Psyberspace

Want to keep this link handy, an article by George Monbiot who seems a reliable source of info:

But Afghanistan’s strategic importance has not changed. In September, a few days before the attack on New York, the US Energy Information Administration reported that “Afghanistan’s significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. This potential includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan.” Given that the US government is dominated by former oil industry executives, we would be foolish to suppose that a reinvigoration of these plans no longer figures in its strategic thinking. As the researcher Keith Fisher has pointed out, the possible economic outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror the possible economic outcomes of the war in the Balkans, where the development of “Corridor 8”, an economic zone built around a pipeline carrying oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe, is a critical allied concern.

An excerpt from: OP-ED | Lule: Myth In Journalism Which makes sense of one aspect of the process of finding stuff online. The conversational part is not made all that clear here, but is implicit. (See my earlier item for continuity.)

As Myth, News Will Be Crucial But Conflicted In An Online World
Myth and the new technology may seem to be an unlikely pair. But we have already seen that myth has adapted to every storytelling medium from tribal tales to cable television. The new technology is no different. The combination of myth and online news, though, will produce intriguing, paradoxical, perhaps ominous, results.

The information model of journalism, already in great disrepair, will be dismantled by the marriage of myth and new media. News is losing whatever franchise it had on whatever information is. Information is no longer some scarce resource, a commodity that newspeople can cull and sell. Our society rapidly moved from information explosion to information overload. Information is everywhere. From online events calendars to live, continuous congressional coverage, anyone can give and get information online. If news is only information, news is nothing.

Yet information overload offers opportunities to news: as myth. In the throes of all this information, the need for myth increases. People grapple with the meaning of rapidly changing times. People seek out ways in which they can organize and explain the world. People need stories. Myth has long played these roles. Myth has identified and organized important events in the lives of individuals and societies. Myth has interpreted and explained the meaning of the past, the portents of the future. Myth has offered the stability of story in unstable times.

Decades ago, Marshall McLuhan foresaw the increasing need for myth to organize experience in the face of information overload. “You cannot cope with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classified patterns,” he told literary critic Frank Kermode in a 1964 interview. “You tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data, moving at very high speeds.”

Can people see through this? Citizen spies in the US and the imperialism disguised as war on terror. John Pilger Puts it well:

As the West prepares for an assault on Iraq, John Pilger argues that ‘war on terror’ is a smokescreen created by the ultimate terrorist … America itself

A page on my own site… full of good intentions, but forgotten. Perhaps linking it here will help. Remind me to update the Writing index. I am now doing all my writing on the web, though I keep some files unlinked.

I am collecting snippets here on the autonomous nature of the psyche or soul.

Marshall McLuhan: New Media As Political Forms

Writing in Encounter (April, 1954), Auden discusses ”The Word and the Machine.” Poets today, he says, envy ”not the rich or the powerful but the scientists, doctors, machine designers, etc., for whose happiness our age seems designed as earlier ages were designed for great landowners, for these people enjoy the satisfaction both of meaningful work and of an unequivocal social position. When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a curate who has strayed into a drawing-room full of dukes.”

A few years before, Mr. Auden’s colleague Stephen Spender was wanly asking why, when he met a communist, did he feel so small? Both having failed in the thirties to find a satisfactory lyrical idiom to glorify the machine might now unite in the matter of dukes. Or doesn’t it matter that the machine has now brought English noblemen to the pass of purveying homemade jam at the roadside? The fact of the matter is that Mr. Auden typifies our current failure to examine the forms of technology, past and present, as art forms. He concludes his essay:

Is there something in the essential natures of the machine and the Word which makes them incompatible, so that at the slightest contact with the former the Word turns into lifeless words? Is even the mechanical printing press, but for which I would never have been able to read the books that formed my life, nor for that matter be writing this article now, an evil? Sometimes I have an uneasy suspicion that it is.

This is a useful link as it is straight to the current studies at the uni of Toronto.

Posting this so I can update my McLuhan page.

Marshall McLuhan is making a comeback or at least many his ideas are. Twenty years after his death, many of his thoughts and ideas about technology are cropping up again. Especially now that many of these ideas seem quite prophetic. During his lifetime, many readers of his work assumed that his theories on mass communication revolved around television. Looking back on his work, many admirers are now realizing that most of his thoughts apply to the Internet. In his 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, he predicted that the print culture would eventually be replaced by the electronic age. In his well-known 1964 book, Understanding Media, he goes on to foretell how technology has and will continue to change social relations and attitudes. In fact, he describes future society as a global village in which “we are all within reach of a single voice or the sound of tribal drums.” McLuhan understood the incredible impact that technology would have on the world and added many new quotes to the language that are recognized today, one of the most familiar being, “the medium is the message.” While still controversial in some circles, McLuhan’s ideas remain thought provoking and enlightening.

Of all the McLuhan sound bites I have noticed in my current binge this one stands out. Maybe Windows has some life in it yet. From a nice Biographical Profile: Marshall McLuhan. This is not bad either: Wired 5.06: Street Cred “I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change. But I am determined to understand what is happening, because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me.”

Article by Steve Lawrence, NEC Research Institute

Articles freely available online are more highly cited. For greater impact and faster scientific progress, authors and publishers should aim to make research easy to access.

I wonder what wealth lies off-line? I wonder too what wealth lies buried and unused behind various proprietary systems? The un listed however can be searched! It is via relationships. People know stuff and will send you stuff. But then again some people are not “online” – still someone is bound to know them.

It adds up this: cyberspace is beyond any specific technology to access it.

It does not really seem to be a very well know phenomena outside of highly specialised circles – sort of proving his point. It seems to me it is as useful an idea as Bell’s Curve. Or is that just the bell curve 🙂 It strikes me that wealth is distributed in the Bradford way. This page is succinct. I’d like some graphics though.

Bradford’s law, sometimes called Bradford’s law of scatter, is useful, not just for writers and bibliographers, but for librarians doing collection development as well. 1/3 of the literature in a field can be covered in a small collection of core journals. To cover 2/3 of the literature, multiply the number of journals in the core by a constant (n) which varies by field. To have a comprehensive collection, multiply the number of journals in the core by the square of the constant.