Mid-morning. You are at Joseph Toyota for
the thirty thousand mile maintenance. You feel good that the maintenance is
taken care of by Toyota through the forty-five thousand mile checkup. You both
love your Avalon Limited Hybrid. – Amorella
0959
hours. It seems dumb to state the obvious, that we love our car.
Afternoon.
You are heading out to a late lunch shortly once Carol has the Duke Energy bill
ready to mail. I was looking at my iPhone and Carol showed me an app I didn’t
know I had. In the time I have had this phone (I think it is about two years) I
have averaged 0.6 miles a day walking. Who knew? It is an Apple app that came
with the phone. Of course this is only when I carry the phone, which is not
often unless we are going out. So, for fun, I set it and will carry it all day
for a few days and see what happens. – Amorella
1403
hours. Your sense of being human is more than just genetic?
Of course, boy, isn’t that obvious?
Consciousness and empathy make people human. – Amorella
1406
hours. I don’t agree with you. People are born human.
Humane is a better word here. – Amorella
** **
humane –
adjective
1 having or showing
compassion or benevolence: regulations ensuring the humane treatment of
animals.
•
inflicting the minimum of pain: humane methods of killing.
2 formal (of a branch of learning) intended to have a
civilizing or refining effect on people: the center emphasizes economics as
a humane discipline.
Selected and edited
from the Oxford/American software
** **
I, the Amorella, include empathy in the
above definition.
1411
hours. I include ‘humanity’ in the definition.
** **
humanity -
noun
1 the human race; human
beings collectively: appalling crimes against humanity.
•
the fact or condition of being human; human nature: music is the universal
language with which we can express our common humanity.
2 humaneness;
benevolence: he praised them for their standards of humanity, care, and
dignity.
3 (humanities) learning or literature concerned with
human culture, especially literature, history, art, music, and philosophy.
Selected and edited
from the Oxford/American software
** **
You had lunch at Panera/Chipotle, stopped at
PetSmart to pick up a toy for Jadah and one for Spooky too, then a stop at
Graeter’s and on to the far north lot of Pine Hill Lakes Park where you are
presently. Carol is on page 677 of Baldacci’s Total Control. You have
worn your new beret for two days now and are liking it very much. – Amorella
1606
hours. It fits better than the old one. I ordered a size 8 this time but also
ordered an interior half band to put in the front. It fits fine. The old one
(before I knew they sold bands) I cut the leather band in the back, not all the
way up to the stitching but close to make a fit that was slightly too tight at
times, depending on how long or short my hair growth. I won’t wait so long to
order one the next time. – I just reread the three book reviews on Laurence Scott’s
The Four Dimensional Human. The reviews reinforce Will Self’s article on
the death of the novel of a couple posting ago.
After rereading them you realize each
article focuses on a different aspect of Scott’s book, which you have not read.
Drop them in but let’s rearrange them to be better read one after the other. –
Amorella
1618
hours. That is fine with me Amorella. Here are the three book reviews.
** **
1. Computing and the net
Book of the day
By John Naughton
Monday 27 July 2015 01.30 EDT
“We shape our tools,” said Marshall McLuhan, “and afterwards they shape us.” The most powerful tool that
humankind has invented in the past half century is the internet, and we are
still trying to figure out what it is doing to us. This is no easy task, and
it’s very much work in progress because we are still only in the early days of
the transformation of our communications environment wrought by the net. It
took us the best part of 400 years to understand how the last such revolution –
the one triggered by Gutenberg – would play out, and the internet has only been a fixture in
our daily lives since 1993, which in the long view of history is only the blink
of an eye.
Our problem is not that we are short of information about this
new force in our lives. On the contrary, we are awash with the stuff. It’s just
that we have no idea what it all means. In that sense, we are in the state immortalised
by Manuel Castells as that of “informed bewilderment”. Sure, we have some idea
about what digital technology means for our economies and our daily lives. But
what does it mean for us? What happens to our humanity in a digital age?
