Sunday, June 30, 2002

Identity, Ethos and Vigilance


Michelle Finley writes in Wired: Attention Editors: Deep Link Away

Hupp said deep linking is not illegal as long as it's clear whom the linked page belongs to. "Hyperlinking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act," Hupp said in his ruling. "There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library's card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently." Website designer Laszlo Pataki cheers the judge's decision but thinks that the case should have never gone to court. "Why bring the lawyers in when there are simple technological fixes that could have solved the problem?" Pataki said. "For instance, Ticketmaster could have blocked all referrals from Tickets.com. That's an easy thing to do, so I suspect that by taking the legal route TicketMaster wanted to either get publicity or squish Tickets.com."

And here we are - in a deep link! I have deep linked into the print format of the item. And it seems right, feels right! There is no deception here, this is a story from Wired, click and it will take you to Wired. There are some issues here though.

• Identity and ownership
• Technological fixes

I hate that word "belongs to" in the quote above. I have just made a resolution to always do what I have done above, to add the authors name. Identity is important for both author and owner. WHO am I deep linking to? If that is obscured then it is plagerism. Law might say so but more than that, it is the ethos that counts. Ethos is more important than the law, because it must win out over bad laws. Ethos is free, laws belong to those who can pay lawyers. Identity works the other way to. I link therefore I am. My links define me, I am not an island, I am a node in a larger net, and without the net "I" die. Weblogging has made that so clear. So do the best writers about the knowledge ecology, knowledge is a conversation, it always was. Technological fixes; that scares me. Right there on the top of daypop today is an article by Robert X. Cringely, Bob writes:

This is NOT about making things better for the user. This is about removing the ability for the end user to make decisions about how his or her computer functions. It is an effort by Microsoft to take literal ownership of Internet technology, Microsoft's "embrace and extend" strategy applied for the Nth time, though on a grander scale than we've ever seen before.

Technological "fixes" used by Palladium, and similar already being implemented by Microsoft in Windows Media Player "updates" (see Dittohead in BSDvault) Maybe this is a case for stopping MS by law (what a joke), vigilance is needed and the ethos that we have a right to our personal space. It might initially be inconvenient, but not using Windows Media or Windows media player is an important start, a bit simpler than moving all the way to GNU/Linux, but a good step. Vigilance is not free, the price is effort, it means reading great efforts like TCPA / Palladium FAQ by Ross Anderson, who concludes:

No doubt Palladium will be bundled with new features so that the package as a whole appears to add value in the short term, but the long-term economic, social and legal implications require serious thought.

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Thursday, June 27, 2002



Ghosts of Xanadu

The behavior of ants has been likened to a distributed mind, a demonstration of collective intelligenceA. In Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach an ant colony is even used as a main character to drive home the point that the actions of dumb individuals can add up to a smart collective. Xanadu was supposed to enhance the intelligence of the human race, too, but a new feature in your web browser is unlikely to have ramifications that profound. Yet in both language and art the act of linking nouns together creates new meaning, which is a nice bonus we're sure can be pulled off with a few hours of surfing.

Smart Mobs? Does linking and back linking and networking make a mob more intelligent? I don't know. OK, I have done it, will this happen:

Link to this page and it will link back to you automatically
Have a response to something said on this page? Want others to see it after reading this article? This page can detect where a visitor is coming from and provide a permanent link back to it that all other visitors can see. Link to this article from the page where you've posted your response, and a reciprocal link to your page will be made automatically and for free.

Later: But it won't happen... only the top 20 referrers get listed! Could I make my weblog do this?

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dive into mark/June 26, 2002 On daypop, how useful! And no wonder this is a popular link. How and why not to use javascript links and how to work around it! - makes sense.

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Backlinks -- Love
Jon Udell using a biological analogy to look at blogspace

O'Reilly Network: Blogspace Under the Microscope [May. 03, 2002] I said in an earlier column that blogspace is a laboratory for group-forming experiments. As we conduct and observe those experiments, it seems useful to reflect on how life itself uses information loops to sustain multicellular collaboration. The analogies are compelling -- though also, let's admit, fashionable and subject to abuse. Happily, biologists and information scientists are now talking to one another more and more. Having that conversation in blogspace might be a good way to get to the root of what blogspace is becoming, and how, and why.

