The documentary film-maker of “Pirate of the Sea,” Mr. Ronald Colby, was very pleasant to converse with. The film is excellent, but I was unprepared for some of the more graphic scenes of killing the baby seals, and all that goes on with the butchery of whales, and found myself looking away from all of the blood, dismembered bodies, seal mothers weeping for their skinned dead cubs, and whale mothers murdered and dragged away from their helpless calves. It is absolutely essential that the footage be included, but it is difficult to endure witnessing such violence and brutality even once, much less what it would take to create the documentary. I asked Colby how he managed to get through editing the film and he admitted that there were times when he wondered if he could go on with it, but that the purpose of giving the public the opportunity to SEE what is and has gone on, was so important to him, it strengthened his resolve. He also reminded me that it wasn’t just the footage he took himself he had to edit, but hours and hours of other documentary films (incredible and admirable dedication to this project). A interesting conversation, with I think a very thoughtful filmmaker. Surprisingly, his general background in the industry is in the fiction genre! This is a rare and recent venture into documentary work (for him). He manages to keep a sense of suspense throughout, which in my experience is unusual for documentary films; perhaps the influence of plot development critical to the storytelling conventions for fiction, enhances the strength of “telling the story” in documentary production?

The Plympton film was very well done, if very strange.

Fernando Gutiérrez y yo somos autores del capítulo 3: “Understanding the New Digital Ecology in Mexico: The Organizations and Arrangemente of Complex Media Environments.

Cardoso, et al. (2009). World Wide Internet Changing Societies Economics and Cultures. Macao: University of Macao.

It may be somewhat cliche in academic circles to cite American educator and philosopher John Dewey to launch any particular exploration, but I’ve always believed him to be one of the great treasures of our national heritage and a thinker largely unappreciated outside the walls of academia. His pragmatism, in combination with his brilliant mind, define the essence of great American reasoning, and so I begin this piece with his work in mind.

Dewey’s work on democracy is pinned to some very important notions of the role of communication. He had a sense of the ecological in his beliefs about our communities and their foundations in acts of communication as shared experience. In his work The Public and its Problems, Dewey explores the fits and starts of technological evolution in the early 20th century and their obvious impact on the disintegration of community as we’d known it previously. Primary to his argument, Dewey draws a connection between the system of signs and symbols that developed gradually over time to reinforce old institutions and the lack of such signs in the sped up society of the industrial era. In the end, Dewey writes that without the evolution of a congruent relationship of signs and symbols “the public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance…Communication alone can create a great community. Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible.”

Fast forward to Robert Putnam’s work on the decline of civic engagement and his findings that the introduction of television to a broad American audience coincides with the decline of interest in civic life. His book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community expanded on his more technical findings and gave access to these ideas about our way of life to a broader audience. Of course the details are more complex than to simply rest the entire case on television, but a good deal of the findings lean in that direction. Putnam’s work harkens back to Dewey in many respects. The ideas that he puts forth lean on the effects of home-based entertainment and a sedentary lifestyle, but a good media ecologist would also note that Dewey’s public seeks spasmodically for itself, seizing and holding its shadow, largely due to the disconnect between a consciousness rooted in the distant pixels of the television screen trying to make sense of a physical world right under our noses.

The introduction of television to American communities certainly had a negative effect on civic participation, but there are distinct cultural trends that precipitated the technological shift as well. It has been said that communication is culture, but there is also ample evidence to show that the reverse is true as well; culture is communication. No matter which angle you prefer to take on this subject, there is plenty of evidence to paint a complex picture of the interplay between technology and culture and their mutual influence. Mindich helps to broaden the discussion on this topic, but looking further back in American history we find a profound and prescient analysis of this very issue.