If you’re a policy wonk you will turn to sociologists,
anthropologists and neuroscientists for answers. Good luck with that. As Miss Jean
Brodie said of the gaseous domain of chemistry in Muriel Spark’s great novel, “for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of
thing they like”. Personally, I would put my money elsewhere. Since imaginative
failure is a likely explanation for our current bewilderment, novelists and
literary types may be better guides. After all, the people who first nailed
down images of our technologically determined futures were both novelists – George Orwell and Julian Huxley. And more recently, the best evocation of the mindset of the giant
internet companies is to be found not in any journalism emanating from Silicon
Valley, but in Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle.
Laurence Scott is a literary type who has been brooding on the
implications and meanings of digital technology for a while. He can even
remember the time when one connected to the net via a modem, that little box
that emitted curious burbles and whistles as it hooked you up. “The modem’s
faithful churn,” he writes, “made it seem as if it were tunnelling through to
somewhere else, opening up a space for us to inhabit. Once inside we followed
our moods, webpages listlessly completing themselves in descending strips,
producing all manner of suspense as the news story or piece of erotica toppled
slowly into being.”
Ah yes… we remember it well. Well, some of us do, anyway. Once
upon a time, cyberspace and meatspace (where real life was lived) were parallel
universes. And then, surreptitiously, the two universes merged to produce the
world we now inhabit – a mysterious mix of the virtual and the real. No wonder
we find it puzzling: we have never been here before.
Scott’s big idea – implicit in his title – is that cyberspace
adds a fourth dimension to humanity. But his is not the fourth dimension of
Einsteinian relativity, but rather the way our sense of ourselves is changed by
the reality of ubiquitous connectivity. One sees this in myriad ways every day:
how everyone in a railway carriage is reading a smartphone; how groups of teenagers
meeting in the street are all texting while ostensibly engaging in what we now
quaintly call face-to-face conversation; how an unanswered text or a withheld
“like” on a Facebook post can be sources of angst; how nobody under the
age of 25 bothers to make long-term arrangements; and so on.
These
minutiae of social and private life are the grist for Scott’s mill, which
sometimes grinds exceedingly fine. His book is essentially without structure –
a sequence of headings over riffs of varying profundity. He ranges from big
themes (time, space, isolation, silence and fear) to the smallest of anxieties
– “the silence of the unsent text message”, for example – with a relentlessness
that reminds one sometimes of Geoff Dyer’s omnivorous musings on photography, and at other times of Walter Benjamin, who had a similar habit of fragmentary musing that had the
effect of obscuring a bigger project. Underpinning Scott’s cabinet of
reflections is, one suspects, a bigger idea. On this evidence, it might be
worth waiting for.
Selected
and edited from - http://www.theguardianDOTcom/books/2015/jul/27/four-dimensional-human-review--laurence-scott
***
** **
2. Books
The Observer
Four-Dimensional Human – the age of self-publicity
Review
by Jemima Kiss
How does it feel to exist in a life so dominated by digital
technologies? Laurence Scott’s The Four-Dimensional Human is a delicate, reflective book that compares our modern transformation
to the Victorian preoccupation with a spiritual and science-fictional fourth
dimension of being.
Rather than explore the more clinical concerns about attention
spans or concentration, Scott says he wanted to explore our shared anxieties
about living in a pervasively networked environment. “We are engaged in a 24/7
news cycle of the self,” he says. “People claim to feel more isolated, more
restless than ever, and there’s a self-consciousness to our behaviour.” We are
constantly filtering, he says, and explains that his students now refer to
things as “grammable”, or Instagrammable, as a currency of social value,
because eventually new technologies change our behaviour when they become
mainstream. Our constant re-presentation of ourselves gives us an illusory
feeling of being the publicity reps for our own lives. “There’s always been
this comical idea that we don’t have the copyright to our own lives. Who you
are will be composed of other people, gossip you can’t control – we’re always
bleeding out of ourselves and we can’t control the perceptions of others. If
we’re honest, there’s an emotional toll to the idea of being our own
publicists: how was my latest release really perceived?”
The concept of a fourth-dimensional human was in its heyday
between 1890 and 1910, variously explored as time manipulation, literary
fantasy and a philosophical exercise in the boundaries of the human condition.
