Great essay, in my superficial phone-mediated read with my impoverished attention span I feel I pick up little bits each time such that over multiple essays I may absorb sufficient to start to get you and people like McLuhan.
Any of the approaches, via grammar or rhetoric, would seem to require a first step, recognition of lack of knowledge and some epistemic humility. But who even cares to enquire about such things? As far as I can tell the whole point of the mob rule version of truth is that the mob doesn't care about truth- that's the point...
If I understand the term, we need a Socratic Turn before we can begin to regather our learning institutions and cultural orientation. But how?
Btw, I think you deserve a good audience for your writing so as one perspective, consider holding back releasing too many essays and dare I say it, pump your product via the known methods and once your audience grows then you will have a backlog of fresh releases. Unless the middle bit is repellent to you, of course disregard anything I say at your discretion.
The will to humility is definitely a necessary precursor. In our psychoanalytically-infused contemporary terms, the ego always fights to survive and justify itself even against awareness of one's own faults. It's very, very difficult to pin one's self down, and when others do it it's rage and shame all the way.
As you well know, another line of my larger argument is that people know too much wrong, yet superficially evident surface-stuff about their technology while knowing nothing about what it is, how it works, or what it's doing. Someone who spent weeks or months or years mastering some piece of software is married to it for life—and is still helpless to do anything else with a computer. There is some inchoate potential there I'm still trying to feel out.
And I'm sure you're right that both that I ought to market better and that I find it repellent—but the latter is likely for reasons of ego. My reticence to write straightforwardly, in favour of my lazy schizo-ramblings had the same cause. Seeing as I'm managing to overcome that, I may as well stop worrying about selling out and begin learning to love the self-commodification. Thanks for the nudge.
Ah well, perhaps you can circulate among different approaches to appease the various personality and ego tensions and keep some of the experimental edge.
It just strikes me more people should be ready to take the next step in understanding where we are it in terms of culture and media so that we can have richer conversations. As you say we have the access to the ideas.
I subscribed yesterday on the recommendation of a very nice young woman interviewed by C Best of this parish. I have read your essay just now and I'm strongly, indeed loudly prompted by the insistent voice of Wittgenstein who is yelling "Whereof, Thereof" as I try to feel my way around your words. I mean, just to clarify, by that reference for you to understand one of your subscribers is an ignoramus, and it isn't an ad hom dig at yourself.
Ha! If those are the vibes I'm giving off, no wonder my engagement is so bad! 😂
But no, we ought to make comment sections on weblogs more of an exploratory space for speculation, seeing as we can jump in to catch one another. What I'm admonishing is loud, public oration or monologue with the authority which good rhetoric grants. We need to keep the dialectic, the corrective back and forth, small and informal. Keep it from blooming into massive flame wars.
Absolutely agree about avoiding massive flame wars, all parties get burned & the cinders of arguments clog the system to no advantage. I gotta say it's an education to read some of the writers on SS, for someone like me whose brain was never trained to think the hard yards required. I'm relieved someone is up to it and alive. Keep the ole flag flyin'.
Great essay, in my superficial phone-mediated read with my impoverished attention span I feel I pick up little bits each time such that over multiple essays I may absorb sufficient to start to get you and people like McLuhan.
Any of the approaches, via grammar or rhetoric, would seem to require a first step, recognition of lack of knowledge and some epistemic humility. But who even cares to enquire about such things? As far as I can tell the whole point of the mob rule version of truth is that the mob doesn't care about truth- that's the point...
If I understand the term, we need a Socratic Turn before we can begin to regather our learning institutions and cultural orientation. But how?
Btw, I think you deserve a good audience for your writing so as one perspective, consider holding back releasing too many essays and dare I say it, pump your product via the known methods and once your audience grows then you will have a backlog of fresh releases. Unless the middle bit is repellent to you, of course disregard anything I say at your discretion.
The will to humility is definitely a necessary precursor. In our psychoanalytically-infused contemporary terms, the ego always fights to survive and justify itself even against awareness of one's own faults. It's very, very difficult to pin one's self down, and when others do it it's rage and shame all the way.
As you well know, another line of my larger argument is that people know too much wrong, yet superficially evident surface-stuff about their technology while knowing nothing about what it is, how it works, or what it's doing. Someone who spent weeks or months or years mastering some piece of software is married to it for life—and is still helpless to do anything else with a computer. There is some inchoate potential there I'm still trying to feel out.
And I'm sure you're right that both that I ought to market better and that I find it repellent—but the latter is likely for reasons of ego. My reticence to write straightforwardly, in favour of my lazy schizo-ramblings had the same cause. Seeing as I'm managing to overcome that, I may as well stop worrying about selling out and begin learning to love the self-commodification. Thanks for the nudge.
Ah well, perhaps you can circulate among different approaches to appease the various personality and ego tensions and keep some of the experimental edge.
It just strikes me more people should be ready to take the next step in understanding where we are it in terms of culture and media so that we can have richer conversations. As you say we have the access to the ideas.
Well done.
I subscribed yesterday on the recommendation of a very nice young woman interviewed by C Best of this parish. I have read your essay just now and I'm strongly, indeed loudly prompted by the insistent voice of Wittgenstein who is yelling "Whereof, Thereof" as I try to feel my way around your words. I mean, just to clarify, by that reference for you to understand one of your subscribers is an ignoramus, and it isn't an ad hom dig at yourself.
Ha! If those are the vibes I'm giving off, no wonder my engagement is so bad! 😂
But no, we ought to make comment sections on weblogs more of an exploratory space for speculation, seeing as we can jump in to catch one another. What I'm admonishing is loud, public oration or monologue with the authority which good rhetoric grants. We need to keep the dialectic, the corrective back and forth, small and informal. Keep it from blooming into massive flame wars.
Absolutely agree about avoiding massive flame wars, all parties get burned & the cinders of arguments clog the system to no advantage. I gotta say it's an education to read some of the writers on SS, for someone like me whose brain was never trained to think the hard yards required. I'm relieved someone is up to it and alive. Keep the ole flag flyin'.