Concerned Netizen

Full-Stack Media Ecology

Four Part Resonance

Ratios

Let’s figure out just what analogy and metaphor meant for Marshall McLuhan. To begin, here’s an early summary of his conception spelled out for Modernist poet Ezra Pound. As Pound’s technique drew a great deal on his study of Mandarin, McLuhan frames his argument in terms familiar to his correspondent: that of the Chinese ideogram.

The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18th century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy— the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the U.S.A.

Turning the Friggin’ Frogs Gay in Three Easy Steps

My recent dive into anthropology has taken its inevitable post-human turn with a book a friend gave me today, purchased from Book Bazaar here in Ottawa. It’s a collection of academic papers titled Cyberspace: First Steps, edited by Michael Benedikt and published in 1991.

It has inspired me to finally tell you what’s turning the frogs friggin’ gay. And, to be perfectly honest, I’m as pissed as Alex about it.

After the introduction by—of course it is, who else would it be?—novelist and founder of the cyberpunk genre William Gibson, the first paper by Canadian artist and cinema scholar David Tomas provides the perfect interpolation of Arnold van Gennep’s Rites of Passage into the realm of computer-created spaces, via the retrieval of Van Gennep’s theory by American Victor Turner.

If you don’t know what the hell I’m …

(Late) Spring Cleaning!

I’ve been writing up a storm over at Less Mad, and I’m very proud to say that I’ve had a few paid subscribers amid the nearly fifty people who now receive a few emails a week, on average, from yours truly since I started just a few weeks ago. Check there for my latest!

This website, Concerned Netizen, has received a major overhaul in the above-linked header pages. So if you’re wondering what the heck I’m doing here, you can find the full story (at least as best as I can figure it out) on the new About Me and Notable Media pages.

Almost like I’m preparing for something……

Going a little crazy over on Substack…

I’ve been doing my thing on this website since June of 2018, and doing it on ConcernedNetizen.com since February 2019. That’s nearly six years of blogging!

Some deep dives I’ve done in the past month into the nature of metamorphosis and transformation have pushed me into some deep introspection. And so, with much deliberation with my friends, I have made a decision to open up a bit more online, and have started a second blog over on Substack.

It’s called Less Mad.…

The Overdetermination of le mot juste

mot juste (n) the exactly right word or phrasing
—Merriam Webster

The most important benefit of reading and listening at length is to develop more felicity with using words. Ways of phrasing and thinking rub off on you with exposure to language as wielded by other people. More so than just acquiring new clichés and newly coined buzzwords, I’m thinking of all the ways which thoughts and perceptions can be ordered and built up and expressed so as to bring you, the reader or listener, into a new relation to the world and everything in it. We learn language every time we partake in it. The reward, in turn, is that one’s own speech and writing and thinking becomes enriched. Our thoughts and utterances become more nimble and nuanced and precise—or, just as importantly, direct and coarse and vague—as required.…

TechNosis: Get to the Outer Hull

It’s the same with all these authors—are they all falling into the same pit on purpose?

After my deep dive into as much McLuhan as I could lay a finger on, I started digging into the larger Media Ecology scene in 2018. Soon I began charting constellations of intellectuals and writers out of the reoccurring references to their each other across books; the sort of study analogized by hyperlinks on the web.

Out of what I’ve read, I’ll say now that popular books in the ’90s about “cyberspace”—the world behind your screen—had its capstone with Erik Davis’ TechGnosis, most recently updated and reissued in 2015. It’s a wonderful, encyclopedic book—and the reason it so disastrously crashes and burns in the final chapter is very instructive.

Davis references and builds upon the works by nearly all the other ‘90s authors …

On Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation

Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness has been released today—and so has part one of my review!

Read it at the Default Wisdom Substack: https://default.blog/p/on-jonathan-haidts-anxious-generation

Haidt’s pragmatic call for action—the removal of cellphones from the classroom and the incentivizing of embodied, social play in childhood—are realistic and achievable goals to help the up and coming generation get their sensoriums back into proportion. I’d recommend this book and, more so, recommend the rallying for the changes at the parental and local level which he advocates for.

Postmodernism is Cyberspace

Figures without Ground

As it’s usually understood, post-modernism is a wildly relativistic cultural state of nihilism and social constructivism. Put simply, modernism was when we thought we figured out everything, and post-modernism is when that empowered us to start changing making up everything and we ended up knowing nothing. It’s basically all of “society” Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff while not looking down.

All the books from the ’90s which I read on the subject of media and internet culture referenced the same guy, Kenneth Gergen, as spokesman for social constructivism as a hopeful means for reconciling differences and creating a more tolerant and peaceful world. And so, back in the summer of 2018 or so, I read his most cited book, The Saturated Self, written in 1991. You’ll find this cited in a lot of books—which …

Information isn’t a Substance and Ideas are not Viruses

Look at that image above. Every ring on this “memory plane,” or RAM module, would represent one computer bit. Do those rings look like abstract 1s or 0s to you?

One reason I’ve released my 14,000 word post Cheating at Peekaboo against a Bad Faith Adversary is to put our socially constructed perceptions of “information” in its place. Especially its fluid nature; we hear everyday that information “flows” and “spreads” around our mediated environment.

This makes intuitive sense at the basic level of how gossip gets around, or how events or ideas come to everyone’s attention all at once when broadcast and widely discussed. However, at risk of being thought of as a guy who always just states the obvious, there are a few mantras I’d wish I could convince everyone to repeat to themselves daily:

  1. Information does not have
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