Noteworthy places to visit recommended by a noteworthy blog

To take note of some places I would like to visit in Thailand.  Musuem Siam, and BMA Local Museum of Yannawa District, both have special memories for me, both recommended by a blog I like, My Unseen Thailand.

Google's view timeline search

Being someone who like to read and write about history and therefore loves timeline, a reader's comments led me to discover google's experimental search timeline.  It was difficult to find how to get there since it is still just an experiment with google.  I hope it stays and improves, but just so that I can find it, I'm collecting some links below.

Results of google search for "search timeline".
Google view timeline page
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-05-24-n40.html
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/new-thinking/googles-experimental-timeline-search-22214

Blogging, identities, and ideal web space

When I was introduced to blogging some five years ago in a media class, I spent a lot of time surfing other people's blogs.  I was lucky to have others guide me to where the best blogs can be found.   Through those guides and reading famous blogs, good blogs, bad blogs, I discovered different kinds of pitfalls of blogging and learnt what to expect, what not to expect.  My few blog companions guided me to understand certain laws of media and we had a great time witnesssing the blogosphere bloom to its highest ideal in the political campaign of Howard Dean. 

As all things that go up, they eventually settle down, as did that first generation of quality blogs.  When a few journalists and famous bloggers were dramatically exposed as liars, blogging became just another quirky mode of expression as the internet moved on to exploring other forms of connectivity.   

Occasionally checking in on the emerging Thai blogosphere, I was reluctant to join in any group because they seemed to be dominated by certain identities and technical structures that were limiting for a true free or equal expression of personal thoughts.  However, out there in the wider blogosphere it was difficult to find fellow bloggers who shared similar focus or interests and it was getting boring just talking to myself.  Usually when there was some kind of crisis going on I would feel more strongly the need to join in some conversation in trying to make sense out of the world, so that was what brought me to this space here.  Now I'm starting to have some doubts.

I don't know if it's too much to hope that the Nationa Weblog will move towards a kind of space for grassroot "journalism" to develop as it did with the Jordanians or the Koreans.  Even a lesser ideal of simply becoming a space where people will have diverse and entertaining expressions over a variety of topics would be an encouragement to keep blogging.  Maybe, I'm too "new" in this space and expect too much, but I cannot help but worry when I see development of flamingfueds that just simply bring down the quality of any forum.  One was recently started around the question of identity, an Achilles' heel of this narcissistic media form.  

Here's a bit of my say about identity, (through the luxury allowed by this form of other people's words):

On the blogging identity: 

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/2412

Something about identity and transparency: 

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2006/04/21/identity/

An entertaining "Pop Psychological Look at Blogger Identity": 

http://www.black-iris.com/2007/08/07/a-pop-pscychological-look-at-blogger-identities/

An example of about what/how to blog: 

http://www.twincities.com/ci_11225012

In the general interest of having a geniunely interesting blogging space, would I be too naive to plead with my fellow bloggers here to let's be constructive and avoid falling into these degrading pitfalls and waste of blogspace?

On n'a plus le temps

I found this with languagehat:



On ne lit plus, on n'a plus le temps. L'esprit est appelé à la fois de trop de côtes; il faut lui parler vite où il passe. Mais il y a des choses qui ne peuvent être dites, ni comprises si vite, et ce sont les plus importantes pour l'homme. Cette accélération de mouvement qui ne permet de rien enchaîner, de rien méditer, suffirait seule pour affaiblir et, à la longue, pour détruire entièrement la raison humaine.

Félicité Robert de Lamennais, 1819.

(Translation: "We have stopped reading, we have not the time. Our mind is solicited simultaneously from too many sides: it has to be spoken to quickly as it passes by. But there are things that cannot be said or understood in such haste, and these are the most important things for man. This accelerated movement, which makes coherent thought impossible, may alone be sufficient to weaken, and in the long run utterly to destroy, human reason.")

More on Thai blogs

After unsuccessful googling for some kind of directory of Thai blogs, I had to opt for the tedious work of going through pages and pages of google results of webpages that had the words "Thai" and "blog" on it. It took me a whole night to just get the links below. They are what I would call "preferential' links, by the way, since they are the ones that I liked. I have not included a number of other blogs which blogged about Thailand, mostly those written by foreignors who seem to mostly enjoy ranting about the negative aspects of Thailand.