"It's hard to avoid the sense that there's some biological force at work here." This reminds me of the physical analogy that Moreno uses with the notion of "social atom". There really is a pattern to seemingly random behaviour, chaos theory works with that, social net-work theory does too. However Moreno enabled the psychological work as an integral inescapable part of that investigation. Social net-works are patterns of what he called tele, feelings projected into... space. What is that space! Now it is blogspace! Moreno called it the sociometric matrix. (Hence the movie? :) By going for the biological analogies it becomes easy to avoid the psychological. How about this: Patterns of linking - new norms and technology for doing so - are expressions of archetypal forces. That leads us to examine them as stories, myths, gods. So what is the backlinking an expression of psychologically? On the net we tend to keep strict control of how public we make our choices and also our chosen-ness. We reveal our popularity, say being in the top 40 of daypop, or showing off the hit counter, but keep access to the logs private. Biologically, technologically there are reasons for that... from a marketing perspective there are economic reasons. Psychologically? Our chosen-ness, our choices are both the stuff of cyberspace, and the stuff of who we really are. What we click and what we link reveals a lot and who clicks and who links us does too. What are these forces of attraction? Forces of attraction on a physical plane... are magnetism, gravity. But see where it leads when we look through that psychological eye: Love. Eros. We want to control Love. It can't be done. There must be a story there. How about this passage by Stanley Richards: Eros, Master od Perversity

It comes about like this: Eros draws us to what is opposite because he is the desire for union. Giving way to Eros means permitting yourself to be attracted, not merely to what you like - but towards what is different from you, even radically different, even to what repulses you. For Eros is the great joiner. He reaches out to join you to what is unlike you: the opposite sex, the opposite idea, the opposite way of life, the opposite goal, the opposite course, the opposite god and, heaven help us, the opposite morality.

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Wednesday, June 26, 2002



The Alphabet versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain

From the books web page: In the bestselling book, The Alphabet Versus The Goddess, Leonard Shlain proposes that the invention of writing, particularly alphabetic writing, rewired the brains of the people who learned how to communicate using this culture-changing tool. Great benefits to society followed. However, a precipitous decline in feminine values manifested by women's status, goddess veneration, nature, and representative art occurred in tandem. For example, the European witchhunts followed closely in the heels of the printing press. The return of the image in the modern age through the medium of photography, film, television, and the internet have brought about a sharp rise in the values denigrated during the 5000 year reign of patriarchy and literacy.

"... the European witchhunts followed closely in the heels of the printing press." I have been reading with interest the Playboy McLuhan interview and the same printing press is just prior to nationalism and industrialisation. Makes sense to me that they are all linked. Good reviews on Amazon.

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Jungawunga Inc. ::: Company

Good design is not only pretty graphics or a good user experience, good design communicates.

Less is more - YES. This is more from Brig mentioned in my last post. What has Jung got to do with it?

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Cybertime
Meg Hourinan in O'Reilly Network: What We're Doing When We Blog [Jun. 13, 2002]:

What distinguishes a collection of posts from a traditional home page or Web page? Primarily it's the reverse-chronological order in which posts appear. When a reader visits a weblog, she is always confronted with the newest information at the top of the page. Having the freshest information at the top of the page does a few things: as readers, it gives a sense of immediacy with no effort on our part. We don't have to scan the page, looking for what's new or what's been changed. If content has been added since our last visit, it's easy to see as soon as the page loads. Additionally, the newest information at the top (coupled with its time stamps and sense of immediacy) sets the expectation of updates, an expectation reinforced by our return visits to see if there's something new. Weblogs demonstrate that time is important by the very nature in which they present their information. As weblog readers, we respond with frequent visits, and we are rewarded with fresh content.

Cyberspace is what we called it but cybertime might have fitted as easily. Space is shrunk so we have a global village (perhaps) and time has altered the notion of now. It has altered it to the extent that we have to use words like "real-time", synchronous, asynchronous. The passage by Meg Hourinan draws attention to this simple phenomena, the use of time... not unexpectedly in web logs. Yes the content is "fresh" or stale... but a strange thing happens, by logging it old content becomes fresh. I think so anyway. I often log old items here, because I think they are still fresh. Sometimes because they are particularly old, like my notes on Huxley's Crome Yellow. The asynchronous nature of email and web groups is a way that the now has stretched. But for it to be experienced as a stretch we need to see the date. This dating of items is needed so we can get the timing right on the wave we are surfing. Dating items on the was there from the early days with the conventional Last Updated line at the bottom of the page. With weblogs it has promoted itself to the top. Hmmm, as in newspapers, hence the weblog is more like journalism. Journals too have dates. Rebecca Blood mentions

In early 1999 Brigitte Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the Eatonweb Portal. Brig evaluated all submissions by a simple criterion: that the site consist of dated entries. Webloggers debated what was and what was not a weblog, but since the Eatonweb Portal was the most complete listing of weblogs available, Brig's inclusive definition prevailed.

All this is of particular interest in that it echoes what happens in the psyche. From the outside it looks as if people in therapy are examining the past, but that is not so. What they bring to a session is "fresh" -- because they brought it! And why? Because the pattern of the past will be repeating in the present and the pattern is the interesting thing. Patterns of the soul - archetypes - are worth catching. To be fully there - the 'past' also needs to be time-stamped -- it is impossible to imagine a specific feeling without a specific moment (or span of them). The underlying pattern is outside of time. Fits with the idea that the soul is eternal. e-ternal, not a reference to the e words but just wondering if it means outside of time?

