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Re: Climate Control in the Singapore Press
Dear Frederick,
Thank you for caring.
At 09:57 AM 7/26/01 +0200, Frederick.Lawrence@stpaul.com wrote:
>The most surprising is how we "comfortably" accept such situations.
>Discussion is one thing, action is another....and complementary might I
>add. The relation between mouth & hand as always been a challenging one.
>I guess the outcome depends on how warped is the mind.
>
>Frederick Lawrence
>Paris - FRANCE
Yes - it is unbelievably surprising yet common isn't it. I don't know of a
good label to attach to this phenomena. Until we find a better one, let's
call it "sublime middle-class malaise".
Two perception geniuses who have thrown powerful insight to me recently
onto the very very subliminal causes of this middle class malaise are:-
a) Kumara Barathy in New Zealand. You must read his classic at :-
Essential Social Thinking For the Cyber Age
http://www.sulekha.com/articledesc.asp?cid=110038
b) Neurolinguist Antonio Rossin on writism. Here's an excerpt:-
-- begin quote --
Dr Rossin tackles an even more subtly embedded linguistic
phenomenon: language as literacism -- which we may call,
more
euphoniously, *writism.
2500 years after Socrates warned Phaedrus of the dangers of
technology (in particular, the intervention of writing in
human
relations), we now begin to see (if we look around with
sensitive
eyes) what he meant. (2)
o Education relies primarily on books. "Students"
"learn" from
"teachers" (each term, of course is book-defined), but
what
they learn is not what the teacher knows, but what the
teacher
*points to as "knowledge."
o No school or department of "communication" *communicates*
with ordinary people (the 'person-in-the-street' or PITS,
in R's shorthand). What such people really do is seen as
irrelevant except as 'data' for 'studies' and 'research.'
o Writers routinely say, "hearing" and "saying" when
they refer
to reading and writing, "speaking" is as likely to
refer to
scholarly reading from "notes" as face-to-face
interacting,
while "communicating" includes not only any form
(referred
to in the literature in terms of its "medium") of
signaling
process -- pictographic, oral, written, telegraphic,
telephonic,
or digital -- but any *function as well, be it
unilateral,
bilateral or collective.
The effect is to disallow what PITS *do from being
meaningfully
"called" communicating -- everybody does it, from
cetaceans and
chimpanzees to the "high-definition" rasters of one's video
terminal -- while the only purposes for human interaction
that
are "identifiable" will be those of the communicating
"subject",
i.e. the individual organism. Collective, cultural, social
reasons ("values") are "bracketed out".
Writing, as Socrates foresaw, separates content from
container
(conduit, context), information from insight, and
experience from
behaviour (conduct, no?). *Writism -- the idea that
people are no
longer aware that their mediated actions are only an
'alterity,'
makes the separation 'inevitable' or
'paradigmatic'. Literacy
becomes the *frame of reference within which any
discussion is
foregrounded, and thus "discussion" cannot question the
mechanism
of literacy itself without being - prima facie - absurd.
Why, then does Dr R suppose that Yet Another Book
(YAB) is
appropriate? What has changed in two thousand-odd years?
For one thing, the Internet -- and I would leave it at that,
except that I'm a writer, too, and must obey syntactical and
morphological demands:
For one thing, the Internet put 6 or 60 million people in
one
place: idiotsand savants, tinkers and thinkers, are
tossed together
like flotsam on the tide -- and since no writist
conceived of the
possibility, the defences were down. PITS began to *talk
with one
another, entirely ignoring the protocols and decorums and
the rest
of the (metonymic) machinery of being a writer, of being
*literate.
The evidence (and it's out there, in the lists and
archives and IRC
transcripts, for anyone who cares to read) reveals,
however, that
PITS no longer remember (in Socrates' sense) how to talk;
instead,
they have writist ideas of talking. The best they can do
is to write
"as if" they are talking, but with none of the collective
values
that used to inform talking. (Similarly, many people
offline speak
- not as if they are writers, for that would be
presumptuous - but
as if their listeners are *readers; that is, "disembodied,"
disaffected, remote observers rather than actors.)
The same dedication to cultural integrity and societal
functionality that took Dr R into family medicine brought
him to
see the opportunity, really the necessity, for
"reinventing" a
socially coherent ethos. Regardless of their numbers,
those who
are online are not an *abnormal percentage of the
population at
large. The absence of an Internet culture is merely a
symptom of
a general malaise, and (by poking and prodding the
communicative
corpus in a number of ways), he has isolated a *syndrome;
that is,
a collection of related phenomena which suggest a common
etiology
or vector of propagation. If, he reasons, the syndrome
presents
as writism, perhaps the prime causative agent is
*educationism --
the idea that fashioning children into human beings can
safely be
left to institutions. Certainly, nowhere within the
social system
does he find natural resistance [antibodies?] to this meme.
I am afraid it is a true pandemic, and Dr R's warning
may be
too late to be heard correctly. That parents are
educators, that
education should inform parenting from one's earliest
days on the
receiving end right through to propagation, parturition
and beyond,
that academia has social responsibilities, that drug
addiction in
youth and stress-induced disease in adults are not isolated
malfunctions or idiopathies but systemic patterns -- most
likely,
none of these indicators will be seen by those who can
take action
on them. You have in your hands a poor imitation of, but
as ironic
a record as, Plato's writing down Socrates' wisdom,
doomed to be
preserved for posterity.
As a writer, of course, I am familiar with that outcome.
As writists, of course, you doubtless appreciate how
effectively
"publication" channels large amounts of human motivation and
energy into harmless, ersatz, bookish "containers".
Who could predict (that is, control) what would happen if
PITS
*realised their potential?
===========
1. Found at
http://www.emich.edu/~linguist/issues/6/6-61.html ,
13 Jan 2000.
2. Socrates ascribes his concerns to Tut-ankh-amun, when
Thoth
reported his discovery of writing:
'Theuth, my paragon of inventors, - replied the
king, - the
discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the
good or
harm which will accrue to those who practise it. So
it is
in this case; you, who are the father of writing,
have out
of fondness for your offspring attributed to it
quite the
opposite of its real function. Those who acquire
it will
cease to exercise their memory and become
forgetful; they
will rely on writing to bring things to their
remembrance by
external signs instead of on their own internal
resources.
What you have discovered is a receipt for
recollection, not
for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will
have the
reputation for it without the reality: they will
receive a
quantity of information without proper instruction,
and in
consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they
are for
the most part quite ignorant. And because they are
filled
with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom
they will
be a burden to society.'
(From Walter Hamilton, (trans.), " Plato: Phaedrus &
Letters Vii
And Viii ". Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.)
--- end quote --
Bala Pillai <bala@apic.net>, sydney, australia
Founder, The Asia Pacific Internet Company <www.apic.net> (since 1995)
Networking Minds in Halls Without Walls (*sm)
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