis; the situation where too many choices make it difficult to concretize and cause mental clutter. (Schwartz 2004). The power of analysis paralysis has further had the effect of generating a seemingly idle and discordant praxis out of the uber quest, the predominant question shifting from how to create and sustain healthy communities to how to make sense of and act upon communication theory, which in itself shifts the quest back to how to create and sustain healthy communities.

A primary source for the incongruent need for order in thought, theory, and action comes from Aristotelian histrionics which argue that in the face of uncertainty, in a world based on chance, order emerges in a linear manner as the final and ideal form. Widespread Aristotelian based thinking has imbedded itself as a predominant academic model and has reinforced the idea that clutter and chaotic thought has little value in and of itself other than being observed as a mere component of a linear logical sequence moving toward a final resolution or theory. In an Aristotelian world, idle and dissonant praxis is the antithesis of the best conclusion.

Upholding the linear modality, Claude Shannon formulated a theory explaining the communication of information (Shannon – weaver model, 2003). Shannon’s Information Theory includes the basic elements of any general communication system. Information is the message. Communication is the medium through which the information is transferred and synthesized. According to Shannon, the basic elements of any general communication system includes the following: a) Source b) Sender c) Message d) Channel e) Receiver f) Destination and g) Noise source communication is not just what we talk. Expressions, gestures or visual sense.(4) But effective communication occurs only when the three important aspects of communication viz., 1) visual (used in seeing: the visual sense) (2) audio (pertaining to, or employed in the transmission, reception, or reproduction of sound) and 3) kinesics (the study of body movements, gestures, facial expressions, etc., as a means of communication) are in the right proportion. Therefore, in general, human communication may be defined as, “the process in which all of the three important aspects of communication is involved in the right proportion, in order to exchange information between humans in an effective manner.”

The compulsion toward linearity and the need to avoid dissonance is comparable to satisfying hunger and is reinforced in communication’s cybernetic tradition which states simply that people are more comfortable with consistency than inconsistency. (Festinger as quoted in Griffin, 2006, p 228) People seek homeostasis. The mind is imagined as a system that takes inputs from the environment in the form of information processes and then creates behavioural outputs (Littlejohn and Foss, 2008). Festinger posits three possible outputs: the first registers the input as irrelevant; the second registers the input as consonant and third registers the input dissonant, registering the input as an opposition to some other consonant or irrelevant input; ergo cognitive dissonance is given its birth. The degree of dissonance experienced is a function of two factors (1) the relative proportions of constant dissonant elements and (2) the importance of the elements or issue (Littlejohn and Foss, 2008, p.77). Festinger imagined a number of methods for dealing with cognitive dissonance: (1) altering the importance of the issue of the elements involved, (2) changing one or more of the cognitive elements, (3)adding a new element to one side of the tension or the other, (4) seeing consonant information and (5) distorting or misinterpreting dissonant evidence (Littlejohn and Foss, p.78). The application of the theory of cognitive dissonance then is the active attempt to avoid it. LittleJohn and Foss use the metaphor of buyer’s remorse (Littlejohn and Foss, 2008, p79) to describe cognitive dissonance. Being plagued by regret and second thoughts after a tough choice, people seek information that vindicates their decision and dispels nagging doubt. If an individual states a belief that is difficult to justify, that person will attempt to justify the belief making his or her attitudes more consistent with the statement (Aronson, 2004, p. 164). We succeed in modifying our attitudes because we have succeeded in convincing ourselves that our previous attitudes were incorrect. Acting as if we believe something promotes the belief itself. What becomes illuminated is the ongoing potential for the Stockholm Effect en masse. People are not rational beings but rather rationalizing beings. Humans are motivated not so much to be right as to believe they are right and to justify their own actions beliefs and feelings. When they do something they will try to convince themselves and others that is was a logical reasonable thing to do. (Aronson, 2004, p. 164. 
 An excellent starting place for anyone wishing to experience analysis paralysis, in its own right, are the works of Roland Barthes. Challenging standard beliefs and theorizing on the interpretation of signs Barthes' ultimate goal was to explain how seemingly straightforward signs pick up ideological meaning and work to maintain the status quo. In Barthes’ theory, he states that a sign has a signifier and a signified. The signifier is something that is seen and grasped; what the signifier represents is the signified. You cannot have one with out the other. Manipulation of the signified is the means of retaining social control, or status quo, the modus operandi for modern social marketers, bank robbers, or even community developers.

