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Ribbonfarm -- How to Name Things

'Names are nothing; naming is everything. To name a thing is to truly know it. As Ursula Le Guin said, “for magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.” It is in fact useful to think of naming an interrogative act that creates what it questions. Demand insistently enough to know the name, rank and number of a thing, and you will eventually find out. Even if your mind has to manufacture an answer. We name to liberate, and we name to imprison. We name to flatter, and we name to insult. We name to own, and we name to be owned. We name to subsume, and have subsumed. We name to frame, and we name to reframe. You name to create, destroy, fragment and churn. You name a product and launch it. You give a dog a bad name and hang it. To name is also to hide and cloak. To switch stories and manufacture realities. This is the world of Don Draper. He dons a mask, and drapes new realities over old ones. Starting with his own life.'

language naming framing identification magick
february 2012 by adamcrowe

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ScienceDaily -- We may be less happy, but our language isn't

'"English, it turns out, is strongly biased toward being positive," said Peter Dodds, an applied mathematician at the University of Vermont. ..."a positivity bias is universal," both for very common words and less common ones and across sources as diverse as tweets, lyrics and British literature. Why is this? "It's not to say that everything is fine and happy," Dodds says. "It's just that language is social." In contrast to traditional economic theory, which suggests people are inherently and rationally selfish, a wave of new social science and neuroscience data shows something quite different: that we are a pro-social storytelling species. As language emerged and evolved over the last million years, positive words, it seems, have been more widely and deeply engrained into our communications than negative ones. "If you want to remain in a social contract with other people, you can't be a ...," well, Dodds here used a word that is rather too negative to be fit to print – which makes the point.'

psychology language magick
january 2012 by adamcrowe

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Quora -- Do book-lovers look down on non-readers? [Answer: Venkatesh Rao]

'You cannot learn to swim in ideas until you actually enter the meme pool. Then you realize you're not alone. You just see dead people. Your frame of social reference is the hidden river of dead authors communicating with each other across centuries of time, carrying on a conversation that is strangely detached from the regular world. Light readers cannot hear this conversation. You start to feel a bit like a medium once you can hear this conversation, because every individual book is situated in this conversation for you, where it basically stands alone for a light reader. It's like you can see the background where others can only see the foreground. You aspire to join the dead people while still alive. You start to write. You write a book. The circle is complete. You are now a civilizational ghost. Even if you don't write a book and remain forever a listener, you are still part of a group disconnected from the rest of humanity, but connected across time in ways the non-heavy-reading living will never be.'

reading writing readerlywriterly literaryculturevsoralculture language immateria rhizome
december 2011 by adamcrowe

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Wikipedia -- Rectification of names

'Confucius believed that social disorder often stemmed from failure to perceive, understand, and deal with reality. Fundamentally, then, social disorder can stem from the failure to call things by their proper names, and his solution to this was the rectification of names. He gave an explanation to one of his disciples: "A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect." — Confucius.' -- "The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names." — Proverb

quotes wisdom 2+2=4 reality language oldspeak newspeak themapisnottheterritory from delicious
march 2011 by adamcrowe

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Figures of Speech -- A Real-Life Matrix

'Rhetoric is the art of influence, friendship and eloquence, of ready wit and irrefutable logic. And it harnesses the most powerful of social forces, argument. Whether you sense it or not, argument surrounds you. It plays with your emotions, changes your attitude, talks you into a decision and goads you to buy things. Argument lies behind political labeling, advertising, jargon, voices, gestures and guilt trips; it forms a real-life Matrix, the supreme software that drives our social lives. And rhetoric serves as argument’s decoder. By teaching the tricks we use to persuade one another, the art of persuasion reveals the Matrix in all its manipulative glory.'

language manipulation persuasion rhetoric thematrix argumentation from delicious
november 2010 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- CorbettReport: Robert-Scott:Christy on Think Free 1/2

"The first spell we were put under was our NAME."

persons legalese magick words language realityprogramming from delicious
november 2010 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- Freedomain Radio: Language as the Ultimate Government Program @ 2010 Porcupine Freedom Festival

"When we're comfortable with something – morally – we call it by its proper name." -- "You cannot frighten people out of their fantasies because they're only in those fantasies because they're frightened already – they are frightened of the society they live in so they create all these words to pretend that its not what it is."

statism government newspeak language philosophy morality voluntaryism StefanMolyneux from delicious
june 2010 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- Terence McKenna: "Reality is made of language"

