I just built something that I’ve been meaning to make for years. I tried building something like it before, about 5 years ago, right before I graduated from CMU. At the time, I had strong programming ability for small projects, but didn’t really know how to write programs modularly with any effectiveness. I’ve learned so much since then, so now something that took a really inordinate amount of time and never got off the ground before took two days to write. I like to program recreationally. It’s a very bizarre habit. It’s not a compulsion, but really just a passtime.

The project in question is a visualizer for strange attractors. I did research on them as an undergraduate at CMU, and I’ve been wanting to make this project as a general tool ever since. I wanted something that could display stuff in both parameter space and phase space, and effectively get at all of the peculiar things that can happen with strange attractors.  The example below only does anything interesting in phase space, but it’s rather flexible, and has a nice modular architecture, which means that it will be easy to adjust properties, add or remove visual elements, and generally do interesting things.

It does not seem to behave quite properly with the mouse wheel at the moment, but it should have zoom functionality…

Java 1.5 or higher is required to run this applet. Please download a JRE from java.sun.com.

I have been working on a paper for my cognitive science course, and that has been going well, but not quickly. The paper was turned in while somewhat incomplete. I will post it when it is done.

While I have not yet found a stable paper writing system yet, I have made progress. I am leaning toward Docbook for final products. It is intended for books rather than papers, which is an irritating flaw, but it does come with a large set of XSL transformations to transform a docbook document into a variety of formats. Its export to HTML is promising: sections are all classified with “class” attributes, so transformed documents can be very easily styled. For the daily practice of writing, I’m happily chugging along with Google Docs.

When I say writing system, I mean something that handles writing, document formatting/typesetting, and dealing effectively with citations. While I have previously adored LaTex and BibTeX, the formats are very ill supported. If anyone ever finds a LaTeX editor that isn’t terrible, please let me know. While I have previously been unimpressed with Zotero, it is pretty effective as a reference manager. With references, I want something that I can have work with my bibliography, but that’s really dependent on the openness of the reference format and my ability to get my homebrew readings plugin to behave nicely.

This book is about an approach to commonsense reasoning that is implemented using formal logic. Mueller does not make the claim that humans make use of formal logic structures in understanding the physical world, but rather that this is a way for commonsense physical phenomena to be understood computationally. The approach does not replicate or even simulate the human method of cognition or understanding, but rather gives a formal account of relationships. Commonsense systems could be applied towards making predictions, performing diagnostics, or analysis within a simulated or artificial environment. Mueller uses classical first-order logic, and every element of commonsense reasoning takes the form of axioms that work within that space.

Mueller lays out a set of four assumptions that guide the rest of the investigation. These assumptions are certainly contestible, but they can be seen as a basis on which the rest of the work can be derived. (p. xx)

• I assume, along with most cognitive scientists, that commonsense reasoning involves the use of representations and computational processes that operate on those representations.
• I assume along with researchers in symbolic artificial intelligence, that the representations are symbolic.
• I assume, along with researchers in logic-based artificial intelligence, that commonsense knowledge is best represented declaratively rather than procedurally.
• I use the declarative language of many-sorted first order logic.

The formulation of commonsense reasoning accounts for a number of specific properties of real world objects. This contains the vocabulary and the elements that will be formalized into axioms of the commonsense reasoning logic. One noteworthy flaw within this is the element of perspective. For someone to have common sense, that individual must have a perspective. Mathematical logic in abstract does not have a perspective that is readily apparent. Even thought this logic can make commonsense conclusions, it still has a view from nowhere. (p. 7-8)

1. Representation. The method must represent scenarios in the world and must represent commonsense knowledge about the world.
2. Commonsense entities. The method must represent objects, agents, time varying properties, events, and time.
3. Commonsense domains. The method must represent and reason about time, space, and mental states. The method must deal with object identity.
4. Commonsense phenomena. The method must address the commonsense law of inertia, release from the commonsense law of inertia, concurrent events with cumulative and canceling effects, context-sensitive effects, continuous change, delayed effects, indirect effects, nondetermnistic effects, preconditions and triggered events.
5. Reasoning. The method must specify processes for reasoning using representations of scenarios and representations of commonsense knowledge. The method must support default reasoning, temporal projection, abduction, and postdiction.

Commonsense logic originated with situation calculus as created by John McCarthy and Patrick Hayes in the 1960s. This was the inspiration for Robert Kowalski and Marek Sergot to develop event calculus, which is the method of Mueller’s investigation. The foundation of event calculus relies on the understanding of events and properties that change over time. Time dependent properties are called fluents, which could be typed variables or true-false values. Events are any occurrence that can happen within the world. Time in the event calculus is linear, and can be either discrete or continuous.