Anyway, that tedious search turned out to be productive because some of these links have links to other Thai blogs, which requires more reading on another day. I'm so frustrated that there isn't an easier way to do this.



What I also discovered was that there are a lot of young Thai-"Americans" (a growing new generation of Thais) blogging in a blogging ring called Xanga. Interesting that there are some claims that Xanga is growing faster than Friendster. I liked the ecclectic mix of people they have there and there seems to be some sense of order and respect among its members. I have to see what they have to offer as a community and as a blogging tool and may just decide to join them.



Additionally, Ross Mayfield mentions a blogging programme being tried out in Thailand by think.com which I haven't had the time to investigate just yet.



My preferential link collection of Thai blogs:



blogwise: List of blogs in Thailand This was a directory, that actually didn't have many "Thai" blogs. But who knows, it might grow.



"The voices in my head" A bit slow to download the whole page, but worth the wait to see the pictures she's posted. Blogged by a Thai.



"Just my thought" Blogged by a Thai.



"Stories from the life of Stuart G. Towns" who is not a Thai.



by Ron Morris, great source of news, and good pictures. Not Thai, but passionate about Thailand and its mass transit system.



Piyawat's a new Thai blogger and updates slowly.



"The House of Random Crap", Thai-American who moved to Thailand. Actually not crappy at all, quite intense.



"Wanderlustress" I think she's Thai, she certainly travels!



SOMMAIRE Not a Thai blog, but a blog (of sorts) by His Majesty Sihanouk, King of Cambodia. I've put it in my links here in hope that maybe King Bhumipol or Princess Sirindhorn will eventually blog. It would really be the establishment of the Thai blogosphere.



Discuss

On question, questioning and quest of identity in cyberculture

The question of identity and its quest with myself and other members of cyberculture has been mentioned many times in my blog as well as many other blogs. It was enlightening for me to listen a classmate's presentation about her research and the model of media systems which she applies. She classified "identity" under "Communication as Social Knowing", as opposed to the opposite group of "Cognition as Individual Knowing". Of course, we don't know who we are until we can relate ourselves to somebody, and we start from the moment we are born with our mothers.

The revelation for me was to see the classification. It rang a bell with a recent paper I found through google. Anthropologist Richard O'Connor questions the assumption of anthropology and its method and retheorizes culture and said let's look at the sense of locality of the Tais and its relations in the definition of their identity. It's obvious that they have multiple identities and paradoxically a single, consistent identity.

Serendipity, Sibylle, and googling "Sybil", (a probe of her name), I found this webpage - about identity, saying exactly the same thing, that "personal identity is not singular".

The insight I gained in this mini-journey, quest of identity, was being able to see the unseen, how we lock ourselves in with fixed notions of identity thinking we are "..." by nation, by geographically location, by our job position, our position in family. We construct a sense of identity with a border. So we invented terms like "schizophrenia" and applied these distortions to those that didn't fit society's definition of how that person should be or behave. It really isn't like that.

Something about McLuhan's method also recalls to my mind Carlos Castaneda's work on shamanism, and recently I've pulled out my old book "Woman Who Run with Wolves" as well.

Discuss

Great Thai Blog!

I enjoyed visiting this webpage: Thailandlife which is another Thai webpage that I find has the characteristics of a blog, but with the format of a webpage, an interactive one at that. Thai culture is quite different from the western conventional, therefore Thais may not find blogging in the conventional format attractive. But as with the two websites I've found, that certainly hasn't stopped them from being creative and inventing their own style of "blogging".



What is interesting about the above website is its network of webpages, created by amateur webmasters of Sriwittayapaknam School. The school itself is novel in its experiment of teaching Thai kids to learn English by teaching them how to use the internet.



Discuss

Somewhat a Thai "blog"

Since I've started blogging, I've been searching the internet to find what can be classified as "Thai blogs". Found many interesting things, but nothing close to what I was personally looking for until I had to do searches about Thai media ownership and discovered Busakorn's page. I find her style interesting because it is a webpage but has a weblog feel to it, and of course because she discusses media and being Thai. There was even a comment page added to it but she has control of what she wants to show.



Discuss

What my blog is not

For the benefit of readers of my blog, that they not be mislead, I thought I should somehow state what my blog is not!