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Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, by Howard Rheingold

Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks. The technologies that are beginning to make smart mobs possible are mobile communication devices and pervasive computing - inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments. Already, governments have fallen, youth subcultures have blossomed from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born and older industries have launched furious counterattacks.

Just how will the networking advances actually aid the intelligence of a group? I wonder.

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Seizing The Media The Immediast Underground Pamphlet Series - Spring 1992 - Immediast International - New York City / Amsterdam / Seattle - Version 1.1 N © Copyright; 1992. Public Domain.

Towards An Ecology Of Information - The Immediast Approach

0. Participating in the proliferation, crosspollination, and consolidation of counter-commercial print, audio, visual, modem, activist, and correspondence media.

1. Documenting the basic sources, dynamics, and effects of corporate and State media control. Exposing methods of mind control, behavior modification, and image embedding.

2. Openly discussing tools and methods that strengthen immunization and freedom from deceptive, disinforming, and subliminal media exposures. Upgrading public media literacy to decode, produce, and broadcast in all communications media.

3. Open cultural expressions, education, networking and resistance.

4. Reclaiming public sovereignty of the airwaves.

5. The liberation of all public space from government, corporate, and business messages.

6. Public takeover of all airborne commercial broadcast media and the creation of public production libraries.

7. Liberation as glasnost: the emergence of democratic public communications and media networks.

What a noble manifesto.

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eatonweb portal :: the original weblog directory Just added this weblog to Brigitte Eaton's weblog Portal.

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Amazon.com: Linked: The New Science of Networks

From a review on Amazon: He explains the basic history of network theory, and then shows how his own work has turned it into a closer model of reality, a model that most of us will recognize. Networks are all around us, and they are simply not random. Some of our friends, for instance, are loners, while others seem to know everyone in town. Some websites, like Google and Amazon, we just cannot avoid clicking on or being referred to, but many others are obscure and you could only find them if someone sent you their addresses. Barabási calls these 'nodes' with such an extraordinary number of links 'hubs,' and he and his students have found laws of networks with hubs, showing such things as how they can continue to function if random nodes are eliminated but they fragment if the hubs are hit. Barabási is currently doing research to show what intracellular proteins interact with other proteins, and true to form, some of them are hubs of reactions with lots of others. Finding the hubs of cancerous cells, for instance, and developing ways of taking them out, show enormous promise in the fight against cancer.

Looks good. Yes one of many on the same theme, but each adding a new slant. Hubs and nodes - reminds me a little of the classic article: The Strength of Weak Ties ?

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weblogs: a history and perspective

Shortly after I began producing Rebecca's Pocket I noticed two side effects I had not expected. First, I discovered my own interests. I thought I knew what I was interested in, but after linking stories for a few months I could see that I was much more interested in science, archaeology, and issues of injustice than I had realized. More importantly, I began to value more highly my own point of view. In composing my link text every day I carefully considered my own opinions and ideas, and I began to feel that my perspective was unique and important.

Thorough history and insight into personal weblogging.

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O'Reilly Network: Warchalking - The 802.11 Hobo Runes [June 25, 2002] Something is big happening fast!

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Tuesday, June 25, 2002



IDG.net

AS THE PRESENCE of IEEE 802.11x access points increases in airports, restaurants, hotels, homes, corporate campuses, and other public access locations, IBM and others are beginning to talk about the creation of a single, virtual WLAN (wireless LAN) with seamless coverage across North America.

I imagine a huge network of "echos" like we had on the BBSs - a modern Fido-net. Hopefully this will be possible without any central anything.

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ANTIWARGAME Fantastic Josh. I love it! I get killed in the first minute each time, but may get it soon :)

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Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Scientist or storyteller?

Philosophies that capture the imagination never wholly fade. From Animism to Zoarastrianism, every view known to man retains at least a few devotees. There might always be Freudians, and there will always be admirers of Freud's great imaginative and literary powers; these two, as the foregoing remarks suggest, are intimately linked. But as to Freud's claims upon truth, the judgment of time seems to be running against him.

Nah! Truth is not as simple as it looks in this review. Psychological truth is hard won... vampires do not exist so how do we examine them and even more importantly slay them? This is bread and butter stuff for a psychotherapist.

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Monday, June 24, 2002



Psybernet: Jung

Above is the link to my Jung page. I have just updated it after five years of neglect! Well neglect perhaps but it was always good to know it was therer. Appreciated. The most important thing is that I have added a list of articles by Jungians on the Net and technology. Of course I also got rid of the old orange background colour and tightend up the layout.

