Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“’Authorship’ – in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity – was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the “books” they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was nearly their own. They…
“As the philosopher Rae Langton argues, we can also ‘undo’ hateful speech from the inside, by dismantling the conditions needed for the speech act to have its force in the first place. As we saw, some speech acts require the speaker to have authority. And some presuppose content that gets smuggled into the ‘conversational score’….
“Our species’ ability to understand and respond to the planetary ecological crisis may be aided by a truly ecological media ecology, that is, by the idea that there is not just an analogical resonance between natural ecologies and media ecologies but a cosmological community. Whitehead’s panexperientialist cosmology allows us to generalize media ecology’s focus on…
“The idea is the same: Truth is not found, but made, and making truth means exercising power […] The reductive version is simpler and easier to abuse: Fact is fiction, and anything goes. It’s this version of critical social theory that the populist right has seized on and that Trump has made into a…
“Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus – the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size.” —Marshall McLuhan I finally got to read Andrew Sullivan’s latest article in NY Magazine about technology and distraction sickness. I remember Sullivan for notably becoming one of the first journalists…
“Consciousness is not in the head. Consciousness is an emergent, symbiotic process that is planetary in extent.” I’m really curious to read Kester Brewin’s new book about technology and transcendence titled Getting High (due to be published soon I suppose), but I have to admit that I’m a little disappointed to pick up a technophobe/Luddite…