I am basically a non-expert on all of the topics I blog about. These include: communicating in English, and in Thai, blogging, multi-cultural, global issues, economics, development, media, McLuhan, connectivity, emergence, paradigms, buddhist philosophy, being a mother, etc. The great thing about being a non-expert is that I get to ask a lot of questions. I enjoy it most when unlikely answers pop up, but the questions will always be the adventures. I will, however, unmodestly claim to be close to being an expert as a household cook, in being intuitive, and in sinking into the unconsciousness of sleeping (where I get most of my creative work done!) The thing about being close to an expert is that one tends towards arrogance, so please be forgiving.



In conclusion, I'm pretty much an amateur at everything, "ama" is the key, I do it for love, I do it for fun. I may sometimes get serious, because that is another part of my nature, but this blog was basically started for fun, as an experiment, as some sort of tool to organize, and put down in writing my very random and disorganized thoughts.



I have learnt through my experience of blogging up to this moment that blogging is like walking the fine line between belonging to a group and being myself. Being part of a group means that I have to accept certain pressures, like working on my research project, ; ), and being myself means I keep resisting/insisting on my way of enjoying the blogging process as mine. Somehow this fine edge produces quite a lot of material for me to blog about.



Everyone with curiosity, willingness to engage in play, question, contribute, wishes to give constructive comments are all very welcome and I really appreciate your comments.



Discuss

Why is it "Watch what you write"?...not..."Watch who's hiring you?"

An incredible blogging phenomena to watch happening in front of my eyes again! I was 'surf'-searching for substantive information to support my class project, and ran into this story of accidental instant fame through RandsinRepose whose site was recommended in a response about NADD by Seb.notlong.com in Bernard's blogs. The item "Eclectism: Even Microsoft wants G5s" under RandsinRepose's POPDEX, Top 5 side links caught my attention, and hey, there's actually two items on that same subject! I clicked on and I'm smack in the middle of a blogging phenomenum that's going to be real fun to research on!



My immediate response:

Why is it "watch what you write" not "watch who's hiring you"? The number of people who sent in comments along the line of "watch what you write" was more than sympathies about his situation. The next popular comment was something along the lines of "Screw Microsoft". Very few took up the questioning of "what is wrong with Microsoft to fire a staff just for a picture", or even fewer took up the question, "What's wrong with us when we warn ourselves to self-censor free speech rather than questioning the norm of "behave or you will be fired"?



My secondary response:

Hey, this guy achieved instant fame. Is he for real? Let me check up the consistency of his identity in his past record of blogging. Well, he was blogging for 3 years, have developed quite a personality, as he admits in his bio. Checks out, only a few group of friends and family commented on his blog before the event.



Even more amazing, instant fame also means instant vulnerability! Read his very polite account of 'identity theft' and his thoughts about "surviving commercial time.



My temporary concluding response:

My continuing research on this event will surely result in a lot of insights about how blogging affects our reality. Michael Hanson's eclectism is cool, he's hip! Isn't this a great demonstration of what blogging can do for "Power to the People"?!



Discuss

Blogs and control

Tonight was the first time that I got together with some fellow bloggers from my MMS class. The high of a fun gathering of like-minded people is definitely much more engaging than a satisfying communication with blogging. But I feel that blogging has spoilt me somewhat for normal conversation. Why? Because I missed the "linking" part of blogging, being able to show somewhat concrete support of my point of view, without having to elaborate so much. Normal conversation now seemed to lack the precision of blogging. In conversation, the subject does tend to go off to various tangents and I felt that I had less control in the flow of conversation than in a blog. (Have I become a control freak?...Well, I know I tend to be one in my household...understandable as a mother to teenage kids...but I find it unpleasant to face that situation with my friends.) In conversation we spontaneously touched upon a whole bunch of subjects which would not have possibly been done with a blog. So I came home a little bit intrigued by this question: "Are blogs tools of control or are they tools of 'free' expression?"



Of course, the tone of this thought was already set into motion by Leo Reitano's presentation of his Phd. research on the "Polysphere Model" earlier in the evening which gave rise to the occasion of the class gathering. Leo passionately put forward the notion that "just using the web, ...blogging, even different modalities of technology is not enough (in shifting the paradigm of learning and education)....what's important is examing the assumptions we have taken before using these new learning modalities,... did we assume unconsciously that it was to serve our outdated modes of command and control, divide and conquer?" A strong challenge was put out by Leo and for those who are interested to find out what he proposes as an alternative model for learning, I understand that Leo's research paper will be posted for viewing somewhere on the McLuhan Program homepage.