Our modern experience of this “other” way of being is more tense, a “conflict
landscape”, says Scott. “The vocabulary of social media is gothic, even
barbaric. Friends talk of a Facebook ‘cull’, and used to talk of ‘committing
suicide’, which meant closing their account. We would never bandy that word
around in real life, yet the immaterial qualities of digital life allow us to
talk like that, casualness collapsing into callousness.” Scott cautions a kind
of vigilance where new technology is concerned. While the ability to interact
in real-time video with someone on the other side of the world is astonishing,
and definitely new, eventually technology ends up changing our relationships
and how we communicate with each other. “Students of media and communications
will tell you there’s no such thing as neutral technology, that it’s too
simplistic to say technology is just a tool used for good or for bad, because
the actual design of a service can encourage certain behaviour.”
Of
many recent titles exploring how technology is affecting all of our lives,
Scott’s book is a gentle meditation that drifts through observations about our
behaviour, our state of mind and our sense of self, without manufactured
conclusion or a clumsy inevitability. And he defines something many of us feel,
a need to resist the relentlessness of immersive technology, and the constant
enthusiasm for technology that runs parallel with our anxiety and claustrophobia.
http://www.theguardianDOTcom/books/2015/jun/15/four-dimensional-human-review-laurence-scott-technology
***
** **
3. Society
Book of the day
The
Four-Dimensional Human by Laurence Scott review – how has the digital world
changed us?
The web privileges
novelty over originality, and the apparent fluidity and diversity of our online
existences is deceptive, argues this perceptive loiterer in social media
Review
by Will Self
Thursday 11 June 2015 01.30 EDT
This is a curious book; a text that in its physical production –
its writing, its publication and possibly even its reception – says much more
than its actual words disclose. Which is not to say those words are badly
written or otherwise lacking. Laurence Scott has set himself the formidable
task of registering the impact of the new digital technologies on our
cognition, our perception and our emotions; in short, our phenomenology in its broadest
sense. Other pundits take on the political, economic and social changes
occasioned by the world wide web and the internet – Scott busies himself with
the existential ones. The four-dimensional humans of the book’s title are our
wired selves, compelled increasingly to inhabit an environment in which the old
certainties of space and time are being disrupted by a global network that
abolishes distance and privileges instantaneousness.
Besides the title, Scott devises other motifs to exemplify these
transformations: the four-dimensional human, ever conscious of the clock
ticking in the corner of the screen, looks through “a reverse peephole” into
the homes of others. Airbnb encourages us to turn booking a
night’s stay into a paradoxical form of intimacy: we may never meet the people
who pimp their sheets to us, yet both parties know exactly where to find one
another should those sheets be egregiously stained. The frontier era of
cyberspace, was, Scott suggests, painfully short-lived: we set off pell-mell
into the virtual new-found-land, gleefully abandoning the old strictures of
gender, sexual orientation, class, age and ethnicity, only to find them
catching up with us – and indeed being still more rigidly imposed by interests
for whom it is essential our identities be defined, so they can sell us stuff
we don’t need, but which they know we’ve bought in the past.
If the vertiginous seesaw between seeming anonymity and actual surveillance
(by both commercial and state apparatuses) typifies online life, then our
communications within it have, Scott suggests, an equally Janus-faced
character. One of the great strengths of this book is that its author offers
himself up as the experimental rat in the virtual maze, analysing his own
emotional responses to a life on social media. He writes of how in an era when
everyone has the permanent possibility of communicating with just about anyone
else, his own interactions with those actually present have become curiously
stilted. He distinguishes between telephonic silences, which link us together
“like a thick rope”, from Skype ones that, as we avoid our
interlocutors’ eyes, only drive us further apart. Nowadays, he writes, the
phrase “awkward silence” is utterly tautologous: all silences are awkward.
Scott, who is a self-styled social media “loiterer”, rather than
a compulsive tweeter, is particularly good on the ways four-dimensionality
seems to queer our flesh-and-blood existence: the friend who continually
updates their online profiles can seem oddly insubstantial and anachronistic in
person; the fleeting real-life encounter can turn into a persistent virtual
presence, hovering around our twittering timelines; while the deaths of casual
acquaintances can gain huge salience, even as those of old friends are lost in
a spume of pixels. Marshall McLuhan’s much-trumpeted “global village” is, it transpires, not some Laurie Lee hamlet where everyone brings in the
hay together, but a world-girdling Hollywood chock full of over-demonstrative
divas. And, according to Scott, this is the virtual world at its best, because
the confusions of scale and proportion are necessarily uncanny, making us only
too aware of the trolls and stalkers who lurk about in the unearthly glow of light-emitting
diodes.
