Warning: this is not a well-thought-out post.

So, coming out of Teri's class I've got a maelstrom of enticing but disconnected thoughts flitting about in the wind-whipped rain of my chilly mind (my jeans got absolutely soaked on the bike ride here this morning). I will try to rescue these thoughts from my soggy pockets, unravel them onto the radiator, and dry them into little, brittle stamps that hopefully are readable.

Information ecosystem vs. Media ecology

-it seems most linksto "media ecosystem" focus on Journalism (bleh!), so lets pare it down to ecosystem vs. ecology.

Ecology: The study of how organisms interact with each other and their physical environment. Ecosystem: The complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit. Ok, so no biggie there, Ecology is the study of Ecosystems, sorta.

So, Media Ecology would include the study of Information Ecosystems. And since I hate the word "Media" for its pussy-footed murkiness (I love the fact that Teri had to look over he shoulder when she referred to this as an "Art" department, er... "Media" she quickly corrected) I would be involved in Information Ecology.

But that has really gotten us nowhere.

Form vs. Content

Our discussion of McLuhan's form vs. content and its application to the effectiveness of an actor teaching an author's works vs. the author his/herself teaching (the actor does a better job), reminded me of this questionairre I designed for my Jica Educational Multimedia in the South Pacific research project. The results are irrelevant, but you probably want to hear them (out, dang content!), so in general students preferred image to text, and known visual display methods to unkown ones. I.e clever charts don't do as well as tried and true, and if you're gonna get too clever best to just use good ol' text.

Another still-damp morsel from my pocket: most comments on a teacher's effectiveness related to presentation style. Form over content, baby! And here's a newer way of looking at it: hacking as abstracting straight to the medium. Which brings us to:

Debord vs McLuhan

How does McLuhan's discussion of content and medium map to the post-modern discussion of signified and signifier? Okay, yes I know Debord is not a Post-Modernist, because he felt that the signifier could still be subverted:

The Situationists, whilst leading towards postmodernism were not postmodernists. They still believed that this was subject to analysis and therefore could be overcome.

Or more deeply, does the Post-Modernists' symbol map to the Situationists' spectacle? Well John said symbol is representation and spectacle is commodification, which is saying something quite similar to the above quote.

And now, I realise I had meant to compare McLuhan and Debord not McLuhan and Baudrillard. Well, McLuhan's media over content seems to map to Debord's sign over thing signified in that both posit that how the thing is portrayed has more bearing on our understanding of it than the thing itself.

But from here their conclusions diverge. Or rather, Debord points out McLuhan's errors (in my mind):

"The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at... due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation."
-Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

As McLuhan put it,

"In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner..."
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man

And then, there is McLuhan's wonderfully (there's one of those vague "media-like" words) incomplete circular logic: if a then b, and b then not c, therefore not b then not b!

Or, if fragmentation is a series, and series is not causal, then no series menas no series! Or, if mechanization fragments by putting things in a series, and items in a series aren't necesarily causally related, then by negating series electricity negates series!

Or, from the horse's mouth:

"For mechanization is achieved by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series. Yet, as David Hume showed in the eighteenth century, there is no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another accounts for nothing. Nothing follows from following, except change. So the greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant."
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man

Enough about that, though Rachelle sent us his Interview in Playboy.

And I will finish this scattered soggy post with this snippet of a conversation between Bill Seaman and John Klima in Empyre:

bill said:

>I like how you place the deeply intellectual into
>a context of the deeply pragmatic.
>
>

john said:
That process is the very core of my being. Until I witness the
intellectual manifest into something concrete, it is just a bunch of
fancy words. I'm not suggesting that the pragmatic has more value (I've
been misunderstood in the past regarding this point, so I now feel the
need to be quite clear about it :).  When I hear a bunch fancy words
that inexplicably feel right, I want to prove it. The context I work in,
that of gaming, is (i feel) uniquely capable of demonstrating the deeply
intellectual in pragamatic terms because a game is understood a-priori
to be the shadow on the cave wall and not the truth itself - though it
is the complete truth internally, to itself, within the confines of it's
system.