Discuss

Why bloggers need to blog about blogging

Any blogger knows and any blog reader notices that always the biggest topic is "blogging about blogging". Here's one reason why:



To ignore the medium you are in is like a fish not caring about what kind of water he swims in. A fish that is more likely to survive is one that is very aware of his waters. That fish would know which water to swim away from, or not even approach. He knows not to go on land, for example, lest he dies. (But there are some strange fishes that have developed some kind of half-land abilities, surprisingly found in Thailand, and have been rumored to jump out and attack land lubbers.) A fish also knows that swimming in a shoal makes it easier for him to swim, but somehow decreases his likelihood of survival, especially from big predators like sharks and humans. And there are some fishes that prefer to go off alone to create their precious offspring, some fishes that even attack their mates to protect their offspring, and some fishes that struggle to swim upstream to accomplish the same great creative act. I may have gotten some of this fish protocol wrong, but I think I've got the general idea, after all I am not a fish, nor a fish expert.



So what do fishes have to do with blogging? Wouldn't you say we are all swimming in a current that we find difficult to grasp, like a fish doesn't really know that he is swimming in water until he is left on land? So let's blog about blogging until we understand or know well our waters.



Discuss

On blogging and what kind of blogger one wants to be...

Thinking about what kind of blogger I want to be, I remembered a teaching of Buddha. The version that left a lifelong impression was given in a class on Thai culture at the impressionable age of 15 or 16. It impressed me because here was a teacher telling me not to believe in teachings, not to believe in books, authority (which include our parents, elders, government, religious leader, etc. )... Before you start raising arguments against that, let me tell you the part that impressed me most. The Buddha says to test out any knowledge and if through your own personal experience it rings true, then maybe you can accept it as true. Since then I have looked up this teaching and found it rephrased in many ways. The one I found quickly for refering to on this blog was the following from a Shambala pocket classic, "Teachings of the Buddha", ed. by Jack Kornfield:

"This I do declare, after investigation there is nothing among doctrines that such a one as I would embrace. Seeing misery in philosophical views, without adopting any of them, searching for truth I saw 'inward peace'.



"Not by any philosophical opinion, not by tradition, not by knowledge, not by virtue and holy works can anyone say that purity exists; nor by absence of tradition, by absence of knowledge, by absence of virtue and holy works either; having abandoned these without adopting anything else, let one, calm and independent, not desire any resting place.



"One who thinks oneself equal to others, or distinguished, or low, for that very reson disputes; but one who is unmoved under those three conditions, for that person the notions "equal' and 'distinguished' do not exist.



"The Sage for whom the notions 'equal' and 'unequal' do not exist, would he say, 'This is true'? Or with whom should he dispute, saying, 'This is false?' With whom should he enter into dispute?



"An accomplished person does not by a philosophical view, or by thinking become arrogant, for he is not of that sort; not by holy works, nor by tradition is he to be led, he is not led into any of the resting places of the mind.



"For one who is free from views there are no ties, for one who is delivered by understanding there are no follies; but those who grasped after views and philosophical opinions, they wander about in the world annoying people."

(adopted from the Sutta-nipata,

translated by V. Fausbol)

Discuss

Lessons learnt from blogosphere

Three bloggers whom I have linked to on the right space of my blog have greatly inspired me. Dave Pollard, whom I delightedly found out is a Canadian, has a blog that offers a wide range of ideas on "How to save the world". I am also very interested in his New Collaborative Enterprise" idea, and I thank him for putting me on his blogroll, especially under the "dreamer" category, :). I think Dave is a demonstration of what I have mentioned in my previous post... bringing the world to that screen which Prof. Derrick says is an extended part of ourselves becoming the outer skin of culture. Dave also has an excellent list of Canadian blogs, by the way, as well as a helpful summary of what people who read and write blogs wants, found on the right side of his blogspace.



Watching Joi Ito put up his wiki-space on his blogosphere in front of my eyes during the last few weeks, and the discovery of his htm paper turned wiki on "Emergent Democracy" hit a chord within my nagging desire to bring out my own views about emergent values that I believe is a result of cross-cultural, multi-disciplinary communication, that is all within this process of going towards the "noosphere" that I have mentioned before. Thanks to Tammy for being a strong support for defining the area of focus on cultural communication.