But if the capacity of the internet to unite us is deceptive, so
are the apparent fluidity and diversity of our online existences. In a section
that takes as its starting point Marx’s apercu in The Communist Manifesto about the transformative power of capitalism, “All that is
solid melts into air”, Scott argues that far from liberating us into a realm of
vaporous reinvention, every web-surfer is “training to be a taxonomist”. The
culture and operation of the web thrive on our willingness to point and click
and view; Scott cites “cyber-philosopher” Jaron Lanier, who coined the expression “virtual reality”, as the champion
of “a sustainable global economy based primarily on exchanges of information” –
namely all those clicks and likes and views – but he himself isn’t convinced.
Perhaps too much of a cybernaut and an egalitarian to argue straightforwardly
that the web banalises culture by bypassing the traditional gatekeepers, Scott
instead wittily dissects the phenomenon of “Normcore”, seeing it as emblematic
of a medium that relentlessly privileges novelty over originality.
But really, as Lear observed to Cordelia (who clearly didn’t
have an Amazon Prime account), nothing comes of nothing, and no “information
economy” can ever topple the suzerainty of things. In some quite prosaic ways
Scott is an ideal person to tackle this subject: he is in his mid-30s, and so
reached adulthood before the inception of wireless broadband, the technological
change that freeze-dried cyberspace into full, gelid existence. Moreover, he is
both a creative writer and a perceptive literary critic, who leavens his text
with some mercurially brilliant turns of phrase and poetic coinages, while at
the same time stiffening it up with huge dollops of literary explication and
quotation. There’s room in The Four- Dimensional Human for everything from Proust’s madeleine to Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, and back again. The former is employed to discuss the web’s
time- and memory-distorting capabilities; the latter as prescient of its
simultaneous visibility and obscurity.
I
enjoyed Scott’s tropes, whether it was nailing the defining quality of Katie Price (AKA Jordan) as “eternal nextness”,
or describing the x-ray view of screened luggage as a Warholian “pastel
fantasia”. And I appreciated the erudition, which brings the same degree of
criticality to bear on The Wings of the Dove as an advert for Dove soap, without thereby implying any
necessary equivalence. However, speaking with all the gravitas of my 53 years,
and as not so much a digital immigrant but more of an away-dayer who takes
short trips into cyberspace, I think Scott may not quite have the long view
necessary to fully apprehend this epochal transformation in our terms of
existence. In part, his scholarliness is responsible, making of him an oddly fusty
zeitgeister, since he explains emergent technologies almost solely by reference
to content derived from one – the codex, or physical books – that is
increasingly redundant. Yet there is also a failure here to fix the phenomenon
of digital media properly in a universal timeline, one that allows for other
developments that have had just as radical effects.
I’ve often thought the virulence with which these technologies
have battened on to human psyches is due to our already having been softened
up. Really, the communications and media technologies that came to fruition in
the late-19th and early-20th century already constituted an embryonic “world
wide web”; many of the characteristics Scott attributes to his contemporary
four-dimensional human were already evident in the city-dwellers of the recent
past. High-speed transport links allowing for mechanised distribution systems,
the telegraph, the telephone and radio were all in place by the late 1920s,
while the roiling, jostling urban millstream was itself a spatial analogue of
the cluttered screens that have subsequently come to fill our vision. Scott
does understand the past has much to teach us, yet understandably he wants to
make it new by privileging the novelty of the virtual; but, really,
metropolitan existence, at once utterly anonymous and rigidly codified, while
also imposing on us all sorts of spatial jump-cuts and temporal stitching, has
been the truly transformative force in human affairs. The new media have –
through their ubiquity and prevalence – finished
Towards the end of this book Scott seems to lose his focus;
shifting from forensic descriptions of web-heads’ perceptual and cognitive
glitches into lengthier philosophising of the Whither goest thou? form. Unlike
Bob Dylan’s Mr Jones, Scott sees there is something going on here but he has a
fairly good idea of what it is: a sinister lock-step between humanity’s
technological “advance” and its compulsive shitting in its own nest. He tries
to stave off what he terms “the Demon of Melodramatic Prophesies” which can
bedevil writing about the present, yet having already identified as intrinsic
to virtual existence a collapsing of the future and the past into a permanently
digitised “now”, he can’t avoid the doomsday intersection of human connectivity
and environmental degradation.