There are four main predicates that work on the event calculus (p. 11). Note that these are not elements of a “new” logical structure, but are rather constructions within the framework of first order logic.

1. HoldsAt(f, t) represents that fluent f is true at timepoint t.
2. Happens(e, t) represents that event e occurs at timepoint t.
3. Initiates(e, f, t) represents that, if event e occurs at timepoint t, then fluent f will be true after t.
4. Terminates(e, f, t) represents that, if event e occurs at timepoint t, then fluent f will be false after t.

Using these elements, many axioms can be declared. These define the ordering of time, how effects may be defined or triggered, how events may be preconditions, what cumulative effects are, what abnormal states are, and so on. These are elaborated in detail throughout the book. They work together to form a representation of commonsense reasoning within a domain. In addition to these axioms, a domain must include observations of the world’s properties at various times, and a narrative of the known events in the world (p. 35). Mueller gives a formal definition for a domain description (p. 37):

• Positive effect axioms, negative effect axioms, release axioms, effect constraints, positive cumulative effect axioms, and negative cumulative effect axioms.
• Event occurrence formulas, temporal ordering formulas (the narrative).
• Trigger axioms, causal constraints, and disjunctive event axioms.
• Cancellation axioms.
• Unique names axioms.
• State constraints, action precondition axioms, and event occurrence constraints.
• Trajectory and antitrajectory axioms.
• Observations.
• Event calculus axioms.

This is an extensive list, but composed together it represents what would completely define a domain within the calculus. This is actually quite contestible when compared with human reasoning. Human reasoning is necessarily incomplete, and much of the logical formulations are never explicit. For the purposes of logical reasoning, it still seems somewhat rigid and inflexible. It is severely dependent on total objective knowledge. With missing or incorrect knowledge, the logic might be crippled.

Later on, Mueller gives a chapter on the Mental States of Agents. This too gives an external and objective perspective on the modeled phenomena. It necessarily has an external omnitient view inside the minds of the emotional agents. The ostensible goal of this is to develop a system which can reason about emotions, but that too depends on issues of understanding and perception. Agents themselves, as modeled, have beliefs, and thus are subject to some perspective, but the logic will reason about those beliefs without perspective.

Mueller first gives a version of the Beliefs, Desires, and Intentions framework (listed as Beliefs, Goals, and Plans). This gives a clear logical account for conclusions that may be derived from BDI agents and environments. This reasoning is still very complex, but could be made more rapid though computational implementation.

Next, there is a logical formulation of the emotion theory developed by Ortony, Clore, and Collins. The formulation uses the system of eliciting conditions. The goal is to make logical conclusions about the emotions of agents when events occur. This work creates definitions for the predicates, Joy(a, e), meaning that agent a is joyful about event e, and goes to more complicated predicates such as Appreciation(a1, a2, e), which means that agent a1 is appreciative of agent a2 for performing action e. Following this is a large series of axioms which formally defines the relationships between the various predicates of deirability, belief, joy, distress, hope, resentment, and so on.

Default reasoning is constructed using vanilla 1st order logic, not with any messy nonmonotonic logic, or probabilistic reasoning. The perspective here relies on a total account of abnormal conditions, and a total knowledge of the states of objects. This formulation is especially problematic from a sociological perpective because of its emphasis on the cases of normality. An example given is that apples are red, unless some abnormal condition applies, such as that the apple is a Granny Smith, or is rotten. Of course, the claim of normal or default conditions is highly contestible, and an architecture that encourages defaults could lead to problematic assumptions.

I made a mistake in my posts on Tristram Shandy and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. These two unconventional narratives have a playful element, and I was describing this as ludic. That actually was not the word I was looking for. I was digging through some notes the other day and found some notes that I took when Marie-Laure Ryan visited, and found a comparison between paidia and ludus. Paidia represents uncontrolled play, whereas ludus is structured and goal oriented. So, the comparison that I meant to make earlier is that both Sterne and Calvino embraced paidia, whereas most narratives and novels have a form that more resembles ludus.

The distinction between paidia and ludus are outlined by Callois. Chris Bateman gives an excellent analysis of the complexity between the two.

And it’s my own damn fault, too.