Paulo Freire challenged the one way flow of Aristotelian histrionics; the traditional communication model. Freire insisted on the fact that communication is a process that cannot be considered in isolation away from social and political processes. But he, like others, called for a greater emphasis on praxis. Freire's "conscentiation" (Friere, 1970) means simply thoughts perceive reality as a process of transformation rather than a static entity. This challenged the one way flow and proposed a communication model rooted in dialogue and discussion. Praxis is reflexive of internal processes rather than external. This again creates a fresh fissure from which to nourish analysis paralysis. Applying Freire’s theory to augment community development strategies creates a paradox; community development is an external process intended to effect change in social structures where reflexivity is internal rather than external. 


A parallel paradox is illuminated by extolling reflection on practice rather than theory (Bordieu, 1991). Those who create theory have an abstract logic that is different from the practical logic of those who live in the social world. Those who create theory, the observers, do not represent practical knowledge. Practical activities represent the world of action, things from the experience of participants. This participant-observer paradox has to do with a person's point of view. One is either a participant or an observer. The paradox emerges when one realizes that it is only as an observer that one comes to know that he is a participant and what that entails. What Bordieu wants to do is to create a theory based on practice where life is seen only through subjective experience.

Imagine now three dialogues: in the first a conversation is forgotten quickly, never to be recalled; in the second an enjoyable conversation takes place, but in recalling it content is not remarkable or specific; in the third, someone makes a statement you which you cannot immediately comprehend, and the result is confusion or perhaps embarrassment. What has occurred in the latter example becomes an occurrence of dramatic proportions that neither of the first two examples illustrate (Briankle, 2006,) . These are the theoretical examples offered by Briankle in an effort to postulate a truth in communication: that the sense of apprehension or uncertainly - when there is a moment, however minimal, of non understanding – is the true moment of communication. The sense of apprehension or uncertainly about what is to unfold more powerfully defines an event that is truly communicative when one does not understand. Communication can therefore take place when it appears not to take place. This theory offers yet another communication paradox – in this case to the linear communication model where communication is understood as an intentional and observable process of creating and sharing information for mutual understanding.

Overwhelmed by detail; better than anything that has been herein reviewed and considered, the best resolution of analysis paralysis comes from the Belgian artist Francis Alys’ work The Paradox of Praxis. In this work the artist took a very large block of ice and pushed it through the streets. The melting ice left an evaporating trail of water and eventually nothing more than a puddle evaporating in the street. Praxis is the idea of deep conviction that hard work brings tangible benefits. But as Alys communicated in this work the struggle slowly, steadily, inevitably dissipates transforming first into distraction (the focus on pushing the block of ice through the streets) eventually into trivial sport (playing and kicking the ice block, in its latter form, along the streets), and finally into a soon to be forgotten wet smudge evaporating on an anonymous city street. (Zwirner, The David Zwirner Gallery).

My conclusion: simply overwhelmed.