But
this is a cop-out: seemingly even youngish literary types such as Scott cannot
help being nostalgic for the quill, parchment and carrier pigeons they never
knew; and would prefer extinction to any version of “the singularity” (the absorption
of biological into machine intelligence) that may lie ahead of us. Which is a
shame, because with his joyful phrase-making and sharp eye for the follies and
absurdities of wired life, Scott would be the perfect investigator to report
back on what it feels like to be … uploaded.
Selected
and edited from -
http://www.theguardianDOTcom/books/2015/jun/11/the-four-dimensional-human-ways-of-being-in-the-digital-world-laurence-scott-review
***
***
1629
hours. These three reviews plus the earlier Will Self article show how the
future is leaning as far as novel writing as a form of literary communication
is concerned. From my perspective the trends have been here since the Orwell’s
1948 projection of propagandistic word usage in his novel 1984 (not a
coincidence by the way, of publication year and subsequent title). – The most I
ever imagined earlier was to have illustrations of characters and/or an event
or two, scattered about the books, much like those by John Tenniel’s in Alice
through the Looking Glass for instance, only modernized as science fiction
illustrations. –
1759
hours. I have spent the mostly looking through images and illustrations of
science fiction on line and I find none that I could readily translate to my
Merlyn books.
This shows you something in itself. Your
works defy illustration in context, even your personal context. Post. -
Amorella
2142 hours. It is a surprise to me that I do not have the
ability to see the Merlyn books in illustrations of my own visual imagination.
However, when I think about it I see the reason, the context of the visuals is
in Merlyn’s mind because they are his dreams not my own. It is true that I used
visual props – the Blake Williams
House set in Shaker Heights, Ohio is also partially owned by his sister Pyl is
actually the Glendower Mansion in Lebanon, Ohio.
Glendower
Mansion – Lebanon, Ohio
This
was easy to mentally construct because our local fraternity Pi Kappa Phi, the Country
Club, on Grove Street just off Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio is
similar in construction. I visualize scenes as mentally constructed props as I
am ‘being a character in the scene. This is not the same as imagining the scene
from the outside as if I were going to make a film of it. If I were to
photocopy the mansion above in the place of the real mansion in Shaker Heights
I would know this was a fake because it is. The four chapter segments are not coherent
because dreams are not coherent but they are strung together with unconscious
reasoning, that is the intent – to make the dream composites more authentic to
me, alas, not necessarily to the reader.
Pi
Kappa Phi – Otterbein – Westerville, Ohio
2210
hours. Readers no doubt give up trying to understand the underlying purpose –
to show a broader range of ‘a greater nature’ one that includes the galaxy as
well as the Dead of both the human beings and the marsupial humanoids because
they are connected within my mind as a sort of a vision connected the ancient
Dead of both planetary systems with the Living in both planetary systems on
opposite sides of the Milky Way Galaxy. Obviously, (as Amorella might suggest)
I expect far too much from the reader because I really don’t know how to show
better without explaining as I am doing now (an old teacher trait).
2218
hours. I remember when the first Dune film came out. I thought it was excellent
because it stayed close to the ‘images’ I conjured from reading the book, Dune,
but alas, the public who had not read the book found parts of the setting and
characters unreal because they didn’t really know the film was made partially
to appease the readers. That’s how I remember it anyway.
You don’t really care whether the reader
gets it or not, boy, because the books are your vision not theirs. They
are my vision too. - Amorella
2225
hours. I need a definition here.
** **
vision – noun
1 the faculty or state
of being able to see: she had defective vision.
•
the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom:
the organization had lost its vision and direction.
•
a mental image of what the future will or could be like: a vision of
retirement.
2 an experience of
seeing someone or something in a dream or trance, or as a supernatural
apparition: the idea came to him in a vision.
•
(often visions) a vivid mental image, especially a fanciful one of the
future: he had visions of becoming the Elton John of his time.
verb [ with obj. ] rare
imagine.
Selected
and edited from the Oxford/American software
** **
Post. - Amorella
No comments:
Post a Comment