Saturday, May 30, 2009

Looking for Words in all the Wrongs Places (Utube)


Words Defy the Confines of Space and Time

Words are words only because humans are able to equate the unequal. Now, if we equate the unequal, are the things equal or not?

So, if mathematics is sometimes said to locate and deal with similarities between differences and with differences between similarities, where, then, is any number?

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Scholarly Quotations to Consider

And through Burke The Lord spoke to Satan: "And in any case, you will agree that, even if their ideas of divine perfection were reducible to little more than a language-using animals' ultimate perception of its own linguistic forms, this could be a true inkling of the divine insofar as language itself happened to be made in the image of divinity." (The Rhetoric of Religion, 1970, p. 289-299).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: "If we were to make completely explicit the architectonics of the human body, its ontological framework, and how it sees itself and hears itself, we would see that the structure of its mute world is such that all the possibilities of language are already given in it."(The Visible and the Invisible, Trans. A. Lingis. 1968, p. 155).

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Where is Mind? (Utube)

Mind is Between You and Others
Your mind is not in your head. It is between you and other people. This means that serious study is one of the best ways you can cultivate your mind, and this is why Cioran tells us, "The most important decision you ever make is who to have as parents." See Video

Matthew Segall on Selfhood and Authenticity (Utube)

Have you read SELFHOOD AND AUTHENTICITY yet?

In this promotional video, Matthew Segall, a Utube friend, provides a nice informal introduction to some of the main ideas from my book Selfhood and Authenticity. He helps us to recognize the organic nature of speech and calls us to understand ourselves as places and moments of the Earth rather than things on it. If more people were to engage these ideas they might come to understand themselves periodic achievements of an Earth that can have itself only by occasionally losing itself in the dance of others-world-self. Read it today.


Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Who are Your Neighbors? (Wide-Eyed Article)

Who are Your Neighbors?

We perhaps could learn much from Epictetus, one of the great teachers of Stoicism and arguably the person who issued the Western world’s first cosmopolitanism. Once asked where he was from, he gave a reply that all of us might just as well say: “I am a citizen of the world.”

Where and When are Words? (Utube)

The Space and Time of Word Users

Erving Goffman, in his book Strategic Interaction, writes, "Of all the things of this world, information is the hardest to guard, because it can be stolen without removing it." Words are not simply in space and time; they are not things in our environments. They are environments that we, word users, always already find ourselves within.

Dreamless Sleep and the Whole of Life (Article & Utube)

Might the Whole of You be Other than You Think?

"What is continuous across the states of being awake, dreaming, and sleeping is not some inner self, nor some super-ordinary transcendental “I,” but the larger living event of which awakeness is the partial moment. Awake I am an individuated whole who is part of a whole, and yet, as someone who necessarily already has slept, I am only on the condition of having been indistinguishable from the whole. This is possible because the whole in question is that absolute whole of all wholes, that partless whole, the undifferentiated. To deny that I am part of that whole which nevertheless also is the whole of who I am is to deny the meaning of dreamless sleep," (Anton, 2006, p. 197).

Monday, May 25, 2009

Artefactual Metonymy and Antiques (ETC Article)


Antiques, and ancient relics even more so, are things that represent worlds that have long since passed away, and it is this representing whereby things transcend their merely physical properties and become, at another level, surrogates or stand-ins for times now gone…even at the level of the not-words, we always already have introjections of inferential data. This means that items of the human world are not simply themselves. They inevitably get transformed into nonverbal metonymies in accordance with the situations in which they are embedded and in which they have participated.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Suggested Readings


Please see these suggested readings.
A multidisciplinary list of readings for basic orientations to communication theory. Sorry for so many omissions.

Against Forrest Gump (Utube)

Against Forrest Gump

This movie took advantage of the most memorable moments from movies and provided a backdrop for a guy who basically has little idea of what is actually going on around him.

One of the main messages of this movie is that you are more likely to run disabled legs to health than you are to improve yourself intellectually.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Election Day Changes (Wide-Eyed)

How Educated is Your Vote?

Richard Parsons, Sumner Redstone, Michael Eisner, Reinhard Mohn, and, of course, Rupert Murdock. These five guys, and their respective corporations, own almost all the dominant mass media systems in the U.S. That’s right, these five guys are as influential, perhaps even more influential, than most politicians.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Selfhood and Authenticity (Utube)

Ever notice that everyone has a face but you?

We are the way the world makes room for itself. We are not things in the world; we are places and moments of it, existential gatherings that retainingly await.

We sometime hear that language is not natural because it is learned with and from others. Even if this is true, it doesn't mean language is not natural; it means that we are naturally social.





Buy from SUNY Here
Buy from Amazon Here

Friday, May 15, 2009

Appriasing Facebook (Utube)

On Self-Promotion and Reading Atrophy

Facebook seems to be promoting a kind of quick, hummingbird mentality, one that slowly will culminate into a large scale system of irrelevance, self-promotion, and profound forgetfulness.

It is the best marketing tool yet created, as many people now no longer distinguish between consumer preferences and personality.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

New Article in Afterimage

Media, Biases, and Environments

An afterimage article by Corey Anton on the 2005 Media Ecology Conference.