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"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." -Nietzsche









References
Aronson, E. (2004). The Social Animal (9th ed.). New York: Worth Publishers.
Bordieu, P. (1990). In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology. Sanford University Press
Bordieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge University Press
Briankle, C. (1996). Deconstructing Communication Representation, Subject, and Economics of Exchange, University of Minnesota Press.
Craig, R. T., & Muller, H. L. (2007). Theorizing Communication: Readings Across Traditions. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
Griffin, E. (2006). A First Look at Communication Theory (6th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Littlejohn, S. W., & Foss, K. A. (2005). Theories of Human Communication (9th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth.
Schwartz, B. (2004). The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More, Harper Collins/ECCO. New York, NY.
The Shannon-Weaver Model. In CCMS, Communication Culture and Media Studies, retrieved January 16, 2009 from http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/index.html
Watson, J., & Hill, A. (1989). A Dictionary of Communication and Media Studies (2nd ed.). London: Edward Arnold.
Zwirner, D. David Zwirner Gallery. The Paradox of Praxis. Retrieved January 13, 2009 from www.davidzwirner.com/news/87/work_2902.htm

Gobbledygook and Social Change

Social change is the task of altering social consciousness, and much of that task is done through language and communication. Though the actual effort required to speak is low when compared to other activities, words carry a lot of power. In the affairs of humans, language is very important. Whether written or spoken, language may be the greatest weapon used in a social change journey. Words carefully crafted for mass consumption by a gifted communications expert can elicit mass support and social change; how we use language as a tool is important for it can orchestrate creation, or it can shape destruction.

One of the most interesting ways to explore communications as a tool for social change is through the lens of nonsense, or gobbledygook. Marshal McLuhan while touring the South Pacific in the late-1970’s was interviewed on the Australian Broadcasting Commission program, Monday Conference (Moody, 2001). Throughout the interview McLuhan discussed dialogue as an alternative to violence, and developed his precept that the task at hand is to understand media because understanding the nature of these forms neutralize some of the adverse effects. McLuhan often inferred a predilection for teasing, challenging and confusing people. As an example, McLuhan frequently punned on the word "message" changing it to "mass age", "mess age", and "massage"; a later book, The Medium is the Massage was originally to be titled The Medium is the Message, but McLuhan preferred the new title which is said to have been a printing error (Wikipedia).

The phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" was coined by Noam Chomsky as an example of nonsense. The individual words make sense, and are arranged according to proper grammar, yet the result is still nonsense. The inspiration for this attempt at creating verbal nonsense came from the idea of contradiction and irrelevant or immaterial characteristics (an idea cannot have a dimension of color, green or otherwise), both of which would be sure to make a phrase meaningless. The phrase "the square root of Tuesday" operates on the latter principle. This principle is behind the inscrutability of the koan "What is the sound of one hand clapping?", as one hand would supposedly require another hand to complete the definition of clapping. Still, the human will to find meaning, even in nonsense is strong.

The dreamlike language of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake sheds light on nonsense in a similar way; full of portmanteau words, it is bursting with multiple layers of meaning, but in many passages it is difficult to say whether any one person's interpretation of a text is the intended or correct one. There may in fact be no such interpretation.

Jabberwocky is a poem of nonsense verse found in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll. It is generally considered to be one of the greatest nonsense poems written in the English language. The word jabberwocky has also occasionally been used as a synonym of nonsense.

George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm is about a group of animals who take over a farm in the name of freedom and democracy. Eventually the pigs gain control over the rest of the animals and it becomes a totalitarian state. Similarly, Orwell’s 1984 is about a totalitarian society which controls and manipulates recorded history and the language to control the populace. In his work Politics and the English Language Orwell writes, “Political regeneration is indeed within our package of tasks” (Orwell, G.). He further identifies the marks of political writing such as “staleness of imagery” and “lack of precision” the ability to dissolve the concrete in the abstract. Orwell persists like a priest identifying the mark of the devil, in his case it is the mark of totalitarianism. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases, one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy; a feeling which becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying. This reduced state of consciousness is favorable to political conformity.