"In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh. The world is a thing of words; the world is made of language. I can't say that enough." -- ;^)

literaryculturevsoralculture words language reality realityprogramming shamanism magick TerenceMcKenna
may 2010 by adamcrowe

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Google Video -- ThinkFree: The Magnificent Deception

On legalese: "All of these statutes are legislated rules of a particular 'society' which have been given the force of law -- but that 'society' is the Law Society. All of these rules are *for* the Law Society... Societies can claim that no-one else can understand their rules because they can create their own language and they can do this by taking an existing language eg. English, and change the definition of just a few words and not tell anyone else how those words have been changed and so they've created an entirely new language that appears to be English but it's not and only they know it. And this is the magnificency of the deception: when this whole thing unfolds, they think they're going to lock us up in their cage?? No. All they're doing is creating a set of rules that is only going to be applicable to them. And if they ever try to step out of the cage they have made for themselves, they're going to step out into our courts and they will face charges for fraud."

realityprogramming society language legalese commerce law rights freedom
april 2010 by adamcrowe

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Wikipedia -- Punctuation (chess)

'Move symbols in increasing effectiveness of the move: ??: Blunder, ?: Mistake, ?!: Dubious move, !?: Interesting move, !: Good move, ‼: Brilliant move'

chess strategy language punctuation
march 2010 by adamcrowe

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Life under the Chief Doublespeak Officer

'William Lutz is professor of English at Rutgers University and author of the new book The New Doublespeak: Why No One Knows What Anyone's Saying Anymore.'

language obsfucation newspeak doublespeak 1984
february 2010 by adamcrowe

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fugitive philosophy -- managing language (with extreme prejudice)

'The Careless Losers – the carefree, perhaps – have something else going on in their lives and see work for what it is: a distraction from what counts. In this sense, the Losers, as the biggest group that constitutes most of us, are composed of that “silent majority” that upholds a good deal of old fashioned anarchist sensibility: act as if the State/Corp doesn’t exist. In the indication of a blindspot within an organisation’s powergame environment, Venkat’s analysis suggests that other systems of power might lie elsewhere. This elsewhere keeps those with an ear to the outside constantly seeking an alternative means to living without working, and as Virno suggests, means that exodus (or the politics of disappearance) constitutes the general strategy of the (Loser) workforce.'

psychology communication information language signalling hierarchy status masks power thegervaisprinciple transactionalanalysis
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- Kymatica 1/9

'One of the most important films ever made.' -- The ways to the One are as many as the lives of men.

* psychology self falseself fear ego status hate parasitism metastasis statism pathocracy legalese language falseconsciousness archetypes realityprogramming repression collectiveunconsciousness consciousness resonance shamanism spirituality humanity one
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes.com -- The Americanization of Mental Illness

'...those who minister to the mentally ill inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. ...the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another. That is until recently. ...in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us ... we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. -- What is being missed is a deep understanding of how the expectations and beliefs of the sufferer shape their suffering. “Culture shapes the way general psychopathology is going to be translated partially or completely into specific psychopathology. When there is a cultural atmosphere in which professionals, the media, schools, doctors, psychologists all recognize and endorse and talk about and publicize [a disorder], then people can be triggered to consciously or unconsciously pick [a] pathology as a way to express that conflict.”'

psychology psychopathology globalization language literacy expectancy reflexivity infection subversion memetics mimesis metastasis
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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PhysOrg -- Reading Shakespeare has dramatic effect on human brain

'Shakespeare uses a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb. Researchers found that this technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands the function of the word within a sentence. This process causes a sudden peak in brain activity and forces the brain to work backwards in order to fully understand what Shakespeare is trying to say. -- Professor Philip Davis, said: "Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity - a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things."'

psychology cognition language readerlywriterly FrancisBacon
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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The Complete Newspeak Dictionary from George Orwell's 1984 -- New words

'New words: #Extremist: Somebody that thinks differently than you. Anybody that has an opinion that differs from current government policy. This term allows politicians to speak of their rival's agendas without actually having to explain exactly what their rival's beliefs are. #Hate Crime: A real crime which is punished more severely because the person is also guilty of a Thoughtcrime. #Left and Right Wings: Terms that limit the range of expression when discussing issues. The idea that there are only 2 sides to every argument. These terms give the public the idea that there are only two possible sources of ideas, and that these two "opposing" sides represent the entire gambit of thought. #New World Order: A world in which all people live peacefully, under the control of the U.N. #Peace Process: A process which will ultimately lead to war. The process of getting oppressed people to shut the hell up and embrace their occupiers.'

newspeak language rhetoric propaganda mindcontrol realityprogramming thoughtcrime 1984
december 2009 by adamcrowe