There was no television in 1927, when Dewey penned The Public and Its Problems, but he noted quite interestingly that the dynamic nature of modern society had a deleterious effect on public life. He wrote, “The older publics, in being local communities, largely homogenous with one another, were also, as the phrase goes, static…The newer forces have created mobile and fluctuating associational forms. The common complaints of the disintegration of family life may be placed in evidence. The movement from rural to urban assemblies is also the result and proof of this mobility. Nothing stays long put, not even the associations by which business and industry are carried on…How can a public be organized, we may ask, when literally it does not stay in place?”

As he continues, Dewey remarks that human attachment is lost in the mass production of remote markets, facilitated by electronic media, cheap printing, and modern forms of transportation. He wrote, “A glance at the situation shows that the physical and external means of collecting information in regard to what is happening in the world have far outrun the intellectual phase of inquiry and organization of its results. Telegraph, telephone, and now the radio, cheap and quick mails, the printing press, capable of swift reduplication of material at low cost, have attained a remarkable development…‘News’ signifies something which has just happened, and which is new just because it deviates from the old and regular. But its meaning depends on relation to what it imports, to what its social consequences are. This import cannot be determined unless the new is placed in relation to the old, to what has happened and been integrated into the course of events. Without coordination and consecutiveness, events are not events, but mere occurrences, intrusions; and event implies that out of which a happening proceeds.”

In many ways, all electronic media function to this effect, be it the telegraph or broadband Internet. Postman rightly pointed out in Amusing Ourselves to Death that the ability to connect distant points didn’t mean that they had anything relevant to say to one another. Hence, trivia was born on a mass scale. This effect of electronic communication is perhaps the most obvious source of our social schizophrenia, the surface layer, if you will, the skin of our postmodern disconnect with the physical world under our feet. Let me explain.

Information is, simply put, the organization of data in a way that it makes sense to a receiver. If the natural state is entropy, information is the sorting of some element in a way that reduces entropy in favor of clarity. In the case of human communication we deal in terms of language and symbols as the units of logic by which entropy is reigned in. When we consider this concept in terms of the events of the world around us, our news media have long played the role of gatekeeper, in effect providing a logic by which we understand ‘reality’ amidst the entropic state of the universe. Admittedly, this task is far too much to expect from any human made institution, and when we include schools, families, and communities in the process we only begin to make sense of a small fraction of the universe in all its glory. Still, when we follow the pragmatist model, its enough to distill our environment into the elements by which we can reasonably hold together a community around shared values, goals, and beliefs. When we introduce agenda-driven messages to the logic, be it political propaganda, commercial propaganda, or simply uninformed perspective, we pollute the delicate organization of this critical data, necessary for the functioning of community, particularly in a democracy.

Understanding Postman’s point, mentioned previously, and adding the notion of speed by which portable, high speed Internet technology operates, we can see an explosion of confusion. It’s not so much that there’s too much information, but rather too little. Remember the definition offered here. There’s too little sorting of the important messages. The differentiation between trivia, the basic tools of survival, and the extended logic necessary to thrive is lacking. The aforementioned schizophrenia can be directly associated with entropy disguised as an information revolution. Certainly, some progress is periodically made in building streams of information via applications like Google, not to mention a host of lesser known entities, but it’s not enough. It’s akin to using a sieve to gather enough water to quench one’s thirst.

As the America 2.0 project takes flight here, a number of different philosophical approaches will be introduced into the examination in hopes of tying together some important concepts and some important perspectives on who we are, what we’ve become, how we got here, and what we can do from here to make sense of it all. The intent here is, in the pragmatist tradition, to tie the conceptual and the theoretical to some process of effecting constructive change on our environment. On that note, I turn back to Dewey.