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Deiknymena: Erotic revelations in cyberspace by Cliff Bostock

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Sunday, June 23, 2002



CG Jung Seminar Series Procedings of all these excellent email groups.

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Conversation with Daryl Sharp sorted by thread

a discussion of C.G. JUNG: HIS MYTH IN OUR TIME with Daryl Sharp, the General Editor of Inner City Books: Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts. Daryl is responsible for re-issuing Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz's book which was originally published in German in 1972 and in English in 1975.

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Friday, June 21, 2002



BookPage Interview February 2000: Peter Matthiessen

To the suggestion that such attention to detail is part of his appeal, Matthiessen replies, "I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail. E. M. Forster made that wonderful observation that good writing is administering a series of tiny astonishments. The astonishments aren't things you never knew. What they are is sort of the first articulation of something you knew but you'd never seen set down in print. And you say, Ah, yes! How true."

I have been listening to a tape: The Zen of the Writers life - Loving it - a lot of the good stuff is also in this interview.

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The Psychology of Cyberspace

The purpose of this online hypertext book is to explore the psychological dimensions of environments created by computers and online networks. It is intended as an evolving conceptual framework for understanding the various psychological components of cyberspace and how people react to and behave within it. This framework is the basis for my ongoing research on what I call "the psychology of cyberspace" - or simply "cyberpsychology." I hope it will serve as a useful framework for other researchers as well. Continually being revised and expanded, this hypertext book originally was created in January of 1996.

A thorough and useful site, i have looked at it and linked to it many times. I am currently working on an article and will need to pop into John's site. Even though the approach here is not in my own preferred Jungian or archetypal tradition there are items that I find thought provoking e.g: Black Hole Cyberspace as Psychological Space

When one experiences cyberspace as this extension of one's mind - as a transitional space between self and other - the door is thrown wide open for all sorts of fantasies and transference reactions to be projected into this space. Under ideal conditions, people use this as an opportunity to better understand themselves, as a path for exploring their identity as it engages the identity of other people. Under less than optimal conditions, people use this psychological space to simply vent or act out their fantasies and the frustrations, anxieties, and desires that fuel those fantasies.

He has a great story about the: "The True and Essential Self" (search google with quote marks intact.)

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Welkom bij de VVP Dutch psychodrama association - site.

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Wednesday, June 19, 2002



EVHEAD Evan Williams, president/CEO of Pyra Labs, the creators and operators of Blogger, writes:

By the way, I was starting to dig Mozilla a while back and using it quite a bit, but now I've found I've migrated back to IE. The main reasons: IE opens when I click a link from email (this could be changed, I know). And IE starts quicker.

I'm still with Mozilla and loving it. Why? Tabs Browsing. Set up the tabs so they open in the background and so that you can use the middle button (wheel) to open them on a link in web page, and use the middle button to shut the tabs when you are done. I bet IE will ape this real soon, as it is just impossible for me to go back. I have not found a way to open emails as a new tab in an open browser, but my email does go to Mozilla. Fast enough for me, faster I think than IE? But Evan, the Edit this Post box is tiny in Blogger on my screen in Mozilla...

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American Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama (ASGPP)Home Page I want this link handy. Has an incredible amt of info, links to GroupTalk etc.

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"audiences"

But for all its pretensions to be an extension of this everyday orality, blogging is instead a) textual and b) radically public. In the blogosphere there's no possibility of controlling audience boundaries and the numerous voices I use to speak to those many audiences who don't overhear my conversations with the other audiences. Blogging requires me to choose one way of expressing my thoughts on a subject, one persona, for all possible audiences once and for all time. The fact that I can later elaborate or change my mind or my tone pales in comparison to the massive reduction of that oral multiplicity of audience and voice I described above to a single text which is not only archived--thus welcoming exegeses to which an oral conversation is rarely subjected--but which all potential audiences anywhere in the world can read upon its first posting. There is a rather severe sense in which blogging makes impossible any flexible, modulated negotiation among audiences; there is only the One Audience, the Mass Audience, and it imposes a good deal of constraint on how you speak and what you decide to say at all.

I post this because somewhere I just added to the already stale notion that emails and weblogs are somewhat of a revival of oral tradition. Turbulent Velvet (pseudonym) writes on the refreshing ufobreakfast. There are comments on the site, and there of course the more usual idea that this is a conversation is defended.

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Tuesday, June 18, 2002



mcluhan interview

People are beginning to understand the nature of their new technology, but not yet nearly enough of them -- and not nearly well enough. Most people, as I indicated, still cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. Because we are benumbed by any new technology -- which in turn creates a totally new environment -- we tend to make the old environment more visible; we do so by turning it into an art form and by attaching ourselves to the objects and atmosphere that characterized it, just as we've done with jazz, and as we're now doing with the garbage of the mechanical environment via pop art.

