Exploring the Psyche in Cyberspace

Rob Carlson's

Friday, October 13, 2000

MightyWords.com - Product Info for Convergence 2000 : Broadband, Dvd, Web, and Other Hybrid Media in The Near

Since the late 1980's, we've been hearing about the coming "convergence" of existing media with emerging media. From Hypercard hype, to George Gilder's groundbreaking treatise on new media, Life Beyond Television, to the present day hype fest surrounding convergence, broadband, interactive, and other flavor of the month terms, there has been a hope and promise of media one day "bridging the proscenium" of the broadcast model and delivering true narrowcast content. Until very recently, this promise has fallen flat on its face when it comes to actual delivery.

The landscape is littered with the corpses of abandoned interactive T.V., integrated "tele-puter", and on demand media projects.

Is it any wonder that interactive media professionals, investors, and consumers alike are jaded to the near quarterly output of the mainstream media’s "next biggest thing?” However, media professionals should not let the media's proclivity to drive terms and concepts into the ground cause them to lose sight of the fact that a lot of these ideas are fundamentally good, potentially profitable, and moreover, almost certainly ripe with the potential of changing the way we communicate with each other, receive and process information and entertainment, and by extrapolation, view and relate to the world around us.

Looks interesting... also interesting is Mightywords where one can publich papers like this.
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MA Dissertation - Walter Ong and the WWW
The World Wide Web
- an instance of Walter Ong's Secondary Orality?
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Myron C. Tuman
And another.
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More reviews from Jean A. Jacobson.

George P. Landow
Landow's advice on making the leap into hypertext includes a chapter on "Reconfiguring the Text" in which he discusses the fragmentation of text into small units. (52) One of these small units is an item on a list. Do readers have assumptions about the order of these small units?
Dispersed Text
"Hypertext linking, reader control, and variation not only militate against the modes of argumentation to which we have become accustomed but have other, far more general effects,...the text appears to fragment, to atomize, into constituent elements (into lexias or blocks of text), and these reading units take on a life of their own as they become more self-contained, because they become less dependent on what comes before or after in a linear succession." (52)
Argumentation, Organization, and Rhetoric
"...the movement from manuscript to print and then to hypertext appears one of increasing fragmentation. As long as a thematic or other culturally coherent means of ordering is available to the reader, the fragmentation of the hypertext document does not imply the kind of entropy that such fragmentation would have in the world of print. Capacities such as full-text searching, aautomatic linking, agents, and conceptual filtering potentially have the power to retain the benefits of hypertextuality while insulating the reader from the ill effects of abandoning linearity." (57)

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MCS: Walter Ong
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Walter J. Ong Review of Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge, 1982 Jean A. Jacobson, University of Minnesota

"The sequential processing and spatializing of the word, initiated by writing and raised to new order of intensity by print, is further intensified by the computer, which maximizes commitment of the word to space and to (electronic) local motion and optimizes analytic sequentiality by making it virtually instantaneous." (136)
Ong's history of print, including remarks on lists and on indexes proposes a transformation of consciousness that accompanies the move from orality to literacy and print. The move to print includes the technology of virtually identical reproduction of pages, as well as text and images. Modern science developed from such technology.

As the book gives way for certain purposes to the computer (and Ong theorizes that the book will remain an important and sometimes preferred technology alongside the computer) will a "secondary orality" come into play? Can the noetic navigation of "places" on the Internet be that play? Ong says yes.

Has an evolution in human consciousness been under way as a continuation of Ong's discussion of the interiorization of words and print? When a medium like hypertext meets late twentieth century readers and writers, will they make choices from lists of links and as a result know simultaneously a more open-ended and more interiorized experience of language and meaning? Will readers and writers experience an intensified "sequential processing and spatializing of the word?" Ong says yes. (136)

I have just come across Ong. Student of Mcluhan apparently. I am looking for more stuff...
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Tuesday, October 10, 2000

Evaluating Training and Results

Evaluation includes getting ongoing feedback, e.g., from the learner, trainer and learner's supervisor, to improve the quality of the training and identify if the learner achieved the goals of the training.

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CTHEORY: Eye-Through Images Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

The Post-Alphabet Future

The real world of digital reality has always been post-alphabetic. Probably because the letters of the alphabet were too slow to keep up with the light-time and light-speed of electronics, the alphabet long ago shuddered at the speed of light, burned up and crashed to earth. Writing can't keep up to the speed of electronic society. The result has been the end of the Gutenberg Galaxy and the beginning of the Image Millennium. Images moving at the speed of light. Images moving faster than the time it takes to record their passing. Iconic images. Special-Effect Images. Images of life past, present and future as culture is fast-forwarded into the electronic nervous system. Images that circulate so quickly and shine with such intensity that they begin to alter the ratio of the human sensorium.

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Monday, October 9, 2000

Psybernet Resources for Hosts
This is an older page of mine that continues to be useful. Email me additions, please.
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Postmodern Virtualities
Mark Poster

(This essay appears as Chapter 2 in my book The Second Media Age (Blackwell 1995)

...

"In the twentieth century electronic media are supporting an equally profound transf ormation of cultural identity. Telephone, radio, film, television, the computer and now their integration as "multimedia" reconfigure words, sounds and images so as to cultivate new configurations of individuality. If modern society may be said to foster an individual who is rational, autonomous, centered, and stable (the "reasonable man" of the law, the educated citizen of representative democracy, the calculating "economic man" of capitalism, the gradedefined student of public education), then perhaps a postmodern society is emerging which nurtures forms of identity different from, even opposite to those of modernity. And electronic communications technologies significantly enhance these postmodern possibilities. Discussions of these technologies, as w e shall see, tend often to miss precisely this crucial level of analysis, treating them as enhancements for already formed individuals to deploy to their advantage or disadvantage."

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Barry Kennedy Online Counselling: Counselling online by email with an experienced health professional

I offer you professional counselling by email, for a fee. This is genuine human contact between you and me which is confidential and secure. You may use my email counselling service and remain anonymous.

My friend Barry has recently aquired a new .com url! Looking good Barry!
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Carl Rogers

"...In my early professionals years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?"
-- Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person

A Rogers Page, with links to books.
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Sunday, October 8, 2000

Salon.com Technology | Robots "R" us - Review

"Robo Sapiens: Evolution of a New Species" takes this notion and runs with it. Journalist Faith D'Aluisio and photographer Peter Menzel have assembled an accessible guide to the field of robotics that's part photo essay and part primer, with a healthy dose of fatalistic futurism. They start out with a bang -- the shocking cover image of an eerily fetuslike robot head is possibly the most disturbing photo ever to appear on a coffee-table book -- and manage to turn interviews with more than 100 of the geekiest humans around the world into a curious peek at the future that will satisfy both the layperson and the engineer alike.

amazon
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