Dewey’s notion of the formation of a public depends on spontaneous groups of citizens who share the indirect consequences of a specific action. These citizens use this common interest as a basis on which they solve a problem. This is a highly dynamic process, as new interests emerge and dissolve, but the speed with which the new electronic media of his day altered the landscape of information, without regard to time or space, prevented a cohesive bond to form across a scattered and uncoordinated landscape. Dewey’s notion of the formation of a public and his observations of technology’s effect on American democracy provide an important historical vantage point from which to examine Putnam. Putnam is concerned with civic engagement and social capital. The focus of America 2.0 is the restoration of an environment in which a public can form and civic life can be revived. This means a radical redefinition of our community organization. The electronic and the physical must find a way to meet in order for a new logic to emerge. This logic is the system by which we pluck meaningful messages from entropy. It’s the logic by which we grasp the substance of our environment, all the while understanding the importance of its shadow.

In the next piece in this series, The Library as a hub for the America 2.0 community will be explored. A redefinition of libraries and their role in civic life will provide the platform upon which further exploration will be undertaken.

The inaugural post here at iProgress is a statement of sorts. A redefinition of the terms of American organization. A redefinition of the relationship between citizens, community, government, power, culture, and the complex interactions and meanings associated with each. To be sure, the term ‘America 2.0′ didn’t start here, with the title of this post. If one ‘Googles’ the term it appears sporadically throughout blog posts, clever comments in various nooks and crannies of the Web, and even in a handful of mainstream articles.

What you won’t find anywhere (that I’m aware of) is any articulated vision of what an America 2.0 would look like and, in fact, what the idea means. Generally speaking, America 2.0 is a simple allusion to the idea that citizens and government interact differently as a result of Internet and social network technology. The simple notion that individuals can now communicate directly to and about the government and its institutions is the essence of America 2.0, as far as my exploration has uncovered. What I intend to pursue via this ‘borrowed’ and underdeveloped phrase is a reexamination of the relationship between Amercan community, its infrastructure, institutions, individuals, and symbolic environment. This undertaking will be conducted through a lens ground and refined by scholars and thinkers from a wide variety of disciplines, but best articulated through the tradition of media ecology and the men and women credited with providing the core structure of its philosophy.

As America 2.0 grows and evolves at iProgress, participation from readers and fellow philosophers, scholars, and citizens of all stripes will be key, for, you see, America 2.0 is not a place or a concept modeled on top-down thinking, but rather from collaborative, multi-directional, grassroots communication that typifies the media environment in which our national discourse is currently advancing fastest.

An important note about America 2.0: Nothing is more important to understand about this concept than the idea that our sense of national character, our culture and our communities, are experiencing a kind of structural schizophrenia in large part due to the contradictions found in the way we have extended ourselves into a world of digital, electronic networks that stand in stark contrast to the corporeal realities that make up the ‘natural’ world, for lack of a better term. On one hand, we’ve seen the acceleration of corporations and institutions operating in a stratosphere beyond the reach of most individuals and their relatively small claimant groups. We’ve see ourselves immersed in electronic environments which have transported our consciousnesses around the world without a care for space or time, but our ideas and beliefs have become increasingly disconnected from our bodies and the physicality of our environment, in which the importance of ‘meaning’ and ‘action’ of the greatest concern. This includes notions of fairness, morality, ethics, and a sense of empathy that is essential to our humanity. The specifics of this phenomenon are for another time and another post, but it’s important to recognize that the basis for America 2.0 must be one of structural integration where the physical world meets the conceptual and the cybernetic.

As the pioneer of the concepts discussed here at iProgress, I intend to drive the bus, so to speak, by providing some intellectual foundations for this concept. Some of the core principles and structural elements will be mine and will hopefully provide a singular coherence to the project. Input from outside sources will always be welcome and should push the project in a positive and broadly useful direction. America 2.0 is what we say it is, and the ideas will begin to crystallize here.

The is the first part in a series of works featuring the famous dog Laika who traveled to space on Sputnik 2 in 1957. The second part called “The Seance – The Medium is the Message” is currently in production, and will be out in March 2010. I’ll be writing about this project quite a bit, so I’ll just credit this quickly for now:
Created by Lior Lerman with Jonathan Shohet and Saray Levin, Tchelet Weisstub, Shahaf Bornstein, Jonathan Albalak, Michael Berkowitz and Ayelet Lerman.