I was looking for something on the theme that old media is transformed by the new. I had in mind how the Saturday matinees I used to go to as a child have gone, and were replaced by TV. But movies were not replaced by TV or video for that matter. The presentation on the big screen with big sound and comfortable seats were part of the come-back. I found some interesting items... related but not quite what I was looking for. This classic is one of them. I think I read this in the original at the time. I was a McLuhan fan in the sixties. I have originals of his books. I think he had more than a touch of genius. I have maintained a page on McLuhan since I started this website.

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More from Crome Yellow by Huxley

How gay and delightful life would be if one could get rid of all the human contacts! Perhaps, in the future, when machines have attained to a state of perfection--for I confess that I am, like Godwin and Shelley, a believer in perfectibility, the perfectibility of machinery--then, perhaps, it will be possible for those who, like myself, desire it, to live in a dignified seclusion, surrounded by the delicate attentions of silent and graceful machines, and entirely secure from any human intrusion. It is a beautiful thought."

"Beautiful," Denis agreed. "But what about the desirable human contacts, like love and friendship?"

The black silhouette against the darkness shook its head. "The pleasures even of these contacts are much exaggerated," said the polite level voice. "It seems to me doubtful whether they are equal to the pleasures of private reading and contemplation. Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce.

What is Huxley up to here? Prophetic, sarcastic or maximising his own point of view? Whatever, this passage stands out as comment on our current machines.

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Lake Pedder - Tasmania Australia



I found myself grieving this lake today. I walked and camped on its shores in the 60s before it was flooded. This came up as I feared the loss of the Net to greed. I am actually an optimist with regard to the Net. It is a Net and so it is hard to knock holes in it, and new webs are woven all the time. Still, there is already a great loss of the ethos that I found here in the early 90s, where anything commercial was unacceptable, including my own Psychotherapy Online. I held that back for a while as a result of that ethos. If I could go back to 1972 I would lie in front of the tractors. I doubt this damage can be undone.

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Comparison of Linux Distributions Is RPM Doomed? RPMs are the packages uses to install programs on some Linux systems. I have found them almost impossible to use! This article gives hope!

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Monday, June 17, 2002



Rickie Lee Jones MP3 Page Surely this is the way to go. I presume this $ goes to RLJ and not some agent, if that is the case it'd be a shame to see them on p2p networks, but even then people could come and pay for the ones they like!

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journal vs. weblog BY RYAN KAWAILANI OZAWA

Hundreds of online diary authors keep weblogs. And thousands of people use weblog sites and software to keep journals. So what's the difference? Plenty.

Thanks to djsmurf Do we have to link before we think? I dont think so. Link and think? What if there were no links at all? I'd say its not a weblog exactly, but close. When is a book a pamphlet? A magazine? The format of writing to the web, with dates, latest on top is a new form, like the sonnet once was.

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Do you hear Me? I don't want you to kill anybody

God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule

"I'm talking to all of you, here!" continued God, His voice rising to a shout. "Do you hear Me? I don't want you to kill anybody. I'm against it, across the board. How many times do I have to say it? Don't kill each other anymore—ever! I'm fucking serious!" Upon completing His outburst, God fell silent, standing quietly at the podium for several moments. Then, witnesses reported, God's shoulders began to shake, and He wept.

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Marc Smith MSR

Marc Smith is a Research Sociologist in the Collaborative and Multimedia Systems Group. I focus on the research and design of social cyberspaces. In particular I am interested in the emergence of social organizations like communities in online environments and the resources groups need in order to cooperate productively.

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Sunday, June 16, 2002



Project Gutenberg -- Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley I have been listening on a walkman to this novel. Full of ideas, some are insightful but sound preposterous in the plumb-in-the-mouth reading of the characters (they are all slightly absurd). I liked the suspense created around the meaning of a word, here is a quote:

"One suffers so much," Denis went on, "from the fact that beautiful words don't always mean what they ought to mean. Recently, for example, I had a whole poem ruined, just because the word 'carminative' didn't mean what it ought to have meant. Carminative--it's admirable, isn't it?" "Admirable," Mr. Scogan agreed. "And what does it mean?"

His assumed meaning of inner glow after wine is shattered... and we are revealed the true meaning, first in german translation and also from the context. I checked it in Noah as I walked.

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Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | We won't deny our consciences

We believe that people of conscience must take responsibility for what their own governments do - we must first of all oppose the injustice that is done in our own name. Thus we call on all Americans to resist the war and repression that has been loosed on the world by the Bush administration. It is unjust, immoral and illegitimate. We choose to make common cause with the people of the world.

