Every once in a while I like to go back and listen to Howl. Here is Allen Ginsberg Reading Howl (Part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVGoY9gom50 Your posting put me in the mood. Arthur -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Sunday, July 18, 2010 1:14 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: timesizing not downsizing ---------------------------------------------------------------------- YOW! Sorry about that. It *is* possible to screw up with Linux. Hit a bunch of the wrong keys and send a half-finished post along with some gibberish. Sigh. Aren't computers wonderful? :-/ I think I'm doing it right this time.... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Arthur> Just one correction. Tim Berners-Lee is credited with Arthur> inventing the World Wide Web. He deserves to be recognized as Arthur> some sort great humanas he did this and seemed to have sought Arthur> no monetary outcome such as trying to patent or copyright Arthur> anything. Keith> True enough. However, it's to be wondered whether he had any Keith> idea of just how his innovation would be developed. Initially Keith> it was just a useful mode of communication for scientific Keith> results. The concept of hypertext/hypermedia has been around for nearly 50 years. Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu envisioned something greater, in a sense, that the WWWeb as we now know it. Nor were such notions limited to the arcana of the academic hothouse; both the depths and the intrinsic ambiguities of such computer systems appear in John Barth's _Giles Goat-Boy_. (1966) Tim Berniers-Lee designed a protocol piggy-backing on the existing internet, that implemented a practical and simple subset of what Nelson, inter alia, had been talking about for years. TB-L's design was so simple that any modestly computer-literate person could learn and start employing it with a few evenings of study and practice. But the deign was *too* simple. What the Tim's original protocol didn't envision was the rabid determination of advertisers and marketing droids to exploit the web in the same way as they had learned and loved to exploit print media and TV. Missing from Tim's initial design were control of detailed page layout and details of audio/video streaming. Support for unlimited interactive sessions were intentionally omitted from HTTP in order to reduce load on 90s-era servers and bandwidth. Which brings me to some thoughts about which I hadn't yet posted here: The rabid weasels of marketing have been furioso drivers in adding "cascading style sheets" (detailed page layout control) and the embedding of video (aka TV :-) and client-side scripting to the basic HTTP/HTML protocols. The result is that many web sites -- especially corporate sites -- are becoming indistinguishable from television and the worst of print media, notwithstanding that they're interactive. http://www.truth-out.org/the-disappearing-intellectual-age-economic-darwinis m61287 The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism --------------------------------------------------------------- Monday 12 July 2010 by: Henry A. Giroux We live at a time that might be appropriately called the age of the disappearing intellectual, a disappearance that marks with disgrace a particularly dangerous period in American history. While there are plenty of talking heads spewing lies, insults and nonsense in the various media, it would be wrong to suggest that these right-wing populist are intellectuals. They are neither knowledgeable nor self-reflective, but largely ideological hacks catering to the worst impulses in American society. [snip] Moreover, as the university becomes more corporatized, intellectual and critical thought is transformed into a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder. I am not suggesting that so called professed intellectuals are not influencing policy, appearing in the media or teaching in the universities, but that these are not critical intellectuals. On the contrary, they are accommodating ideologues, content to bask in the politics of conformity and the rewards of official power. Underlying this drift toward the disappearing critical intellectual and the erasure of substantive critique is a regime of economic Darwinism in which a culture of ignorance serves to both depoliticize the larger public while simultaneously producing individual and collective subjects necessary and willing to participate in their own oppression. The cheerful robot is not simply an opprobrium for ignorance, it is a metaphor for the systemic construction in American society of a new mode of depoliticized and thoughtless form of agency. [snip] It's been 60 years now, since commercial television became ubiquitous, 40 or more years since the average [1] TV-watching time has been hovering somewhere between 20 and 30 hours a week. That's the equivalent of a light-to-medium university course load. And every bit of it carries the imprimatur of large institutions who are diligently trying to control the viewer's behavior, typically to get the viewer to buy something; at least to accept that "buying something" is the default core subject of public discourse. So: the majority of present adults in the US and Canada have been absorbing this medium, accepting as givens its format, style, purposes and effects, all of their lives. And those styles, purposes and effects are intrinsically counter-intellectual, counter-reflective, anti-analytical. The consequence of that half-century of commercial media, a life-long exposure to training in passive non-thinking more highly engineered than almost any school or university program, is a populace who will elect morons, morons who will run for office and obedient sheep who will accept the notion that huge, wealthy, hierarchical convocations of psychopaths, narcissists and borderline personalities can be trusted to do pretty much anything they want and that we should yearn to serve them for wages and prestige. Back to the original topic: TB-L envisioned the web as more than what was implemented in the very first versions of an HTTP server and an HTML browser but I doubt that he envisioned it as a medium engineered to take over the role of commercial television in keeping the sheep docile. It is just our good fortune that we've been able to use it for 15 or so years while the epistemological restructurers, the social engineers, the political brainwashers and the PR & advertising industries were getting their collective digital act together. - Mike [1] Since a large number of professionals and influential white-collar people are *way* too busy, as adults at least, working 90-hour weeks, to watch much TV at all, the average for everybody else is significantly higher than the figures usually cited. -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