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Salon.com -- Magic comic ride

Moore: "The *idea* of the god *is* the god."

quotes god consciousness language magic AlanMoore
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Ribbonfarm -- The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk

'What distinguishes Powertalk is that with every word uttered, the power equation between the two speakers shifts just a little. Sometimes both gain slightly, at the expense of some poor schmuck. Sometimes one yields ground to the other. When the clueless or losers talk, on the other hand, nothing moves. Relative positions remain the same all around. Shifts happen only by accident. Even in the rare cases where exploitable information is exchanged, its value is not recognized or reflected in the exchange. Posturetalk, Babytalk and Gametalk leave power relations basically unchanged. Posturetalk and Babytalk leave things unchanged because they are, to quote Shakespeare, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Gametalk leaves power relations unchanged because its entire purpose is to help losers put themselves and each other into safe pigeonholes that validate do-nothing life scripts. -- The only Powertalk you can speak with no [actual power] is “silence.”'

* psychology communication information language signalling hierarchy status masks sociopathy power thegervaisprinciple transactionalanalysis gametalk
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Wikipedia -- List of political catch phrases

'"Crisis? What crisis?" - incorrectly attributed to James Callaghan by The Sun newspaper.' -- "I don't think other people in the world would share the view there is mounting chaos." - Jim Callaghan's actual words. -- Same piss, new bottle.

politics quotes language happytalk spin bullshit slogans catchphases
october 2009 by adamcrowe

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Mises Institute -- Freedom Is Slavery by Ludwig von Mises

'There prevails in the writings of many contemporary authors the disposition to represent every extension of governmental power and every restriction of the individual's discretion as a measure of liberation, as a step forward on the road to liberty. Carried to its ultimate logical conclusion, this mode of reasoning leads to the inference that socialism, the complete abolition of the individual's faculty to plan his own life and conduct, brings perfect freedom. It was this reasoning that suggested to socialists and Communists the idea of arrogating to themselves the appellation liberal.' -- CRIMETHINK. PARTICULAR IS GENERAL. FALLACY IS ORTHODOXY. NEWSPEAK IS OLDSPEAK. THIS WARN YOU.

economics statism newspeak language realityprogramming
october 2009 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes.com -- Facebook Has a Happiness Index Drawn From Posts

'The idea, one that is generally accepted in social psychology, is that word choice can reveal a person’s mood. This is true in ordinary writing, these experts say, and even more so in writing like Facebook updates or the tweets of Twitter users, which ostensibly are attempts to describe what you are doing right now and how you feel. The Facebook happiness index could be the first step in reorienting the nation’s sense of self-worth. “We have tracked the economic health of the nation for a long time. The reason we track those things is that the government is full of economists, not psychologists. I could imagine it would allow us to look at a group of people, get a sense of what their concerns are, how insecure they feel. It could be an advertiser’s dream. Yes, it is creepy from a government perspective, but it is even creepier from an advertising perspective.”' -- Creepy and extremely dumb. Measure actual behaviours not claims on behaviours. "I'm happy." "I'm sad." You're confused.

socialmedia statusupdates facebook twitter sentiment datamining language words realityprogramming bravenewworld
october 2009 by adamcrowe

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The Boston Globe -- Thinking literally: The surprising ways that metaphors shape your world

'...metaphors reveal the extent to which we think with our bodies. -- “What we’ve discovered in the last 30 years is--surprise, surprise--people think with their brains,” says Lakoff. “And their brains are part of their bodies.” -- To the extent that metaphors reveal how we think, they also suggest ways that physical manipulation might be used to shape our thought. In essence, that is what much metaphor research entails. And while psychologists have thus far been primarily interested in using such manipulations simply to tease out an observable effect, there’s no reason that they couldn’t be put to other uses as well, by marketers, architects, teachers, parents, and litigators, among others. A few psychologists have begun to ponder applications. Ackerman, for example, is looking at the impact of perceptions of hardness on our sense of difficulty. The study is ongoing, but he says he is finding that something as simple as sitting on a hard chair makes people think of a task as harder.'

* psychology embodiedcognition body cognition embodiment perception abstraction language metaphor evocativeobjects carrierobjects objects kinesthetic design
october 2009 by adamcrowe

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BBC -- Will Self: Naturalism and Sanity: Is the Mind Really as it's Portrayed?