This is interesting! I find it heartning to see this document, a rally cry! It has been hard to say that the US state is a rogue without it seeming anti-American or extreme, so good to see a bunch of decent Americans come out and say it forcefully. I am sure many have said it and there may have been other declarations - but this one seems like it will have persuasion. Where can others sign up? How did I hear about it? blogdex

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O'Reilly Network: Seeing and Tuning Social Networks

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Saturday, June 15, 2002



O'Reilly Network: Seeing and Tuning Social Networks

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O'Reilly Network: What We're Doing When We Blog Thorough look at the form. One on [12:45 PM | wl | permalink

Monday, June 10, 2002



Spring Publications Homepage


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Web

The dream is halfway between the poem and the paramecium. Like the paramecium, it is a product of nature, created not by man's will. But like the poem, it is a product of art, dependent upon man's imagination. -James Hillman Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. - James Hillman

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Kate

I have been doing quite a bit of work on the Horse Trek site this weekend. Kate -- looking great here this morning working with a couple of new horses.

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About this Weblog I have just completely re-written the about page for this blogging effort!

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Sunday, June 09, 2002



policies: seminar in the novel, 2002 From the site:

Weblogging Each student maintains a Weblog, or "blog", for their work in this class. These must be updated weekly, by each Wednesday by midnight. Each blog consists of two parts:   1. A reflection on the reading for that week, at least one paragraph in length
  2. An annotation hyperlink to a relevant Web resource. You may use Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/), or produce your own site in your own Webspace.

Wired has a story that makes this sound like something very new. Bryan has been going on for a while! Students make a good job of it too!

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Edgar Morin

In his latest work, Une politique de civilisation*, Edgar Morin develops the views on the state of the world which he had already outlined in Terre-Patrie, and proposes a reform of politics and our way of thinking, to take us beyond the multi-faceted, global crisis we are currently experiencing.

A new holistic theory of action for our time? I have seen it put that way...

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Saturday, June 08, 2002



Dan Bricklin Log Dan has a lot to say about David Weinberger's book, and has some good quotes:

This is the Web's nature, for everything on it was put there by a human being for a reason. In building a site, we are saying that we find this topic interesting and we think others will also. Sites that work make manifest their passion. So, of course the Web inevitably is a plenum of places that have meaning and matter at least to someone.
David Weinberger

Having found Dan's site earlier today, I find he has a lot of good stuff there. Added him to my list of blogs (should appear soon on the left.) His series of Writings are insightful and pleasant to read. The quote above is from David Weinberger's new book, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined". Here is the book's site, has chapters online. The quote makes me realise how the web is as I have often said, a mirror - but it is one selected and filtered by people and what they find meaningful. Obvious, but it is one way that the world is different from the virtual world "everything on it was put there by a human being for a reason". The link to the book is great to have... more on that to come.

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Silent Theft

A great untold story of our time is the staggering privatization and abuse of dozens of resources that we collectively own. The plunder is widespread,affecting public lands, the broadcast airwaves, the Internet, the public domain of knowledge and creativity, publicly funded medicines, and even our genes. As companies quietly seize our common wealth, however, our government often fails to protect us, sometimes actually giving away our common assets.

I have not sen any full reviews of this book. Looks promising - good title :)

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Small Players Matter

While large players and big media companies act like they are the main reason for the web and Internet and therefore should drive policy decisions, in actuality they are just "the biggest of the many small players" that make up the Internet. In fact, the controlling "stay within us" mentality some of them have is actually counter to the needs of the Internet for growth. The numbers show that the contributions of the myriad of small players -- individuals, non-profits, and small businesses -- are crucial to the vitality of the web and its value to people.

This one was in the top 40! Great to see it and also that people appreciate such clear simple commonsense analysis backed up with data. The fact that I found it and am linking to it proves his point. Here is a moment where a country inn rises above the Hilton. Could the big pipes however control the net? Another thought, if we judged an individual by their job religion, race or gender we might get some idea of who they ware but it is the fine mesh in between these big trends that really matters.

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Nodal and Matrix Analyses of Communication Patterns in Small Groups Technical, but maybe useful somewhere - so i've linked it.

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Paul Robinson, The Philosophy of Punctuation

Rules are important, no question about it. But by themselves they are insufficient. Unless one has an emotional investment, rules are too easily forgotten. What we must instill, I'm convinced, is an attitude toward punctuation, a set of feelings about both the process in general and the individual marks of punctuation. That set of feelings might be called a philosophy of punctuation.

I like this sort of stuff!

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Daypop Top 40 Links This seems a clearer interface than blogdex. They have a separate list for News sites.

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( blogdex ) Top 25 blog links - not unlike DAYTOP's Top 40 - link coming up. Funily enough these two indexes show different chart toppers. Wired article about blogdex.

