Ok Ian, I'm really gonna have to deal with you in some meaningful way. First, you post the Siddis links that meet my exact needs for dialogue with the students of D-Q University who are trying to get their school back on track, and then you quote from one of the books I like and have used in arguing the dangers in the rise of what I call, the mediacracy.
So what are you? Some kind of heavenly messenger or something? Sorry if the question seems a little personal, but all this talk of avatars has got me twitchy. I like the definition of the fourth level and believe it makes a worthy > border. The Bible makes a good test case. I'm not sure how well I remember > the book of Genesis, but I don't think of it as particularly abstract. The > following quote from Neil Postman is, I think, relevant. There is no > equivalent in Native American anthropology of which I'm aware. > > It concerns the second commandment of the decalogue: "'Thou shalt not make > unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven > above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the > earth.' ... Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God [am] a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth [generation] of them that hate me; This is an awfully interesting passage in a couple of aspects. First, the effects of disobedience seem to be a delayed effect moving down the cultural generations. Second, the prohibition against images is aligned specifically with that transferal of values known as "worship" Third, the commandment has been largely disregarded in the modern age. People talk about "the ten commandments" as a guide to behavior, but even Christians ignore this one and in fact in the Catholic Bible it's been completely removed. (They split the last one, the one about "coveting" into two, coveting thy neighbor's good and coveting thy neighbor's wife to keep the magic ten.) Fourth, the protestants don't pay much heed to it all, construing it to mean loving anything more than God, which is actually more the first commandment than the second. So this particular piece of scripture has long intrigued me, in a different context, and here you are bringing it up here. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an > unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. > ...People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture > from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this > mosaic injunction." -Amusing Ourselves to Death. > > If you haven't already been exposed to it, the most intellectually thorough analysis of this phenomenon that I've come across yet is Jacques Ellul's Humiliation of the Word. He's a philosopher of the first rank and expounds greatly upon this theme of word-based intellectual processing as opposed to image-based reality processing. "In Huxley's vision no big brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one." Neal Postman, intro to Amusing Ourselves to Death Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
