Psyberspace

Jill Walker’s (jill/txt) article:Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web

Links have always been fundamental to the web. In the last few years their value has become regulated as search engines and other systems that find and define the structures of the Web increasingly index links and anchor text in addition to keywords and page content. In these projects, links are seen as objective, democratic and machine-readable signs of value. This paper discusses the implications and the power structures inherent in this relatively undiscussed but influential change in the structuring of the World Wide Web.

Those are the words of Gene Kan on file sharing as reported in a Wired article on his death by Michelle Delio Quiet, Sad Death of Net Pioneer A sad story indeed.

Daniel Pádua www.blogchalking.tk, has come up with an idea. I did his thing. Maybe this will help in the process of making amore intelligent Web. A bit like the promise of XML bot more organic. And here is my bit as part of a post:

Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, New Zealand, Christchurch, City, Walter, Male, 56-60!

This site was recommended by Dolores on Techne & Psyche. I found some of a discussion she reccomends thus:

the ongoing dialogue between Steve Talbott (editor of NetFuture ) and Kevin Kelly (editor-at-large of Wired) which began with Steve’s essay The Deceiving Virtues of Technology. Their forthright give and take cuts through to the deeper issues concerning technology and how it is changing our sense of what it means to be a human being.

Political Corrections From The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension

Index to a wealth of articles, many about dream sharing online. I am looking for dreams that help define cyberspace, that reveal cyberspace, any offers?

Marshall McLuhan

”That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions… Physiologically, man in normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms.The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.”

This site is by Brett Breitwieser who is on the wavelength – where psyche meets cyberspace – or in his words: “the polytheistic psyche meets the polycentric web…” Links to McLuhan, Chardin, Hillman. A nice find for me but also disturbing as it picks up on all those far right politics of the soul we find occasionally in Hillman and Camille Paglia, who is heavily linked. I hate that smart attack on the “politically correct” (nasty sarcastic phrase that it is.) It also looks like this is a site that literalises polytheism rather than using it as a way of psychologising, in other words they make it into a church. Easily done when one advocates seeing the sacred in everyday life.

Phoenicia, Phoenicians: Cadmus the Phoenician – Another telling of the myth.

Unfortunately, now Cadmus had no men. He looked to the gods and since he had sacrificed the cow, Athena answered his plea. “Don’t worry,” said the goddess. “Just plow a field and sow the dragon’s teeth in the furrows.” Cadmus followed Athena’s strange advice and as soon as the teeth were sown, fully grown warriors sprang up. They all ran at Cadmus and again he feared for his life, but again Athena stepped in. “Throw a rock among them!” she told Cadmus. Again, Cadmus did as the goddess said, and at once the warriors fought each other fiercely, accusing their neighbor of being the thrower of the rock. In the end, only five remained living, and those were wounded badly. Cadmus nursed them back to health and they helped Cadmus establish the city of Thebes.

Is this then the five vowel sounds? Updated this item: 10 August 2002

Having found this site (see previous Item) and noted the paucity of references to him, here he is again, Harold Innis:

“Innis sees communication media as extensions of the human mind and believes that the primary interest of any historical period is a kind of bias resulting from the predominant media in use. In other words, what happens, and what seems significant in a historical period are determined by the media.

“Heavy media such as parchment, clay, or stone are lasting and therefore time-binding. Because they facilitate communication from one generation to another, these media favored relatively close communities, metaphysical speculation, and traditional authority.

“In contrast, space-binding media such as paper are light and easy to transport, so they facilitate communication from one location to another, fostering empire building, large bureaucracy, commercialism, and the military.

“Speech as a medium, because it is produced one sound at a time, encourages people to organise their experience chronologically. Speech also requires knowledge and tradition and therefore supports community and relationship. Written media, which are spatially arranged, produce a different kind of culture. The space-binding effect of writing produces interests in polotical authority and the growth of empires across the land.

“Innis grew increasingly pessimistic later in life. Changes in communication technology were seen as a revaluation of community and a of loss culture and freedom. What Innis saw most clearly was that the main meaning of electronics was not in the provision of entertainment and information through radio and television. he recognized that the speed and distance of electronic communication enlarged the possible scale of social organization and greatly enhanced the possibilities of centralization and imperialism in matters of culture and politics.”

Update: There are two spellings of Innis on the site but I have (I think) corrected this item to Innis.