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Friday, June 07, 2002



Web Intersections I am having an exploration of the blog indexing situation. This site seems to provide some overview. Headlines of a sort, but they emerge sociometrically from the world, well, in this case from a handful of bloggers via tomandian. Moreno called it a Matrix a long time ago. The tools for tapping into the global sociometry - search engines do it but now the finest mesh of the net is being carefully analysed - by tools and humans. Amazing to see how popular the Mozilla release 1.0 is today! This is great news.

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A Picture of Weblogs

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Wednesday, June 05, 2002



They Rule


Larger view.

They Rule is a launchpad for investigating corporate power relationships in the United States. The website allows users to browse through a variety of maps that function as directories to companies such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft. They Rule depicts the connections between companies through diagrams of their power structures, specifically their boards of directors. (from the Whitney site)

This is Josh On's "They Rule" site currently featured at the Whitney Museum in New York. I've been discussing this work with josh over the years and I think it is a really important site. I think it reveals firstly the corporate power relationships, the power of sociometry, and most of all the power of the net in being able to mediate global networks of this kind. How else could this sociometric exploration be used? How could it reveal and organise and network the power of the opposition to the rulers? Great that it is recognised by the art world. It is truly art in the service of... (see earlier post with Hillman interview.) Go Josh!

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gordon.coale weblog

I do a live music webcast, called TestingTesting, from my living room. Our next show is June 3

And it is great! Now this is the future of music. Who else is doing this?

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Howard Rheingold's Reboot talk Howard is being blogged "live" on Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things.

Don't think that money is never a motive force, but the Internet, the PC, and the Web weren't motivated by money. There are 0.5MM blogs, but only three of them make any money, the rest are in it for reputation, love, to contribute to the commons.

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The Jung Lexicon

The Lexicon is reprinted here with the permission of the author, Daryl Sharp, of Toronto, Ontario. Daryl Sharp is a Jungian Analyst and the publisher of Inner City Books.

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Monday, June 03, 2002



Shakespeare's Royal Self by James Kirsch, M.D.

The root of all neurosis is the refusal to accept conflict consciously; once an unconscious conflict becomes conscious, it is no longer neurotic and neurotic suffering is replaced by authentic suffering, which brings about the healing of neurosis

This is by Ediger - found it in my old EditThisPage Weblog File (will post that up soon.) I like the quote and did a search for it, but only found my original post. PLUS other nice stuff. Particularly the item linked here by James Kirsch. The cgjungpage is such a great resource! What struck me most was the quote from Jung. I am relating this to my earlier posts re Hillman and also to the nature of the NET.

The Net is an expression of the collective unconscious - like all great art. That is a BIG idea.

Art, by its very nature, is not science, and science is essentially not art, both provinces of the mind, therefore, have a reservation that is peculiar to them, and that can be explained only from themselves. Hence when we speak of the relation between psychology and art, we are treating only of that aspect of art which without encroachment can be submitted to a psychological manner of approach. Whatever psychology is able to determine about art will be confined to the psychological process of artistic activity, and will have nothing whatever to do with the innermost nature of art itself.

What contribution can analytical psychology make to the root problem of artistic 'creation,' that is, the mystery of the creative energy? . . . Inasmuch as 'no created mind can penetrate the inner soul of Nature,' you will surely not expect the impossible from our psychology, namely a valid explanation of that great mystery of life, that we immediately feel in the creative impulse. Like every other science psychology has only a modest contribution to make towards the better and deeper understanding of the phenomena of life, it is no nearer than its sisters to absolute knowledge.
C. G. JUNG

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Ancient Strategies in Contemporary Art by Deni DeBon ©

Dominique Mazeaud began a project called "The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande," in 1987. Once a month, on the same day each month, like clockwork she went to the Rio Grande river, near her home, and removed garbage out of the river. Part of her work involved keeping a diary. Sometimes the diary was documentation of the day's events and other times she wrote "prayers" or poems about her ritual.12 Though Mazeaud is not making a grand ecological impact, her art reaches out through compassion, for one day a month she coexists with the river. Her ritual is personal and usually involves herself, and the people who pass by. Personal rituals work to reclaim one's own identity, which cannot be found in today's industrial culture. There is a longing to obtain an intrinsic sense of identity within the individual. Artists are turning to interactive processes which often seem simple and down to earth, working towards finding a sense of function within the world which also heightens the sense of self. Within the current traditions, there is little understanding of ritual art forms. In Mazeaud's piece, her diary is the only commodity available. The function of the work is the interaction between artist and subject, the ending result is only known to the artist

I am adding this as it follows up on the Suzi Gablik item below. There are some important elements here.

Ritual prayers diary

These are the things that move us into the virtual, and that is where the gods are. Virtual and ritual - connected?

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Three plus top box Whee! I have just updated the whole of the template for the blog! Simple look - white like it has been for a while but this time with a CSS - Cascading Style Sheet - which I will be able to use for all my three column layouts now. The link above is to the info I used to learn the layout.