'Celebrated author and essayist Will Self launches the festival arguing that the way the mind is portrayed in most novels is preposterous. Why are we so resistant to attempts to represent the mind as we really experience it, in all its terror, exhilaration and confusion? Are many of our finest novels designed to reassure us that we are 'normal'?'

psychology writing prose poetry mind consciousness multitude semiosis language literaryculturevsoralculture words verisimilitude narrativefallacy reality realityprogramming WillSelf
august 2009 by adamcrowe

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ImageTexT -- The Tides of History: Alan Moore's Historiographic Vision by Sean Carney

'"History, unendingly revised and reinterpreted, is seen upon examination as merely a different class of fiction [...]. Still, it is a fiction that we must inhabit. [...] All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world's insistent texts or else replace them with a stronger language of our own." --- ... Moore understands that in order to change history one must become a part of history, and thus engage in a kind of human sacrifice, as much as he would like to imagine some other way. -- "There's no space and there's no time. It's just as easy for you to think about what you were doing this morning as Victorian street scenes. You can go there instantly. You can imagine a scene from ten years in the future." Idea Space is the medium through which human consciousness draws connections across space and time, finds meaningfulness in the immediate through its mediation within larger contexts. -- Fiction is how reality is made...'

* meta storytelling liminality fiction reality dialectics time space simultaneity literaryculturevsoralculture history metanarratives postmodernism language culture ideaspace magic shamanism sacrifices semiosis realityprogramming consciousness philosophy mythology meaning AlanMoore comics
august 2009 by adamcrowe

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potlatch -- 'Wall Street English'

Ad: '"Do you speak English" Yes! I speak Wall St English.' -- '...capitalism (and no doubt other economic systems too) requires non-economic metaphors, norms and rituals in order to justify itself. -- Financiers and traders don't go around repeating core principles of neo-classical economics to each other. They don't scream out 'I just performed a Pareto optimal distribution!' while high-fiving their mates. Nor do they speak some global logos of dollars and digits, as the virtualists claim. They tend to favour metaphors of sexual violence and anal penetration (presumably not to the exclusion of other metaphors). How significant this is, I don't know. Whether it will be transformed by the current crisis, who knows. 'Wall Street English' ought now to include words such as 'woops', 'bailout' and 'sorry'. Perhaps these will now bubble up in an equally Freudian way, as the traders gradually let some inner shame emanate via their symbolic codes. Some hope.'

metaphor language violence repression freud via:jamessunderland "capitalism"
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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The Onion -- Potato-Faced Youngster Lauded For Memorizing Primitive 26-Character Alphabet

'PHOENIX—Christopher Pierson, a glassy-eyed, slothful lump of a child who still watches cartoons despite being tall enough to reach a polymer-injection molding station, was endlessly praised Monday for recalling the scant 26 letters in the American alphabet."Good job, Christopher!" said teacher Heather Warner, lauding the child for his meager and wholly meritless accomplishment. "You can go play with your blocks now."

china america language lulz
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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Wikipedia -- Map–territory relation

'The map is not the territory is a remark by Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself.' -- 'The development of electronic media blurs the line between map and territory by allowing for the simulation of ideas as encoded in electronic signals, as Baudrillard argues in Simulacra & Simulation: "Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory."'

reality abstraction mapping representation language simulacra
june 2009 by adamcrowe

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(hm) -- first

"The first syllable ever spoken by a human being contained the most meaning of any sound ever: it referred to everything." — Arjen Mulder

speech semiology language semiotics
june 2009 by adamcrowe

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OnFiction -- Psychogeography as Seeing with Metaphors

"As the commodification of values make things generalized and more substitutable for each other, the complex web of social relations that at one point measured meaning and value are substituted by a system that while complex in its own way, undeniably simplifies the meaning of many exchanges... In this context -- an important one for understanding the experience of modernity that's linked to efforts to promote literacy, analytic reasoning, and progressive eye exercises, I cannot help thinking about what is traded for the ability to generalize bears. What sorts of metaphors of understanding are embedded in our preconcieved senses of space? When we seek the ability to 'to look back and see patterns of space construction from a newly alienated vantage-point,' or to seek 'a deeper understanding of the subject space by clearing away mental debris, or to understand better how that debris is constructed in the first place,' what does this cost us?" -- An eye for an ear (McLuhan)

literaryculturevsoralculture acoustic space psychogeography metaphor language linearity perspective #bandwidth #specialization
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- Why Your Baby’s Name Will Sound Like Everyone Else’s