These are screen captures from a video of the performance of “Laika 1: Elogies and Prophecies”. It was performed in the “Stage Song Festival” In Wroclaw, Poland, 2008.

(Video//Mediacology)

Digital technologies increasingly encroach on the analog media environment. The book, a stalwart in many respects, is beginning its shift to the digital. While audio and video were easily subsumed into the digital data flow, print (at least in book form, sorry newspapers) has resisted digital transmutation.

A longer post might investigate the reasons for this resistance, but, suffice it to say, it is the material conditions of the printed book and the use protocols of books that give it staying power. Reading a paper page is easier than reading on digital display screens – a problem many are trying to remedy, such as Amazon with its digital book reader. Also, a reader can write in the margins of a book with ease. Producing a similar kind of “interactivity” (trite word alert!) in a digital book reader isn’t easy. No one wants to type a short thought and hand writing on digital displays isn’t nearly as easy as good ole pen to paper. These material conditions conspire to keep that age old media technology alive and vibrant.

But, just as it would be a mistake to think that digital tech will imminently subsume the book, it would also be a mistake to think that just because book shelves in book stores and libraries remain flush with paper volumes that the digital hasn’t already changed our use of the book.

With projects like Google’s Book Search underway, the world’s books will soon be completely digitized. That is, the “information” of the books will be stored in digital format and subjected to complex algorithms. Every word will be searchable along with a wealth of metadata. This atomization of the book’s information will change the way we access and read books. Even if the stacks remain full of books for the foreseeable future, the virtualization of the text in digital format, as Pierre Levy terms it, engenders new use protocols, even with analog books.

At least in practical terms, this is a kind of win-win situation. Readers benefit from the strengths of both analog and digital technologies; you still get to read the book in the more pleasant analog format, yet you can easily search for, and through, books using digital technologies. It’s the best of both worlds.

These are just some preliminary thoughts on a paper I will be writing soon.

Just kidding. If you believe the claim offered by the title of this post, you may be drowning in the fetid cesspool that is our celebrity obsessed culture. I feel sorry for Michael Jackson’s family–mostly his kids–but I think it’s a pity that they are selling tickets to his memorial tomorrow at the Staples Center. It’s not just a pity. It’s disgusting. More than twenty years ago, Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death that television was eroding discourse in this country because of its structural elements as a medium. He claimed that TV has disconnected information from its context; that the lines between discourse–any discourse, political, legal, etc.– and entertainment were blurring more and more.  Michael Jackson’s death may not be the apotheosis of this phenomenon, but it is a disturbing signpost along the way.

It goes without saying that stories like his distract us from more important issues, and yet I feel I have to say this. Why? Because Postman’s argument is eerily prophetic. Discourse has become entertainment. That is to say, most discourse is entertainment. Look at the nightly news. It starts with a car chase or crash and ends with some mindless puff piece. News as entertainment. Look at any political rally or debate. The pundits are there to highlight the drama, to tell us who more skillfully handled the crowd. Politics as entertainment. Maybe, just maybe, the Internet has begun to change discourse. Maybe the fact that so many people turn to Internet to communicate with each other about issues that are important to them signals a dramatic shift in the discourse/entertainment continuum. Maybe real, serious, meaningful discourse is possible. Maybe this very blog and all the blogs like it are proof of that.

Then again, maybe not.

La imagen, la especie predadora: impresiones desde la Media Ecology

Hace dos años tuve la oportunidad de participar por primera ocasión en el Encuentro de la Media Ecology Association (MEA). En aquel entonces dos grandes amigos, Fernando Gutiérrez, Director de la Carrera de Comunicación del Tecnológico de Monterrey y miembro del Board de la Asociación y Octavio Islas Titular del Proyecto Internet del mismo Tecnológico me invitaron a coordinar una mesa de investigación en la que sería la primer ocasión que la Asociación realizaba un congreso internacional fuera de los Estados Unidos.

