You may not have realized it, but navel gazing can be a social activity after all. You need only direct your gaze towards the navel of another. There’s pleasure in autonavelgazing and in othernavelgazing, but scale it up, add fashion brandnames, put it on the air and run a campaign, and wa la, you have fashionnavelgazing and tube tops to…
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Render unto me my sovereignty
From New York Times, Dec 5, 2005Ms. Rice insisted she could not confirm the existence of secret prisons because that would involve discussion of classified activities. “One of the difficult issues in this new kind of conflict is what to do with captured individuals who we know or believe to be terrorists,” she said. Many are “essentially stateless, owing their…
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Remote viewing and rescued by the webcam. Presence and absence and remote relations.
A woman is saved… By a relative thousands of miles away who’s dropped by on her webcam and seen her motionless on the floor. A perfect case study for Marshall McLuhan’s work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In this case in particular, the extended family. Immediate family extended. Connected? Not if it’s one way, but connected yes because a…
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Not Fade Away? Of news and its decay
This from a 2001 book project of mine… The value of any bit of information may be subject to decay, that is, its value is determined by two factors, either of which lose value over time. These two factors in fact conflate into one. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll consider them first individually. The message value can be derived from its…
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An angry mob is an angry mob
Seems that my tongue in cheek comment on smart mobs and angry mobs was unintentionally ironic. The Times is reporting that French blogs and cell phones have been used to propagate “inflammatory” messages after all. A spokesman for Skyblog, the blogging service on which so many French youths have apparently turned up the heat, was quoted thusly: “You can imagine…
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Where there’s smoke there’s fire…
“That’s not the fire alarm! It’s the burglar alarm!”“Well how would we know? It sounds like the fire alarm.”“No it doesn’t.”“Yes it does.”“No, it doesn’t! It’s a semitone higher!” I think that’s how it goes, more or less. The Germans episode of Cleese’s Fawlty Towers could be a short course in comparitive semiotics and linguistics. It’s got a burglar alarm…
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‘It won’t end until two police are dead’
Violence. A language that can only be spoken. Youths in France declared their motivation, or one of them at least. The death of two policemen, as revenge for the deaths of two of their own. The law of equivalence is spoken in other languages as well, most notably in the economy of capitalism. Capitalist exchange, however, uses a third medium—money—as…
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All the news that’s fit to link
Libby’s indictment has been the topic of conversation for many journalists, not only because three of them were eyewitness to the crime (an extraordinary case, we are told), but also because the absence of a shield law exposes journalists in the future. A journalist’s sources are, after all, his/her asset value. But the scoop on Scooter that sent Judith Miller…
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Alaskan lands: maps, oil, guardians and materialists
There’s an ironic twist in the relationship of territory and culture exposed by the battle over the Alaskan North Slope, where oil drilling may or may not disrupt the local ecology (!!). Oil will bring money to local native communities (read: modernization), and some claim that the Caribou herds there are healthy as can be, and that the North Slope…
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Great Plains 111… A logic unsustainable…
This dug up by Kylen Campbell, had to post it, it’s just too good. “This, finally, is the punch line of our two hundred years on the Great Plains: we trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara; call the land a desert and hurry across it to get…