Flammifer, a new blogger who blogs in French and English from Pandaland and my happening upon the Thai site, diaryhub.com, has prompted me to consider blogging in Thai and English, which will be starting slowly, since technically I am at a loss about how to get my OS X to print in Thai. Much as I dislike using my husband's Windows XP, Microsoft-based computer, that's the only way now that I can write in Thai. So if there is any Mac fan out there who can help me, I'd be so grateful!



Discuss

No longer a class blog, but...

Dear fellow classmates, and instructors, I've been severely bitten by the blogging bug. Through the past weeks' surfing on blogosphere, I've been convinced that blogging is definitely something I want to do seriously. Never dreamt that when I walked unsuspectingly into the McLuhan world that I would be "massaged" this way, that is transformed by the electronic medium.



So therefore this blog is no longer a class blog for me, but I felt that I cannot just make that transition without receiving some agreement from my classmates and warning them of the opening up of this class space. But then our sense of closeness and comfortable security itself was fragile and illusionary, this I realized when I happened upon the Thai blogging website, a larger circle of bloggers who are not actively aware that blogging brings the world to them and that if they wanted to realize the full potential of their blogs they simply have to reach for the world from their individual corners.



I do not know how much traffic it is possible to bring in during a period of two months before our class disassembles. I hope that my fellow "shy" bloggers will not close down and blog less, because that would make Clay Shirky too much of a blogosphere prophet with his power law concept where he proclaims that a popular blog takes the attention away from other less visible blogs. (If I have interpreted him wrongly here, please point it out in my discussion space.) I hope my fellow classmates will rise up to the challenge. I hope I will not be cut out, excluded, virtual heart left bleeding, without the great support you have provided me with. Having visited many blogs where the new blogger had to struggle with their individual blogging 'demons' on their own for a year or two before they either stabilized as a blogger or simply quit, I realise how fortunate I have been to have been introduced to blogging with such a support group as this Mind, Media, and Society Course within the McLuhan Program of the University of Toronto.



Discuss

Class blog vs personal blog

Well, I started another experiment and put up a personal journalling blog and discovered the vast difference between that blog and our class blog. Our class blog has more or less a topic of focus (media and its effects on us, our thinking and society), but still even with that focus, the discussion tends to go off of on a wide variety of subjects and it starts to become a pressure on our attention span.



Notice how our topics are no longer held in one space. We start one topic in one spot but it gets commented on another. After some time went by, I figured out that I might as well comment anywhere and the whole discussion more or less gets interwoven into each other. For example, I am writing in response to a topic in Mindy's blog, but I am also sort of answering something Bernard, Tammy and Wasted Ink have raised. At the same time, I am also carrying forward some of my own points. I could have choosen to post it under any topic discussion of any other class blogs, but that would mean going back a bit in time (on those other blogs) and risk not being read, so my ego tells me to write on my blog as a most current posting, and weave everything together there, trusting the process that the discussion will be carried forward anywhere within the bigger class blog.



In conclusion, our class blog has a built-in interlinking, inter-reference, that maybe other blogs which are started individually don't have. That makes it an interesting interaction and the subject of focus gives it the 'intelligent' content that Bernard mentioned.



The majority of blogs out there, (which by the way haven't been out there for very long) are mostly about the internet, blogging, and current affairs written by media personalities. Few have chosen to focus on academic or research because of its the limited of scope of readers. So I wonder what influences the popular bloggers to blog. Have a look at some reasons here, and for list of popular sites at the NITLE Blog Census and blogcount. Some interesting finds about the blogging process are Jill Walker's Links and power: The political economy of linking on the web and Clay Shirky's (as recommended by Mark) "A groups is its own worst enemy", "Power laws, weblogs and inequality" (interesting reads among many others found there). Also see Google loves blog.



