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I just snipped the following from my essay, as it is not quite to the point, but like the material so putting it here. Also with the intention of looking again at NetFuture.

Steve Talbott in The Deceiving Virtues Of Technology Netfuture an essay full of refereces to greek mythology does not mention Hermes but has some apt reflections on technology that are clearly Hermetic. The following passage captures the mercurial slipperiness and deviousness. While Hermes does not have the precision and unambiguity needed to build and program computers he is attributed as already mentioned with the invention of the lyre and also with the device for making fire using a twirling stick.

A “device”, for example, can be an objective, invented thing, but it can also be some sort of scheming or contriving of the mind, as when a defendant uses every device he can think of to escape the charges against him. The word “contrivance” shows the same two-sidedness, embracing both mechanical appliances and the carefully devised plans and schemes we concoct in thought. As for “mechanisms” and “machines”, we produce them as visible objects out there in the world even as we conceal our own machinations within ourselves. Likewise, an “artifice” is a manufactured device, or else it is trickery, ingenuity, or inventiveness. “Craft” can refer to manual dexterity in making things or to a ship or aircraft, but a “crafty” person is adept at deceiving others.

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he Metaweb is a collaborative structure for learning. In our first phase, we are annotating the ideas and historical period explored in Neal Stephenson’s novel Quicksilver, seeding the Metaweb with an initial base of information. We are currently working on 183 articles, and hope you will expand and relate these and many other entries. If you would like to help build the Metaweb, take a look at the community section on this page and experiment in the scratchpad to learn how you can edit or create an article. See Neal’s longer Metaweb introduction for more information about this project.

Now that I have started reading the book I am I am really drawn to this site – fascinating stuff!

Cite

For writers creating in-text citations and Works Cited lists for online sources, the MLA Handbook provides the following general recommendations

The page goes on to list some useful ideas.

preraphaelites.com A comprehensive site – found this image of Hunt.

Introduction:

William Holman Hunt attempted to create an art that could marry realism and elaborate iconography, fact and feeling, matter and spirit.

I have never heard of Hunt but have been looking at a lot of Pre-Raphaelites and this bit of his philosophy stands out as to why it is of interest to me and how it ties in with some of my thoughts on cyberspace – though I do not know exactly how.

The Awakening Conscience – William Holman Hunt – 1853

Dan Randow has renamed his weblog and is amalgamating them under the name sociocorpus. Nice idea Dan! GroupSense:

sociocorpus notes on the evolving life of the socius online
transition alert: sociocorpus is emerging in the place of the ‘Knowledge Management’, ‘eLearning’ and ‘Online Groups’ blogs on this site

The name sociocorpus reflects Dan’s idea that there is a living thing here, that groups are alive. Well, I think like that anyway… a relationship is born, it lives, it has its personality and ups and downs and then dies like any living entity. It is an idea that is not so common in the social spehere, not as common as in the biosphere where to think of a forest as having a life is no longer so unusual.

Another paragraph about archetypes from Archetypes, Archons and Egregores:

In my experience, when an archetype is constellated, it creates a perceptible field of psychological energy, analogous to a magnetic field in the physical sphere. I have long maintained that a field of this sort might ‘attract’ psychological and physical occurrences belonging to a particular pattern, much as a magnet attracts iron filings that make its field visible. As a matter of fact, contemporary mathematicians and physicists seem to be speaking from a similar intuition when they use the word ‘attractor,’ describing the fact that a particular motion always settles into a specific pattern; and when chaos theory employs the term ‘strange attractors’ for uniquely individual patterns that are complex and unpredictatable, but nonetheless orderly.

Janet O. Dallett, from The Not-Yet-Transformed God

My hypothesis is that “Hermes” is a good name for a cluster of patterns that recurr around communication – everything from the alphabet to the Internet has similatr stories hanging around it.

Some links here: “Readings of interest in Depth and Archetypal Psychology”

Some interesting items collected by Michael Staples, who is an advocate for depth psychology in California.

Archetypes, Archons and Egregores This includes a very useful list of definitions of archetypes – with references, for example:

“Archetypes resemble the beds of rivers: dried up because the water has deserted them, though it may return at any time. An archetype is something like an old watercourse along which the water of life flowed for a time, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it flowed the deeper the channel, and the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return.” Carl G. Jung, from Psychological Reflections

In this otherwise as expected item about Arnie: Schwarzenegger Wants Davis to Stop Filling Posts and Signing Bills, there is this snippet: “The group will do most of its work by e-mail and conference call, a Schwarzenegger aide said.” A virtual group like this can do its work more efficiently than any debating chamber I imagine. Does not mean they will have better policy though. Maybe just more efficiently do what nasty stuff they are brewing up.