Normally, I never get sick. Audrey thinks it’s the flu, since I’ve been basically out of comission since Monday. In my own hubris, I did not elect to get a flu shot when I had the opportunity earlier this year. Curses! I think I’m on the upswing, though. It is still a real drag, though, since I had been planning on doing a lot of work this week, and have only been able to do a fraction thereof.

Oh well, so it goes.

The title is a bit misleading, it is actually “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman”

Sterne’s work is important in understanding one of the borderline cases of narrative. Despite being published six decades before Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, it is a work that seems deceptively modern, or even postmodern. It would be very easy to draw comparisons between Sterne’s writing and the “lines of flight” described by Deleuze and Guattari.

As a work, Tristram Shandy is erratic and nonlinear, circular even. The premise is that the book documents the life of the eponymous subject, who is the narrator, but the main subjects of the book are his father, Walter Shandy, and his uncle Toby. There are a number of other characters who come into play, as well, but the focus is on those two. In the first volume, the narrator is trying to tell the story of his life, but really, he can’t begin to do that before accounting for his birth, and then his conception, and then the life of his parents before hand. The narrative is endlessly digressive, and draws connections between all manner of works of philosophy, science (of the time, of course), and history. Essentially, as the narrator is trying to tell a complete story of his life, he cannot do so without expanding to include more than could ever be written within his lifetime.

One of the reasons for this is that philosophy and science, especially the eclectic, have an essential role in making sense of everyday life. The living world connects to many disparate systems of meaning. Thus, there is a sort of art of connecting, in drawing allusions between everyday life and works of science and philosophy. This idea of naturalism works in contrast to the literary movement of realism (which in itself was a very particular type of narrative), which focused on life alone without connections to other realms. Sterne was interested in parodying this, and exposing a paradox of literary fiction: To capture anything in its true depth will exceed the time of the thing being described. Eventually, when all approaches are exhausted, time changes from exposition, to instead moment by moment direct communication.

The reading of the book seems like it might be well equated with hypertext. Wikipedia is an invaluable aid of making sense of the many connections and allusions drawn within the writing, and with all of his analogies, Sterne is drawing the reader through what really feels like a hypertext experience. The connections are not directed, but demonstrative. The characters are not really driven to achieve specific goals, but rather, understand themselves and the world around them. Most other novels are framed by some sort of goal or obstacle, especially in the bildungsroman tradition. The result of this shift in emphasis is that Tristram Shany has a ludic quality. I mentioned the term “ludic” in reference to If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and the essence of that comparison is that both the reader’s engagement as well as the characters’ activities are playful.

In Tristram Shandy, the reader must be active. The reader is required to make creative interpretation in order to get meaning out of the text. Because the experience is nonlinear, cut up, even, the reader is responsible for gathering the pieces and putting them together into a coherent whole. Sterne’s writing illustrates the connections to many parts of his world, and these connections must be brought and woven together to put that world together.

Some final notes from Ian Watt’s introduction: The book is not a novel. It fails at that because it is incomplete. Similarly, its system, and there certainly is one, must come off as playful, rather than gamelike explicitly. There are virtues of exploration and balance. It connects the deepness of nature and philosophy to the triviality of life.

Normally I don’t spend much time with political games. I like the idea of political games in principle, but it is frequently difficult for me to really get into them. A few days ago, I stumbled on Ian Bogost’s post about Molleindustria‘s new game Oiligarchy.

The idea behind Oiligarchy is that the player is in control of the oil industry. Not just one part of it, but all of it, the whole thing. Early on, the player is responsible for exploring and building: looking for reservoirs and whatnot. However, over time, domestic reservoirs begin to reduce in output, and demand increases, so the player must look elsewhere for oil. The player can drill for oil in Venezuela, Nigeria, Alaska, and Iraq, and each of these have reaching political implications. The game keeps track of many ongoing variables, such as domestic stability, environmentalism, as well as other events and factors. It is oddly fun to play, and each play through can lead to one of four potential endings.

The most fascinating thing about the game is the postmortem written by the developers. It explains in very explicit terms the model at the core of the simulation, which is the Hubbert peak theory, and the political implications of the model. All of the events in the game are based on either real events or theories, and most of them come with citations. I find the explict focus on the model, specifically the way that it manifests and is ever present within gameplay to be very impressive. This careful exploration and critical approach to models is precisely what I want to encourage in my work about adaptation.

While the model is transparent and visible, it is also integral, so it would not, for instance, be easy for someone to try out their own model within the context of the game. Molleindustria did release their source code, though, so someone could presumably try. This is an aesthetic of openness which is becoming more prevalent in games, and that is a very good thing. Sid Meier’s Civilization is a game that I usually criticize for its colonialist  and expansionist approach to history, but even the fourth installment of the series comes with extensive modding capabilities, including the ability to swap out the core of the game code.