When I compare the mechanics of the class blog with my new personal blog in which I have found it difficult to focus my thoughts and allow the writing to flow, because there was such a wide variety of topics that I would have to select from my "multiple selves". So, I am forced to choose,...and to choose what I think will be relevent to the reader. Who do I think my readers are? Firstly, my group of friends whom I've sent my URL. But I am also forced to be conscious of the public as well, so I have to self-censor my writing. (Mindy, I guess that answers your question in some way, I have to show only a part of myself, but that begs the question, "Is that not my real self?") And I am forced to edit and check my reference and try to find an appropriate link to make my points. So...yes, Bernard, the spontaineity of it is gone. I had to revert to writing on paper without worrying about my spelling, the grammar, the logic or even sense, of my thoughts, and only then could the intuitive messages or personal meaning (which, for me is a more productive writing) come out. Then because I've committed myself to my blog, I have to go through the pretty tedious process of making it presentable to the public. But then the value of doing that comes from having shared what I have 'discovered', because knowledge is nothing if it is not shared.



(Something else I have to figure out, how could I have said all that in a few short sentences, which seems to be the style that blogging demands?)



Discuss

Reconciling conflictive values, can the internet provide a solution?

Mindy restarted me on thinking about identities again, and by chance I found an interesting discussion about identity in Joi Ito's blog, a very popular blogger. He advices, "You MUST remember that identities are like names. You are NOT your identity. Your identity points to you. Everyone has multiple identities." That we as entities, shouldn't get mixed up with our identities. He also says that "a multitude of identities is an essential component in protecting privacy and interacting in an exceedingly digital world".



Reading the very interesting discussion that follows, I feel the undercurrents of conflicting values among the many discussants. Joi is a Japanese, educated in western thinking and technology and I believe he is trying to reconcile the values of both infuences. Asian society places a higher value on social/group cohesiveness as opposed to individuality. They have a few thousand years of continuous cultural development of group cohesiveness to follow. Western society, on the other hand, has developed the idea of rights of individual freedom with the French Revolution from the 18th century. There have been failures and successes on both ends of the upheld values. But when east meets west, there seems to be an unavoidable clash of values in some ways. I sensed that from reading the discussions following Joi's posting, and I felt that these differences were left unchanged, unresolved at the end of the discussion as probably does in other discussions at other fora. My questions are, with the promise of a "global village" through the help of electric/electronic connectivity, will these conflicting values be reconciled? Can the internet be a place for this reconcilation? Or will it simply reflect the real world conflict? Or will electric connectivity give rise to new values? If so what are they? Or maybe we need to learn how to let go of dichotomy and live with paradoxial acceptance of both seemingly conflictive values?



Discuss

'I'-dentity and "Who am We?"

Reading Turkle's article and thinking about Mark's comment some time ago about how we tend to repeat our roles no matter what environment we transpose oursleves into, I was prompted to think about what role do I choose to play in this class and class blog?



Here are some of the roles that popped into my mind:



"The person who stirs the water being stirred?

The experimenter carrying on a personal experiment and ,at the same time, allowing myself to be experimented upon?

The connector, the cross-pollinator, the bumble bee?... who craves to be connected therefore searches for the connection?

The psychoanalyst who psychoanalyses herself, therefore tries to psychoanalyse others? (Luckily, I am not a professional, everything is just play!)

Am I the player or the game?"



Whether we choose to reflect on what role we play in life, or try to understand what role we've picked up to play on the computer, either way can be used to learn more about ourselves. But it would all be useless if we could not transfer what we learnt from one to the other. Hence, maybe if Stewart/Achilles (in Turtle's paper) increasingly built into Achilles' profile more of his real self, some of Achilles' achievements would have transferred back to Stewart?



It might have already been noticed that I tend to base my observations on my personal experiences, feelings, and sometimes a seemingly strange intellect. There's a lot of 'I', 'I', 'I' going on around. But that's the way I learn... if I can't validate it with my intellect, feelings and intuition, it's not authentic for me. Under all this lies the philosophy that the 'I' is to be eventually dropped for the 'We' and that brings us back to my original point of digression that We, humans, are ultimately the ultimate transformers. So wouldn't you say we went round and round again and came back to the"single consciousness' bit again?



Can't wait to see where Mark will take us to with 'lost identities'....