Of all the discordant and truly fantastic theories about language is one that personally provides the most fun; it is that of Linda Goodman (1993), who proposed that in the beginning of all things, the creators spoke certain sounds which produced differing sets of vibrational frequencies in the ethers. Some of these were of such low frequency that they formed particles of what we call matter or physical substance. In this manner were tiny word druids created. These nature spirit druids were charged with the sacred mission of hiding and protecting the Anglo-Saxon alphabet until the preordained time for it to be resurrected and gradually re-seeded into the mass collective sub consciousness of humans. Part of the work of these word druids is to place deeper esoteric meaning within words; many of us have played these anagram games. According to Goodman, by treating each work as an anagram, we discover deep meaning. Goodman calls these Lexigrams. An example of what she does to discern true meaning from words, is here from the word ABORTIONS (Goodman, p.113):

It is torn
It is not born
It is a robot
A robot is not born
No sin
Is abortion sin?
No, it is not a sin

Now, to try this personally it is an opportunity to give common sense a work-out. Chosen arbitrarily the random word selection next lexigramed herein is BULLSHIT:
Is this Bull?
It is still bull.
Thus this is bull.
This is but bull.

A relatively harmless and fun theory, and as silly as it may seem, in an odd and different way it too demonstrates the power which can be hidden in words; incredulity assists us in seeking ways of discerning meaning and truth. Like McLuhan’s teasing, challenging and confusing, these uses of language and communication have the capacity to halt socially conditioned responses and ordinary patterns of interacting and perceiving - and by so doing assist in a next logical step in social change which is to expose the ‘what if’s’. Like discovering positive deviance, these discordant processes and theories have the potential for birthing innovation and to allow new knowing to emerge.

It is truly disheartening however, to learn of a growing body of literature and practice which suggests that innovation does not have to be an uncontrollable force. Instead, it can be a rational management process with its own distinct set of processes, practices, and tools (Keeley, 2007). In fact, some research shows that this type of systematic innovation in an organization typically yields much more productive, scalable, and sustainable ideas over time. Systematic innovation requires well-managed and repeatable processes, to move an organization beyond a dependence on the lightning-strike of sporadic innovations and to create a more constant and dependable flow of new ideas:“Innovation that works is a disciplined process…. The real frontier is to not think of it as a creative exercise, but to think about it as being disciplined in using the right methods.” (Keeley, p.78)

Governments and businesses—especially large corporations—have responded to these insights about systematic innovation by improving their research & development teams, using more collaborative design processes, open-sourcing to find innovation and innovators, and restructuring to offer greater incentives. There are a wide range of new methodologies and strategies that have been developed to help foster and promote innovation. Yet in the social sector, where creative thinking abounds it is in fact the nonsensical and the move to unknowing which is more powerful than the knowing; it is the offering of questions and not the answers which brings the greatest innovation and social change (Born, 2008)

Other than indulging my cultural paranoia, there is no single meaning in this missive for there could be several, I merely wish to demonstrate that truth can be elusive; that knowledge is personal and relative; and to emphasize Orwell’s warnings, be conscious of the world of language and communication. As awareness of deep social trauma enters our lives, we must be aware of the attempts to conceal it. We must be aware of political attempts to use language, written or spoken, to create generalities of reality, to undermine the freedom and rights of all. Listen to your bosses and politicians adopt carefully crafted phrases and listen to yourself as you adopt those phrases; and remember what is suggested here, that nonsense and the incredulity it generates, may be more masterful marriage in the creation of positive and fruitful social change.

References:
Born, P.. 2008. Community Conversations, BPS Books, Toronto ON
Fivebodied, retrieved November 9, 2009 from http://www.fivebodied.com
Goodman, L. 1993. Linda Goodman’s Starsigns. St. Martins Press, New York, NY
Keeley, L., 2007. Taming of the New. SuccessBooks retrieved from
http://books.google.ca/books, November 15, 2009
Moody, B., 2001. Redeveloping Communication for Social Change. p. 878 from Communication for Social Change Anthology, Gumucio, A. Retrieved from http:// books.google.ca/books November 10, 2009.
Orwell, G., Politics and the English Language retrieved from
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit, November 7, 2009