Italo Calvino is an important figure in narrative. Calvino’s fiction can be described as modern or postmodern, in that it pushes some conventional boundaries of fiction. Despite this, unlike many other postmodern writers, Calvino is accessible and deeply enjoyable, without being any less profound. Because my work is on adaptation of fiction, and my particular approach is modeling of fictional worlds, it is important to see how my theories hold when pushed to some of the boundary cases of fiction and literature.

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is important because of its reflexivity. When asked what it is about, the clearest answer is to say that it is a book about reading. Specifically, it is about the experience of reading, the pleasure of reading, and the relationship between reading and writing. At times, it reads like Calvino is poking a great deal of fun at Barthes’ Death of the Author. I normally think that writing is about building worlds, and to some extent, building dramatic structures, but to Calvino it comes down to experience and imagination.

The book spells out a great many scenarios. It is almost like a laboratory, to see as many takes on reading and writing that can be explored within its pages. The protagonist of the book is the Reader (who is explicitly male). There is imaginative speculation of the reader fatasizing about the Other Reader (who is explicitly female), who is reading the same book. The Reader imagines the experience of the Other Reader as she reads the same pages that he reads. Later on, narration shifts to the perspective of a writer who watches a woman reading from his balcony, and voyeuristically fantasizes that she is reading the book that he is writing.

These scenarios are important because they playfully illustrate the complex relationships between reading and writing, as human dimensions. It is important too because it exposes a broader model. Beyond the model of a story world itself, Calvino exposes the model between authorship and readership. Because the novel is written so reflexively (but playfully so) the nature of this model is made very visible, so that the real reader can think and reflect upon it. Play is a central element in Calvino’s novels, and gives the story a ludic quality, rather than a formally structured one.

The introduction by Peter Washington yields some important notes. “By Presenting possible worlds, he can remind us that there are alternatives to the present order of reality. Most important of all, he can practice the negative but essential virtue of encouraging his readers to take nothing on trust.” (p. xiii)

Calvino was inspired by texts outside the Leavisite “Great Tradition”: Cervantes, Sterne, Stevenson, the Decameron, and the Arabian Nights. It is worth noting that the novels of the great tradition can probably be seen as having an explicitly formal structure, specifically, one that could be expressed in rules with a clear objective. The form of the novel itself is not necessarily intrinsically gamelike, but novels frequently have a structures that resemble those commonly used in games (notably progression and bildungsroman, as well as Cambell’s hero’s journey). Works outside the “Great Tradition” tend to be nonlinear, multiform, self-referential, and so on. These have a format which is much less gamelike, because they lack that sort of formal structure. Instead, they are ludic, abstractly playful. Calvino’s writing is like this: it is inherently joyful and delightful and rich with play.

Over the course of the book, the protagonist is the Reader, but the Reader remains an ambiguous character. Presumably, the reader is initially the actual person reading the book, Calvino speculates on what the Reader’s habits and situation might be, but then the Reader becomes more active and more specific. The sections about the Reader are written in the second person, much like roleplaying narration.

This past Sunday, Audrey and I went with a few friends to see Amanda Palmer. The show was fun and off the wall. The first opening act was Vermilion Lies, a very silly cabaret duo, almost vaudeville. After that was another band, The Builders and the Butchers, who were really great. They are somewhat Americana, (they remind me a lot of The Decemberists), and initially seemed somewhat out of place. Over their set, though, all their songs revealed an ominously morbid tone, which helped them fit right at home.

Opening acts have an interesting role in concerts. The opening act is primarily responsible for entertaining and riling up the audience so that they are enthused for the main show. As a result, there is an interesting aesthetic to the acts. They aren’t supposed to be the focus of the show, so there is a freedom to be eccentric and not perfect. Because they have to get the audience excited, opening acts tend to have a lot of participatory elements as well. Their lyrics tend to repeat and the audience is encouraged to sing along. In this way, the opening act is very dependent on the audience, but the main act is meant to stand on its own.

When the main act comes to stage, the performance shifts in nature. The audience moves from being participants to really being just the audience, and there is a pressure for the show to be more perfect and authentic. Amanda Palmer’s act was especially noteworthy in this regard because she was accompanied by The Danger Ensemble, who are an Australian performance troupe. They brought an entire theatrical dimension to her show, which converged and worked in a lot of ways.