Discuss

On addicted to the internet

We live in a world of addiction. What is the purpose of addiction? Too much connection with a projected object. It is a problem of connection. Since connectivity is a major issue in this new electric world, maybe its connection to addiction should be seriously looked at? Because addiction is a serious, destructive problem when the object of addiction has such a consuming power, like drugs, booze, sex, work (workaholics), and who knows, maybe eventually the internet. Our censorship, or social acceptance of which object of addiction we allow seems to be connected to what the society values as being supportive or destructive to the society. Alchohol, for example, at one time, in some societies was used as a way to be connected to the holy and communing. It served a function of a bringing together of the community. Now it is not. The addict feels his disconnectivity with the world, his self, the 'single consciousness' at such a deep and compelling level that he becomes destructively addicted to his chosen substance. The degree of one's forgetting of oneself and other selves, is also relative to the degree of one's destructiveness. Sometimes the addiction brings about a reversal and starts a healing process, sometimes the substance consumes him instead. Could a computer addict get into the same destructive cycles as in other forms of addiction?

It was painful for me to see the word "addiction" being battered around so carelessly. So I had to respond with this message. As for my own danger of being destructively addicted to our class blogs? My cat just gave me the answer by trying to sit on my ibook. Lately he's been very jealous of it. I wonder if he thinks it's another pet or knows that he needs to keep reminding me of disconnecting? Anyway, all I need to do is, give him his appropriate attention, and I'm saved from being hooked.

Ps. about "reversal", there's a simple and clear description of its process in "Making the Media the Business Message" from Investment Executive found in Mark's homepage.

Discuss

On Media, Mediums, and the Ultimate Transformers..

"If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spirittual form of information seem to make the entire globe, and of the human family, a single conscious?" ...from "Understanding Media", pg. 61.

These words of McLuhan might help answer the unspoken question that I feel is floating around out there under the currents of our class blogs, "Where is it all leading towards"?

"A single conscious", he says. That was mind boggling for me when I first considered that idea. What would that imply? No individuality? No privacy? Determined by the masses? My deep sense of self-indpendence suddenly felt threatened. So I dug into the reading, or maybe readings. As you can see from the introduction of my blog page, it led me into the exploration of the cocepts of language, philosophy, history, mythology, and eventually into... quantum physics (that took a couple of years to digest), holographic principes, Chaos, fractals, and now "blogs"!!

After considerable time (like some 5 years), it didn't scare me so much anymore. What I discovered was that - hey, there're all saying the same thing! Only with different vocabularies.

It was all about "making whole", like in "healing", "single consciousness", "holograms", "all-in-one, one-in-all", "the undifferentiated ground of being", "the implicate order"... I'm sure all of you have your own words to add to this list!

Now if electricity is the medium, therefore "the message" - the transforming agent, as McLuhan says...how is it transforming us? That's being discussed in class: blogs and attoseconds (was that the correct word?).

I go back and forth between re-reading McLuhan's words, to the internet, to my musings on the blogs...and suddenly, it dawned onto me...Well, aren't we, human beings, the ultimate media, the constant transforming agent in all of this? We've transformed our environment through the different medias we've created. Whether it was language, philosophy, science, wheels, cities, the printing press, the horrifying inhuman factories, machines and electriciy, megabytes and blogs....it transformed us in return. So we come back to the question again. What are we transforming into?

We transform our environment, our environment transforms us...It goes on and on, looping and re-looping into itself. Doesn't that ring a bell somewhere? Anybody "see" the symbol of the Tao here, that half black, half white within the circle with the opposite colored dots within it?...The dancing Kali who tramples on the dead as she dances the dance that creates life? The hermaphrodite surrounded by a wreath in the "World" card of the Tarot?...The non-ending dance of creation?

Listening to myself preparing the composition of my blogs, I am suddenly attacked by a feeling of depression, of inertia. It does seem to be futile... (Bernard, I love this word you dropped in our class blog) ...in the sense that it all goes round and round in a circle and comes back again to the beginning. What is the point of effort if it all goes round and round and you are stuck at the beginning again? If we are all going to be a single consciousness, why try to be different or the same? Makes me not want to do anything, which would eventually defeat the purpose of taking the course. So I came back to finish this 2nd blog.

I took the course to get out of myself, to meet people whom I could share my ideas with. But if everybody is more or less saying the same things, just in their own unique different ways, am I learning anything new? I have to confess. It seems to be the hope of hearing something new that lures me on. Well, it did lead me to the class. And now I have the blogs... lots of opportunities to share my ideas. Therapy, Bernard? It seems so. But what is the difference between putting yourself out there in cyberspace so you can see yourself better, and trying to find the 'ideal relationship' through exchange of ideas - which is also a projection of yourself in the other? Anybody want to make a psychological assessement of that?

Discuss