'Now that everyone relentlessly Googles baby names, parents have no excuse if they saddle their kids with the most popular names. What’s hard for parents is that what feels like your own personal taste, it’s everybody’s taste,” Wattenberg says. “It’s a no win situation - if you pick a name you like, probably everybody else will like it too.” And that’s what’s fascinating about watching the nation-level trends in baby naming. The national nomenclature is transformed living room by living room as one frazzled couple after another makes a seemingly personal decision for underlying phonetic reasons they haven’t considered. “People may think they named a child after great, great grandma Olivia, but they have a lot of great, great grandmas, and they picked Olivia because it fits the popular sounds,” Wattenberg says. And that’s how a country’s culture changes: People cherry-picking from the past as they look for a name to call the future.' -- How about choosing one that's good?

names narrativeobjects selfobjects objects psychology individualism hivemind herd conformity groupthink language phonetics #socialization
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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Crooked Timber -- The ideology that dare not speak its name

"Unpopular ideas require euphemisms, and these euphemisms wear out over time. From the inside, ideology usually looks like common sense. Hence, politically dominant elites don’t see themselves as acting ideologically and react with hostility when ideological labels are pinned on them. Ideology is only useful for an insurgent group of outsiders, seeking a coherent basis for a claim to displace the existing elite. [Initial] users of [the euphemism] rapidly [drop] it, once they [get] into power.'

metanarratives philosophy ideology language discourse simulacra power politics cults
april 2009 by adamcrowe

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Nicholas Carr -- Technology's Prophet: It's Jean Baudrillard, not Marshall McLuhan

Quotes Baudrillard's The Vital Illusion: "#Ecstasy of the social: the masses. More social than the social. #Ecstasy of information: simulation. Truer than true. #Ecstasy of time: real time, instantaneity. More present than the present. #Ecstasy of the real: the hyperreal. More real than the real. #Ecstasy of sex: porn. More sexual than sex … Thus, freedom has been obliterated, liquidated by liberation; truth has been supplanted by verification; the community has been liquidated and absorbed by communication … Everywhere we see a paradoxical logic: the idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess. And in this way history itself comes to an end, finds itself obliterated by the instantaneity and omnipresence of the event." -- Carr: "What we see today is not discontinuity but continuity. Mass media reaches its natural end-state when we broadcast our lives rather than live them."

socialmedia twitter realtime hyperreality simulacra spectacle psychosis simulation language ecstasy communication #bandwidth #socialization #storage #ubiquity JeanBaudrillard via:charlesfrith
march 2009 by adamcrowe

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Mises Economics Blog -- Crazy economists still believe in the free market

"Click at your own risk. This is the NYT article explaining how ridiculous economists are for failing to embrace socialism in light of the current and perfectly obvious failure of the free market. So you can take a market and beat it, tax it, regulate it, subsidize it, flood it with fake money, punish its performers and reward its losers, hobble its capital sector, strangle consumers, nationalize stuff at will, and erect every barrier to trade and cooperation, and STILL call it a market. When the scheme fails, it's the free market that failed, so clearly we need the totalitarian state to sweep into action."

economics language ignorance academic conformity groupthink academia
march 2009 by adamcrowe

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Michael Hudson -- The Language of Looting

'Having undermined the economy at large, Wall Street’s public relations think tanks are now dismantling the language itself. Doublethink and doubletalk with regard to “nationalizing” or “socializing” the banks and other sectors is a travesty of political and economic discussion from the 17th through mid-20th centuries. Society’s basic grammar of thought, the vocabulary to discuss political and economic topics, is being turned inside-out in an effort to ward off discussion of the policy solutions posed by the classical economists and political philosophers that made Western civilization “Western.” What is being attempted is nothing less than an attempt to destroy the intellectual and moral edifice of what took Western civilization eight centuries to develop, from the 12th century Schoolmen discussing Just Price through 19th and 20th century classical economic value theory.' -- Newspeak gobbledegoop

* economics credit debt fraud language newspeak doublethink crimethink thinking ignorance freedom democracy socialism feudalism oligarchy history ph "capitalism" argumentation
march 2009 by adamcrowe

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Future Hi -- The Self as Metaprogrammer

"We have established a planetary network of communication and information, a digital hive mind archiving culture and extending technology through the global brain. And in making information digital we have produced a simulacrum of reality entirely convincing yet entirely malleable, much like the linguistic maps of belief woven within our minds. When it is impossible to tell the real image from the manufactured image, when the fantasy of myth is brought to life in digital cinema, when information technologies can synthesize anything, then the lines between the real and imagined will have grown very thin indeed. Slowly, the human mind and its culture are inexorably drawing nearer and nearer to a time when imagination is as real as anything else and belief is a faint vestige of the past. The shaman, the psychonaut, and the metaprogrammer have intuited this inevitability and are setting themselves ahead of the curve."