Sin lugar a dudas, me pareció una oportunidad fabulosa para invitar a un nutrido grupo de colegas a presentar trabajos afines a un tema que en aquellos días me inquietaba en gran medida, la Alfabetización digital, y que sin saberlo respondía a una preocupación que guarda la MEA y que en voz de Neil Postam expresa simpatía con la definición que hiciera de la metáfora que da soporte a la Asociación: “Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival”.

Tomándola como punto de partida en el grupo de trabajo nos dimos a la tarea de explorar el modo en que las tecnologías de información estaban reconfigurando el hábitat en que las generaciones digitales nacían, crecían y exigían un diálogo empático con el modo en que usaban, se apropiaban y resignificaban su realidad. Así que aprovechando el espacio presenté una ponencia bajo el título Gestión Crítica hipermedial: un modelo de aprendizaje multivía. Un texto en el que intentaba dar cuenta de cómo los hipermedios estaban jugando un rol de fuerza “liberadora” eliminando las fronteras entre infancia y edad adulta. Estas trasformación en las audiencias dejaban ver en el fondo al infante más que como un ciudadano prosumer, como un consumidor.

Aún cuando coincidía con una serie de los postulados vertidos por Neil Postman y su clásico The Disappearance of Childhood (1983), me preocupaba caer en un determinismo tecnológico o en extremo moral, pero reconocía la razón que tenía Postman cuando afirmaba que “la televisión es un medio de apertura total a través del cual los niños acceden cada vez más al conocimiento de los “secretos” de la vida adulta –sexo, drogas, violencia- que anteriormente les habrían resultado inaccesibles en virtud del código especializado de la imprenta. En consecuencia, los niños se comportan cada vez más como adultos, y exigen compartir los privilegios de los adultos”. Más aún, después de revisar a detalle las estrategias mercadológicas que Martin Lindstrom reportaba en su texto Brandchild (2006) y Juliet Schor en Nacidos para comprar (2006).

Por otro lado, no podía dejar de dar cuenta de la Generación Net que nos presentó Don Tapscott (1988) y las Multitudes inteligentes de Rheingold (2002) en las que las jóvenes audiencias exigen mayor control de los medios que consumen. A diferencia de Postman quien se opuso al uso de la televisión en la educación intentando rescatar a la escuela como el último bastión en la defensa de la cultura impresa, pretendía con este texto el que pasáramos a una segunda alfabetización que migrara de la letra impresa a la letra digital; que nos permitiera emplear herramientas como el blog, los wikis, las interfaces de inmersión multimediales en una plataforma multivía. Un aprovechar la dinámica interactiva, participativa y abierta que dejaba ver la web 2.0

Dos años después de haber tenido la oportunidad de convivir con varios discípulos directos de Postman se nos dio la oportunidad de conocer –por lo menos en espíritu y palabra- al tercera persona de la triada sagrada de la Media Ecology el Sacerdote Jesuita Walter Ong quien tuviera como amigo y director de tesis a Marshall McLuhan. El Padre Ong, sin duda estuvo marcado fuertemente por su formación religiosa sustentada en el libro y la palabra de ahí que fuera un gran defensor de la oralidad, sosteniendo al habla como raíz de la escritura. Así generó las categorías de Oralidad Primaria y Secundaria. La primera de ellas se refiere a la que poseen las culturas que no conocen la escritura ni la impresión; y la segunda para referirse a las formas de comunicación de aquellos que conocen la escritura, la impresión y otras formas mediáticas que dependen de la escritura para su funcionamiento y existencia.