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Saturday, June 01, 2002



ZDNet |UK| - News - Story - Linux vendors move to standard platform

Four Linux distributors - Caldera, SuSE, Turbolinux and Conectiva - are to back a standard software distribution, as a way of encouraging application development and battling the dominant position of Red Hat

This is an exciting development! I have Mandrake on my machine and so I can now read this stuff and at least have some grasp - none of it easy without a background in IT etc. Just downloaded & printed the white paper off the http://www.unitedlinux.com site. The implications of that will be interesting. The thing is that once the UnitedLinux is there it is still free. Red Hat, anyone can use it. It takes a bit of getting your head around!
Update Monday, 3, June
RMS has called for people not to support it. It is driven by the Ransom Love who is not pro free software. They will not be distributing the binaries on their CDs. Selling the trademark is the business model. What seemed promising now does not.

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Archetypal Psychology

Archetypal Psychology is . . . an innately diverse and complex style of psychological imagination. It can be seen as a broad, cross-cultural movement whose main thrust is to grant "psyche" or "soul" its legitimate place in modern cultural imagination.

OK. That fits.

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Writings

This paper actually reworks some of the ideas in an earlier paper I wrote here called "Cyberspace: Shadow of the Cultural Imagination?" It was inspired by a meeting between my class at Pacifica Graduate Institute and James Hillman.

This is the same article linked to below in a different place - perhaps not quite? PS: Yes the Atomz search engine is GO! See button on the left! This is important for me as I use this weblog as my literature review, bookmarks... home.

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The Cyberwork: The archetypal imagination in new realms of ensoulment. From the C.G. Jung Page: An article by Cliff Bostock. Towards a Jungian Psychology of Technology

In some ways, this paper represents the recanting of some of my own positions or at least an effort to situate myself with more clarity in cyberspace. It is also an effort to establish some kind of rapprochement between cyber - thinking and the archetypal imagination. This is important to me because among the archetypal Luddites seems to be James Hillman himself. I have heard him dismiss cyberspace in public talks. The quality of images The dismissal of cyberspace by so many archetypal psychologists intrigues me because, as I said, the medium is purely imagistic and, according to the Hillmanian view, images are the foundation of psyche. Of course, images have varying character. Images can be degraded in their representation and, certainly, the images in cyberspace vary wildly in that respect. But one does not dismiss all art on the basis of bad painting.

Have I already linked to this? I have some of Cliff's stuff linked BUT atomz Search is not working! I'm fixing it. This article is of great interest because it addresses the *exact* field of my interest. And yes - many whose psychology I like miss the psyberside.

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Virtual 2 NY Arts magazine item by Scott Weiland

In Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, Levy presents the notion that art virtualizes the virtual. That is, it is possible to become structured by those virtual aspects of the real which in their function bear agency upon us as objects. If it is possible to understand the virtual through media theory, it is the artist in Levy...

Somehow the soul has to be mediated. In that way it is like or is information. Art is one way and the NET is another - that may be a starting point for my essay!

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The Nature of Beauty in Contemporary Art Suzi Gablik has discussions with Thomas Moor and James Hillman. Here is an excerpt.

Suzi: In our culture, the notion of art being in service to anything is anathema. Aesthetics doesn’t serve anything but itself and its own ends. I would like that to change. When Hilton Kramer says that the minute you try to make art serve anything, you’re in a fascistic mode—well, I don’t believe that.

Hillman: I’d like to defend the cleaning of the river, for a moment. I’m going back to what you said a little earlier: it’s the attempt to put art in the service of something.

Suzi: Yes, that’s where the issue is.

Hillman: Art in the service of something. If we say that it’s life, and if we think, for instance, of the Balinese village where everything is made to be functional and useful, for celebrations or ceremonies... you’re still in service to the gods, somehow. Now we don’t have that—we’ve wiped the gods out... So the god that art now serves is the god that dominates the culture, which is the god of commodity, of money. So it is in service, it’s in service to gods we don’t approve of... Now suppose the question doesn’t become what art should do, but rather how do we find that which art should serve? Art is already in service, so we could perhaps change that to which it is in service?

Suzi: So the question is what could art better serve than the things it has been serving, like bourgeois capitalism, throughout our lifetimes?

Hillman: Right! And I think the artist in the river is serving a different god.

To relate it back to the themes here, what it we replaced the word Art with Net? I see them as both mediating soul. However for it to be of the sort of art they are advocating here it is not all the net that works this way... have we wiped the gods out of the Net?

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Web Links

A Virtual Place is No Place At All - Hermes, the wing-footed Greek god of swift communication, has evolved into the messenger of the internet, intoxicating users but playing games with western civilization, author and psychologist James Hillman told a crowd of 350 at Ure Lecture Hall last night.

The link in the paragraph above does not work. Has ayone got a copy of this somewhere?

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