psychology metaprogramming realityprogramming consciousness symbolism magic language archetypes transformation mind self
march 2009 by adamcrowe

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Sherry Turkle -- Multiple Subjectivity and Virtual Community at the End of the Freudian Century (PDF)

"We construct our objects and our objects construct use." -- "Online experiences of playing multiple aspects of self are resonant with theories that imagine the self as a multiple and fragmented, or as a society of selves."-- "Appropriable theories, ideas that capture the imagination of the culture at large, tend to be those with thich people can become actively involved. They tend to be theories that can be 'played' with. So one way to examine the social appropriability of a given theory is to ask whether it is accompanied by its own objects-to-think-with, objects that can help theory move beyond intellectual circles. For Freud's work, dreams and slips of the tongue carried ideas... today computational experiences carry ideas."

psychology virtualworlds behaviours identity self multitude simulation virtuality roleplay acting multiplepersonalitydisorder Freud ideas language diffusion theory theoryobjects objects reflexivity subjectivity transformation SherryTurkle pdf mecosystem
february 2009 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- Sex, Lies, and Avatars (PDF)

'What is real? What is virtual? What is living? What is nonliving? Of the many selves I am, who is he real me?' -- 'Computing would offer [Turkle] endless moments of sweet epiphany when theories that had seemed right but abstract were suddenly right and manifest. Constructing the self with language and the notion of permeable boundaries? There it was on the screen. You could almost substitute computing for terms of Lacan's manifesto: computing is constructed as a set of languages; language (the relationship of terms to each other) is the structure that forms computing; the boundaries between data and execution are blurred; and so forth. What in other contexts has seemed like the gibberish of postmodernism–decentering (oh, you mean multiple users), intertextuality (oh, hypertext), fragmentation (oh, me in the Parenting conference, me in the Eros conference), blurring (oh, object-oriented languages)–is rendered clear at last.'

psychology psychoanalysis Freud postmodernism simulation culture bricolage language reflexivity Lacan theory theoryobjects objects existentialism reality virtuality identity multitude self selfobjects liminality media computers metaphysics virtualworlds MUDs avatars roleplay improvisation performance transformation SherryTurkle pdf improv
february 2009 by adamcrowe

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naked capitalism -- Twitter, Communication, and My Intermittent Inner Luddite

"Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all... (Newspeak Dictionary)" -- "You can't say anything complicated or nuanced in 140 characters. ...try explaining Plato's cave in those confines. Can't be done. You might allude to it, but you could not present it to someone who didn't know about it already. And Twitter encourages people to accept a medium that severely constrains communication, and calls a defect a virtue. Twitter feeds [the multi-tasking] addiction, that false sense of urgency. Most things can wait. Indeed, a lot of things are better off waiting. But we are encouraged to be plugged in, overstimulated all the time, at the expense of higher quality human relations."

psychology communication twitter behaviours themediumisthemassage multitasking continuouspartialattention cognition attention newspeak language #bandwidth #processing #specialization media
february 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility -- Twitter and Newspeak

"Twitter, which emulates some of the salient features of Newspeak, is of course perfect for advertising—if you have to stop to think about what’s being said, the persuasion has probably failed. But the most insidious aspect of it is how it encourages us to speak in slogans and catchphrases, to eschew logical exposition of our thoughts for a quick, allusive declaration. Twitter is supposed to facilitate our relationships by providing “ambient awareness” of the lives of others, but it seems more a way of persuading us to provide a constant stream of information about ourselves to those sureveilling us. In a sense, it ceases to be communication in any conventional sense; instead it reduces communication to the bleeps of a homing beacon. Twitter is a way to become one’s own voluntary RFID tag." -- Information vs Communication. Message vs Massage.

psychology communication ping ambientintimacy attention twitter behaviours themediumisthemassage continuouspartialattention lifecasting surveillance sousveillance tethered self conformity groupthink newspeak language theadvertisedlife #bandwidth #specialization media
february 2009 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge

'What's going on? Normally, we expect society to progress, amassing deeper scientific understanding and basic facts every year. Knowledge only increases, right? Robert Proctor doesn't think so. A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases. He has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is "the study of culturally constructed ignorance." As Proctor argues, when society doesn't know something, it's often because special interests work hard to create confusion. "People always assume that if someone doesn't know something, it's because they haven't paid attention or haven't yet figured it out," Proctor says. "But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what's true and what's not." -- *covers ears*

ignorance denial delusion disinformation agnotology newspeak thoughtcrime doublethink fraud corruption power language control facts knowledge reality truth #specialization CliveThompson
january 2009 by adamcrowe

