I suspended my posting on the Progressive Identity Project recently to focus on a few other things. Research for my thesis works on a number of levels including reading books (what? in the internet era? books? with pages??), searching databases for relevant supplemental material, and occasionally writing. I'm in the home stretch now, with about a month before D-day.
I've focused a lot on progressivism, what it is, what it's not, and the things progressives believe in that make them progressive. I want to take time out from that today to ask about media. I want to find out from you out there in the digital ether how you communicate. What media of communication do you use most, least, not at all. Let's jump over the fold and talk...
Ancient Greece saw a transition from the old oral culture to a hybrid of oral and literate communication. With literacy came a new frame of mind, a new perspective, by which to observe and decipher the world. Literacy was forever altered when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press (or at least invented it for the most widespread usage to date) around 1439. The Gutenberg Bible put religion into the hands of common people for the first time and also gave them an important tool to teaching literacy to others. Without the printing press, Martin Luther would never have been able to widely convince the public to follow him in his Protestant Revolution.
Lewis Mumford, in 1934, penned his famous work "Technics and Civilization" and introduced the significance of technology on our modern lives in one important anecdote. The Middle Ages saw the advent of the mechanical clock, probably invented in a monastery to allow for the rigid scheduling required of pious monks. That clock, translated to the churches of the new urban organization, allowed for bells to ring at precise times, giving merchants and tradesmen the ability to coordinate their activities and generate a coherent economy. This regimented segmentation of time gave way to greater urbanization, process-oriented military and scientific strategies, and transformed the way we think about our environment. We now see time as a commodity, a thing to be measured, saved, wasted, and valued.
Neil Postman, in 1985, added to Mumford's anecdote by illustrating the impact of the telegraph on late 19th and early-20th century America. In "Amusing Ourselves to Death", Postman writes:
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate...
As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge’s famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use. A man in Maine and a man in Texas could converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very much about. The telegraph may have made the country into "one neighborhood," but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other...
For the first time, we were sent information (at a very rapid rate) which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply......or lead to any meaningful action or reflection or analysis...
Welcome to the world of "fragments and discontinuities."
The telegraph gave way to radio, then television, then the internet (to put things simply). Understanding that each new technology essentially alters our environment, it's important to consider the ways that we communicate and the effect our communication has on defining and organizing the world.
We discuss the issues of the day at DailyKos. This internet based forum has properties all its own and those properties affect the way information is processed in our minds. In many important ways, the very nature of this web-based medium, gives shape to the ideas that are found here. We don't operate in isolation though. We turn off the computer (at least for a few minutes), go outside, interact, read books, watch TV, and engage in various other subtle forms of communication. It's said, in fact, that one can't not communicate. Even the clothes on our backs communicate. Our posture gives away something to the observer.
I'm interested in knowing from you today, on a daily basis, how do you give or receive information which reinforces your identity as a progressive? When is it clear to you that you're a progressive? For example, when you're watching ABC News on television and everyone seems so damned conservative. Or, when you go to the local diner and every car in the parking lot has a bumper sticker reading, "Impeach Bush" and you grin. Maybe you're reading the newspaper and there's an article about the flooding in Iowa and you immediately think, "We need to invest in our infrastructure..." There are other obvious answers, like when you hear Bill O'Reilly say anything and you want to roast him alive, or when someone writes that John McCain is a maverick, or when you get goosebumps watching Rachel Maddow rip Pat Buchanan a new one, etc....
Give me a few examples of media use, other than the internet and DKos, that positively or negatively impact your sense of progressiveness. When do you feel most like your progressive self? Consider the following:
- Conversations
- Books, magazines, newspapers
- Radio
- Television
- Signs, symbols, photographs, icons, etc...
And, as always, I leave you with a list of some important contributors to the field of Media Ecology...
Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, George Herbert Mead, James W. Carey, Edward T. Hall, Gregory Bateson, Paul Watzlawick, Alfred Korzybski, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Norbert Weiner, Ervin Laszlo, Niklas Luhmann, Walter Benjamin, Edmund Burke, N. Katherine Hayles, Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, Jeremy Campbell, Wendell Johnson, Edmund Carpenter, Erving Goffman, Susanne K. Langer, Roland Barthes, Joshua Meyrowitz, Lance Strate, Paul Levinson, and many many more. :