Cult Talk

Media Literacy

:: breakfast viewing ::

We probably needed a term like 'media literacy' because 'literary criticism' left out movies, radio, all the new media. Literature means books, and literary meant literature. No one wanted to confine themselves in that way. Semiotics was too egghead, but was a good runner-up. One of the professional videographers I know was a Semiotics major.

Literary criticism came from such writers as Norman O. Brown and Hugh Kenner. They would know how to connect the dots and make sense of a dense piece of writing. But then Marshall McLuhan came along, pointing out the great disconnect taking place within the sensorium. 

Who would be able to preserve linear discursive thought patterns in an age of quick cuts, channel changes, kaleidoscopic nonlinear, some might say chaotic, input order? EST people? That was a book. Bucky Fuller was an EST person, wrote the author, and Fuller agreed, by writing a blurb for the book's cover.

My pitch to the American Friends Service Committee back in the day, was along the lines of the above Youtube essay: the be media literate, one needs to create, not only consume, these communications. Don't just study the propaganda others disseminate, make your own propaganda. Make ads. Just for fun. See what it takes to be persuasive.

AFSC was quite receptive and we enjoyed the challenge of making television, in Spanish, for a local cable TV youth audience. Voz Juvenile was the name of the show. At CUE, we adapted the idea for seniors. Why not let elderly folks write and record their own show, again for community television. Media literacy involves learning how to edit, run a camera.

Adding spin to facts, thereby doctoring them, does not have to mean outright falsification. Think of a pep talk. Sometimes your job is to put a bright face on things. Does that mean you're lying? What happened to conjuring? What happened to casting spells? Halloween approacheth.

My Private Sky

 

Prompt:

Ludwig Wittgenstein is holding a private language black box and peering into it while in a thought balloon he is picturing a golden scarab beetle to himself. Egyptian pyramids in the background. Princeton philosophy.

The AI LW above looks more like Bertrand Russell, who lives close to LW in Hilbert Space. No wonder the LLM adds a Bertie tinge, right?

That little homunculus underlines the "private theater" metaphor that Gilbert Ryle assured us was a category mistake. BTW: How does one illustrate category mistakes in Category Theory?

For those wishing more context:

Wittgenstein didn't buy the St. Augustine picture of words gaining their meaning by being pointers, even as they serve to govern attention and focus our minds. "Not by pointing they don't" I can hear him saying. So when you find yourself imagining a perfect circle in your mind's eye and saying to yourself "THIS is what 'perfect circle' means", imagine Wittgenstein poking his head in and saying 'no it isn't'. How would you contradict him? By showing him how perfect the circle truly is?

 
Ludwig suggested that whatever you're calling private, which is the whole of your experience come to think of it, just call it a "beetle" instead and go around talking about your "private beetle". 

No, he wasn't a Volkswagen salesman. He was talking more like a scarab, as we find later in Jung (a different beetle story). 

Does language ever point to "the beetle" in order to mean "the beetle"? How would you prove that it does or doesn't, and to whom? Mulling over such questions is what passes for philosophy in the academy today (I speak from experience).

Unitarily Conceptual

If eternally aconceptual, partially overlapping scenarios Universe were unitarily conceptual, what might it look like? Is that a "spaghetti monster"?

The Power of Nightmares (trailer)

Debate Clip

On Design