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What Reading Does For The Mind by Anne E. Cunningham and Keith E.Stanovich (PDF)

"What is immediately apparent is how lexically impoverished is most speech, as compared to written language. It is sometimes argued or implied that the type of words present in print but not represented in speech are unnecessary words—jargon, academic doublespeak, elitist terms of social advantage, or words used to maintain the status of the users but that serve no real functional purpose. [Such words] are not unnecessary appendages, concocted to exclude those who are unfamiliar with them. They are words that are necessary to make critical distinctions in the physical and social world in which we live."

reading literacy literaryculturevsoralculture cognition words vocabulary language context pdf
december 2008 by adamcrowe

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Mssv -- The Long Decline of Reading

"In the first ten minutes of many new games, players receive such a blizzard of rewards that they’d be forgiven for thinking they’d won the lottery, cured cancer, and completed the game. It sounds ridiculous, and sometimes it is, but this constant encouragement keeps players with the game long enough for them to get into the story and gameplay. Books are not interactive. You can’t give readers rewards for reaching page 6 (although…). The principle is the same though - you need to give readers momentum. You need to help readers along those nervous first ten minutes when they haven’t quite gotten into the flow yet, and when they’re still being battered by distractions from their TV, radio, mobile phone and computer. After those ten minutes, if they’re hooked, they’re hooked."

reading language literacy literaryculturevsoralculture immersion rewards
december 2008 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- Sex, Lies and Avatars

'Turkle's study of Lacan was preparing her for a future she couldn't anticipate: a future represented by computing. Computing would offer her endless moments of sweet epiphany, when theories that had seemed right but abstract were suddenly right and manifest. What in other contexts has seemed like the gibberish of postmodernism - decentering (oh, you mean multiple users), intertextuality (oh, hypertext), fragmentation (oh, me in the Parenting conference, me in the Eros conference), blurring (oh, object-oriented languages) - is rendered clear at last. How would Lacan, who never, so far as Turkle knows, had anything to do with computers, feel about computing now? "I think he'd have been very excited by the idea of this new space for the weaving of the symbolic order, as he called it. The Web is a very Lacanian idea - chains, knots, weaving, tissues of meaning, people building meaning out of linking and association, not linearly but associatively - these are all his metaphors."'

psychology identity self postmodernism relationalobjects objects oop computing simulation consciousness rhizome web language reflexivity freud lacan SherryTurkle
december 2008 by adamcrowe

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Slate Magazine -- Why is everyone saying "fail" all of a sudden?

"You fail it! Your skill is not enough!" -- No U.

failure lulz language memes via:diemkay
october 2008 by adamcrowe

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Itiel Dror, Stevan Harnad -- Offloading Cognition onto Cognitive Technology

"Cognizers can offload some of their cognitive functions onto cognitive technology, thereby extending their performance capacity beyond the limits of their own brain power. Language itself is a form of cognitive technology that allows cognizers to offload some of their cognitive functions onto the brains of other cognizers. And as with language, the cognitive tool par excellence, such technological changes are not merely instrumental and quantitative: they can have profound effects on how we think and encode information, on how we communicate with one another, on our mental states, and on our very nature.

cognition performance research information collectiveintelligence cybernetics psychology language context #processing #complexity #bandwidth #socialization
september 2008 by adamcrowe

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Wordie -- tardspeak

"ph3@r mY l337 hax0r sp33k"

lulz words language
september 2008 by adamcrowe

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Wordie --: Teh Interwebs

LOLD

lulz words language
september 2008 by adamcrowe

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YouTube Comment Snob

"YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox extension that filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads. You can choose to have any of the following rules mark a comment for removal: #Spelling mistakes #All capital letters #No capital letters #Doesn't start with a capital letter #Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????) #Excessive capitalization #Profanity" -- bRILLAINT!!!!!?!!!!!

youtube comments stupidity filters firefox extension language words griefing trolling immunesystem
august 2008 by adamcrowe

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Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog -- Nodal man

"The scariest thing about Stanley Kubrick's vision wasn't that computers started to act like people but that people had started to act like computers. We're beginning to process information as if we're nodes; it's all about the speed of locating and reading data. We're transferring our intelligence into the machine, and the machine is transferring its way of thinking into us."

servomechanism symbiosis extensionsofman centralnervoussystem tools computer language themediumisthemessage electricity psychology behaviours #processing #storage #bandwidth retribalization media computers
august 2008 by adamcrowe