The set itself had a bunch of songs from her new CD, as well as a few songs from the Dresden Dolls, as well as a few new surprises. I had been reading about her European tour and was sad not to see Zoe the Cellist, but we did have Lyndon Chester, who could play a mean fiddle. Watching Amanda play the keyboard was pretty remarkable in itself. She was never trained to read music, so she is self taught, and I could see all of that crazy obsessive emotion and energy pounding into the instrument. Without drums to support her, she practically played it percussively.

Audrey also got hugged by Mark of the Danger Ensemble during “We Have to Drive”. I’ve been looking photos, but haven’t been able to find one of her getting hugged yet. Just have to keep looking!

Edit: One omitted detail that I forgot about: There was an encore at the end of the show, where Amanda teamed up with both Vermillion Lies and The Builders and the Butchers to sing a couple of songs, a Bon Jovi cover (for donations to the Danger Ensemble) and then Leeds United. Afterwards, there was another encore, but it was a bit different this time. Amanda came back on stage alone with a ukelele, an out of tune ukelele, and sang Radiohead’s well known song, Creep.

This was a great moment because it totally subverted the idea of officiality in performance. Much of the audience had left at this point, leaving a large huddling mass near the center of the stage. We were all very much together, and we were all singing along. The instruments weren’t plugged into the speakers, there was no microphone, so it was just her and the audience together. All of us were necessary to make a sound, and we were all singing, not necessarily in tune, but we were all part of the song together.

I mentioned earlier that the main act of a concert usually works independently of the audience, but that notion was subverted in this last song. The voice of the audience was necessary for the song to have any volume, as was especially evident when she hit the high notes of the song and we couldn’t keep up. Briefly, the audience was quiet and it was just her singing alone. Vermillion Lies came back on and did some acapella rhythm for her, but that last moment was pretty incredible.

Also also: A couple got engaged during the “Ask Amanda” session. I can’t believe I forgot to mention that. It was very sweet.

Neil Postman is an interesting figure. His book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” can be read not only as a vicious attack on television, but also on any form of media or mass communication. The style and tone of his writing makes him seem old fashioned and stuffy. He comes off as hostile towards media and dismissive of anything that takes people away from that nostalgic golden age where people actually read books. It is easy for those of us who grew up with television, video games, and, more recently, the internet, to read Postman and imagine counterexamples to all of his arguments. No, we might say, media has a positive role in our lives, and we have been made stronger for it. Such an argument is valid, certainly, but it is reacting against Postman’s words alone and not some of the deeper themes that lie underneath them. Postman might say that television affects us negatively, we might claim that it affects us positively, but the point is that it affects us nonetheless.

The claims about affect fall within the larger frame of technological determinism, but there is something more present in Postman’s book. In order to take control over media, so that we can use it positively, we must understand its agenda. Following from McLuhan, Postman argues that each medium has an agenda. To not be manipulated by this agenda, we must be aware and critical of it. This concept has been called media literacy. Digital media is not only a medium of its own, but is a conduit, a channel for many other media and systems, each of which have their own agendas. Specifically I am interested in simulation, and thinking about the agendas of simulations, which are often closed, like television, concealing their agenda beneath their surfaces. I want to consider a practice of simulation literacy, where the methods, assumptions, and epistemology of a simulation can all be put under scrutiny.

The Medium is the Metaphor

Before the book begins, Postman presents an analogy which sets the tone and climate for the rest of the book. He compares two authors, Orwell and Huxley, who wrote of terrible dystopias. Their visions both present worlds where people are controlled, but through very different means. Orwell is generally more widely recognized, and his dystopia 1984, presents a world where books are burned and history is rewritten. Huxley’s Brave New World is one in which there is no need to burn books or rewrite history, because no one reads anyway. Postman sums them up neatly: “In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us, Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.” One of these worlds is implicitly the direction that the future is heading. The underlying assumption behind this is that we are slouching toward some dystopia anyway.

Postman’s writing comes across as extremely dated, as though he is appealing to some idyllic period in which spectacle was never a factor in communication. There are a couple of examples of how media has restricted the range of what is possible. A presidential candidate must necessarily now be telegenic. This is definitely true, though. Once media has been introduced, it must be accounted for. By virtue of this, media affordances have restricted what is or may be possible. Behind the moralizing, this restrictive nature of media is still real.