Esta trans-oralidad y metagrafía se ha hizo presente en la 10 Convención Anual de la Asociación que se realizó en el hogar académico del Padre Ong y en su momento de McLuhan: La Universidad de San Luis en Missouri. Cuatro días. Nueve paneles, tres conferencias magistrales, cinco sesiones plenarias, una presentación multimedia fueron la flora en el ecosistema que recibiera a la fauna variopinta que nos dimos cita en tan bello recinto.

En esta edición un tema central era lo que denominaron el Renacimiento de Walter Ong quien hipertextualmente se filtraba en cada ponencia, cada mención y cada conferencia. Hoy en la Media Ecology convergen aquellos investigadores que también coinciden con el Institute of General SemanticMy Social Media Generation. participando en ambas autoridades de la talla de Lance Strate. La Media Ecology resulta ser un espacio acogedor en el que conviven desde los involucrados con las tecnologías móviles, la publicidad política, los estudios semiológicos, la teología de la comunicación hasta los estudios culturales. En ese espectro de diversidad y afinidades tuve la oportunidad de reunirme con grandes amigos y dar cuenta en carne propia de lo que implica Facebook fuera de Facebook y entablar networking entre salones, taxis y Starbucks con amigos que migraron de la virtualidad a la realidad como Carlos Scolari, Jerónimo Rivera y Fernando Gutiérrez. Acción que ponía en evidencia parte de la temática presentada en mi ponencia en la que exploraba algunas características de lo que yo denomino

Pero más allá de nuestros avatares y andanzas comparto una serie de cuestionamientos derivados de las temáticas expuestas y ese biologismo imperante en muchas de las ponencias en las que percibí a la televisión y particularmente a la imagen como especie predadora entre los medios. Enlisto pues una serie de preguntas que fluyeron de mi iPod a la libreta, de la laptop a la memoria:

1) En el contexto hipermediático actual ¿qué tanto la forma influye en el contenido?, ¿Excluye la forma al contenido? ¿Determina los modos de distribución y recepción? ¿Qué papel juega “el hecho” y el “contexto”?

2) ¿Se pierden las raíces en la red? Qué es lo que nos gusta de la actividad en línea, ¿la actividad o lo que ocurre en paralelo? ¿En las redes sociales nos multiplicamos o fragmentamos?

3) En una cultura de la imagen y la fantasía, ¿qué hace a una persona atractiva?, ¿Qué lleva a los otros a buscarla o competir contra ella? En las redes sociales ¿competimos o interactuamos? ¿Son los medios sociales la nueva arena de competencia en la que buscamos con la personalización una forma descarada de distinción ante el otro?

4) ¿Conocemos realmente al otro basados en un coleccionismo de acciones, símbolos y objetos intangibles?

5) ¿qué papel juega el tiempo, el espacio en blanco, el “tiempo muerto” en el proceso cognitivo del navegante social? ¿Qué tipo de construcciones mentales hacemos del otro cuando nos permite hacer inmersión Multimedial en su vida digital? ¿opera en una escala similar a la construcción del mito, la expectación, la teatralidad y la construcción simbólica?

6) Dejo estas preguntas al aire y cierro con una serie de líneas que compartió Alan Kay en su ponencia “Distracting Ourselves to Death”:

a. “The small differences between belief and perception just barely allow Science to be invented (but not easily!)”

b. “It takes almos as much creativity to undestand a new idea as was required to invent it!”

c. “Science is a negotiation between our dreams an what is out there”

d. “System ecology is a negotiation between News and New”

Les invito a leer la reseña del evento elaborada por Carlos Scolari, del evento MEA en St. Louis y el texto Media Ecology de los textos a la gramática.

Lindstrom, M. (2006) Brandchild. México: Grupo Patria Cultural

Postman, N. (1983) The Disappearance of Childhood. Londres: W. H. Allen.

Postman, N. (1994) Tecnópolis: la rendición de la cultura a la tecnología. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg

Rheingold, H. (2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. EUA: Basic Books.

Tapscott, D. (1988) Growing up digital: The rise of the Net Generation. EUA: McGrawHill