~Foo Fighter~ wrote:
I could never express this on 5B, but I had experienced interconnections there but on a very personal, family level. I acknowledge the idea that media issue fragment us and seperate us...but I KNEW there was something there that was not expressed by Bob.
What I experienced over the last decade was a gathering of husbands, wives, family members, close friends and neighbors, all thrown into the "drama" of copulation, conception, and child rearing. Over and in-between this group is some form of non-physical conneciton that manifests itself in dreams, ESP, and pre-cognition.
I didn't notice or experience this prior to being settled, married, and having kids.
So when I was half-jokingly telling Kiggy "The two things we know for sure is we copulate, and we die", I was trying to express something I have no words to express...that there is something powerful that outshines academic discussion.
All talk about media is puny next to this biological non-physical energy...or whatever it is. For all Bob's talk about the effects of media landscapes on humans I KNOW that if I had a wife and kids when the printing press came out I would still be in the SAME non-physical biologic soup that I could not express on 5B.
Prior to Ion I couldn't really express that feeling at all.
Cheers,
888
Foo,
But if we humans created the Guf/NP, as iON claims, then would the Guf/NP not also be a 'media landscape' in the sense of this McLuhan quote?
"Every human artifact can be seen as a medium of communication whose message can be said to be the totality of satisfactions and dissatisfactions they engender".
And would not the 'ESP' concept that New Age thinking reveres be simply the phatic aspect of 'yeah, yeah, yeah' type responses to others when we go along with what they say (ie. assume that we 'get it'), rather than constantly performing one's own due diligence with regard to apprehending precisely what is meant by the exchange? (For example, when we ask another person for directions and then kind of half-listen with an implied sense that we 'get it', only to find that our 'hunch' or imagination actually left us making a wrong turn because we didn't make absolutely sure that the guy meant 'turn right after the 1st MAJOR intersection'). Doesn't every new technology imply that it will once-and-for-all solve the question of 'do we actually communicate' by proposing a real connection to others so we can know that they know what we mean and vice-versa?
And, the question I'm posing is, how can one truly know if iON/NP is going to be the medium/landscape/answer to the type of questions Bob explores in his essay "Cloning ESP"? Because, as far as I can see, there is always a 'meta' lens to anything, and why would iON be an exception. As McLuhan argued, "any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary". So, I am asking what assumptions are being made by the iON/NP medium.
Which brings me to this quote from Roland Barthes regarding myth:
"Everything, then, can be a myth? Yes, I believe this, for the universe is infinitely fertile in suggestions. Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things."
and then...
"Myth can be defined neither by its object nor by its material, for any material can arbitrarily be endowed with meaning."
If everything can indeed be myth in a universe "infinitely fertile in suggestions", then why should iON/NP be exempt from meta-questions through the kind of lenses offered by Bob, McLuhan, Barthes, or any other lens crafter examining human creations, granted humans can endow any material with meaning? And, wouldn't humans' meta-lens-crafting ability (wrought from very persistent questioning of EVERYTHING) trump even a physical/non-physical paradigm?
Chad