There is a religious element to Postman’s objections to television which is hardly surprising. The relationship between the iconography of media and the religious sin of idolatry reveals a deep spiritual unease with the representational power of media. By virtue of its semiotic nature, media and technology have the power to transform icons and images, and this has a profound affect on thinking and conceptualization.

Media as Epistemology

Postman gives a review of the requirements of reading and print culture. This idea translates directly into the notion of print literacy. The first of these requirements are physical and very basic, but they give way into deeper and deeper requirements of comprehension and analysis, which are not even verifiable. It is impossible to measure whether someone truly understands a text, especially when connected to the vast cultural network of meaning. This is literary intelligence at its highest level, and it is by no means easy. To claim that someone is literate means to go beyond the basic ability to understand sentences, but to also go to these deeper roots of making sense of the text, and knowing how to make sense of the text. The practice of meaning making has no set measure or procedure.

I raise these issues because they expose that print-intelligence or print-literacy is not some simple or easy idea. This direction undercuts Postman’s work somewhat, as he means to explain that this form of intelligence was common before television. It is arguable that this may be the case historically, but it is not the case generally. Thus, instead of being a conflict between types of media, we can view Postman’s argument as a conflict over literacy.

The Typographic Mind

The key characteristic of the typographic medium is exposition. Exposition is a mode and methodology. It is the epistemology of the literary medium. “Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; a tolerance for delayed response.” (p. 63)

I would argue that the idealization of this is somewhat fallacious. The “era of print” certainly had its share of spectacle, irrationality, and logical falsehoods. The ideas here are still important, though. Exposition is still a value of print, and it is an affordance.

The Peek-a-Boo World

Telegraphy enabled instantaneous communication, but also came with decontextualization of information. Postman argues that it inflicts a kind of impotence on the communicated content. Because it is deprived of context, he claims that the new information ceases to be meaningful or relevant. This is unfair. If we were impotent in the age of the telegraph, then we were impotent before. This also comes with the implicit assumptions that the receivers of information are wholly passive. Postman argues that the information-action ratio was greatly diminished after telegraphy, which may be true, but a diminished ratio does not indicate a reduction in the actual action itself.

The heart of the matter is that television has become a myth in the sense of Barthes. It is invisible, unquestioned, and only accepted. Postman’s idea is that the communicated artifacts of television should seem bizarre and not natural. The world seen through television seems natural, even though it is false. Postman’s goal is to make visible the epistemology of television, to expose the transformational process so that it is denaturalized. This reverberates with Barthes agenda in Mythologies, to reveal how mythologies are present and prevalent and influential even though they are invisible.

We can make a comparison to games and internet culture, but by virtue of being new media, they are perpetually under analysis and criticism. They have not yet become totally naturalized, but, some conventions are moving in that direction. Postman’s analysis of television is holistic and reductive, but exposing epistemology is key in developing new literacy.

The Age of Show Business

Good sound byte here: “Each technology has an agenda of its own. It is, as I have suggested, a metaphor waiting to unfold.” (p. 84) Later, “Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted, or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure.” (p. 87) This is in comparison to print, whose supra-ideology would be exposition. It is ambiguous what, if any, supra-ideology computation must have.

“Now . . . This”

The argument here goes to support the literacy theme. Things viewed on television, the news specifically, seem implicitly credible. Because things are presented accurately, they are understood as truth. Books still can and do this, using all manner of fallacies. Postman seems to imply that, as television is new and immediate, it is more credible. Maybe this relates to media maturity. Alternately, the argument seems to be that since entertainment is the content of television, truth is irrelevant. This reverberates with McLuhan and Raymond Williams.

The Huxleyan Warning

There is an argument here, not for literacy exactly, but for awareness and skepticism. Technology is ideology. “To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.” (p. 157) The argument is steeped with technological determinism, but is still compelling. Introduction of the alphabet changes culture at a cognitive level, and instantaneous communication produces a social and cultural revolution. This claim sounds like the types of claims, alternating between doomsaying and social revolution, that the internet would have on culture. An argument against Postman is that culture has motivational and self regulating forces of its own. While it may be affected, it still works to regulate itself. This counterargument is also valid, but the culture is still changed. Without awareness, it may not regulate itself positively.

To produce this awareness, Postman explains that we must change how we engage with television. “The problem, in any case, does not reside in what people watch. The problem is in that we watch. The solution must be found in how we watch. For I believe it may be fairly said that we have yet to learn what television is.” The focus on information brings Postman’s critique straight into digital media.

Further: “In any case, the point I am trying to make is that only through a deep and unfailing awarenss of the structure and effects of information, though a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium.”