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Talent imitates, genius steals -- Brands: Socially Constructed Reality

"... let’s put forward a reformulation: A brand is a collective perception in the minds of consumers. But how does this help resolve the division between brands in the head and brands on the balance sheet? Because by making it a collective perception, we can turn a brand from an opinion into a [type of] fact."

branding marketing reality realityprogramming theadvertisedlife communication media language tools #storage #ubiquity #specialization
august 2008 by adamcrowe

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Zero influence -- Doing Business As (A Mercenary)

"Brands within the infrastructure of the cultural mechanism, are the verbs of life, they are not about trying to facilitate the consumers interests - it’s deeper, more transparent, more beneficial - it’s about the organisation working towards a common goal - and that is - mutuality. If Brands think that their role is to rise above ‘acceptability’, then they are going the wrong direction. Brands, if they want to be the life of the consumer, must be the reasoning of the consumer."

business branding marketing strategy language verbs do relationalaesthetics theadvertisedlife #processing #storage #ubiquity
august 2008 by adamcrowe

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Scientific American -- The Semantic Web

"The challenge of the Semantic Web, therefore, is to provide a language that expresses both data and rules for reasoning about the data and that allows rules from any existing knowledge-representation system to be exported onto the Web."

semantic web semanticweb ontology taxonomy information data metadata knowledge sociallobjects objects logic language #storage #processing symbiosis mutualism parasitism
august 2008 by adamcrowe

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Vimeo -- Nova Spivack: Semantic Web Talk

Don't be too proud of this ontological terror you've constructed...

symbiosis data applications evolution techology temes semantic web socialgraph semanticgraph storygraph language linguistics cognition context metadata ontology standards readerlywriterly #processing #complexity #specialization
august 2008 by adamcrowe

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Logic+Emotion -- Brand As Facilitator

"Good facilitators know how to actively listen, how to create environments which stimulate productive conversations and interactions and most importantly they add incredible value even though they may come across as the least vocal in the group."

branding curation facilitation communities collaboration socialmedia stage culture language do
july 2008 by adamcrowe

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Brainstorms -- Rheingold Mind to Mind with Sherry Turkle

"Our new technologically enmeshed relationships oblige us to ask to what extent we ourselves have become cyborgs, transgressive mixtures of biology, technology, and code...The computer is an evocative object that causes old boundaries to be renegotiated."

SherryTurkle computers technology psychology metaphor language objects relationalobjects
july 2008 by adamcrowe

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Britannica Blog: Larry Sanger -- A Defense of Tolstoy & the Individual Thinker: A Reply to Clay Shirky

"It is extremely difficult to understand other people, unless you take a long time to study what they say. If we do not understand each other in our full complexity ... we will be invisible to each other, and ultimately incapable of real human society."

internet literacy literaryculturevsoralculture writing reading speech ear linearity sociology mind hive hivemind civilization perspective vanishingpoint monotheism individualism language culture media ecology mediaecology
july 2008 by adamcrowe

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Havas Media Lab -- User Generated Context

"Context > Content: Most user generated content, is, in fact, context. The bulk of what connected consumers create isn’t content: its context – information

content context data intention complements socialmedia culture language storygraph strategy economics pdf
july 2008 by adamcrowe

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Kevin Kelly -- Is the "First Movable Type" a Hoax?

Comment: Bruce A: 'If “movable type” means an object that can be used repeatedly to produce a durable symbol, wouldn’t that be the outlined-hand symbols found in cave paintings?' -- Talk to the hand.

technology writing printing literaryculturevsoralculture language
july 2008 by adamcrowe

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ICT Results -- Emotional machines

“When they developed databases, the recordings were nothing like the way emotion appears in everyday action and interaction, and the codes they used to describe the recording would not fit the things that happen in everyday life.” -- Way round wrong!

avatars artificialintelligence emotion emotionalintelligence simulation interface language paralanguage gestures database selfservers research storytelling productnarratives performance design
april 2008 by adamcrowe

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Philip K. Dick -- How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

"I consider that the matter of defining what is real—that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves."

* PKD reality chaos fake fraud identity authenticity empathy humanity theadvertisedlife feedback simulacra memory transformation storytelling writing sciencefiction fiction philosophy language consciousness madness replicants quotes
march 2008 by adamcrowe

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Wired - TED 2008: Humans Are Just Machines for Propagating Memes, Susan Blackmore Says

"... true teme machines are arriving" -- "... it will look like humans are just a minor thing on this planet with masses (of) silicon-based machinery using us to drag stuff out of the ground to build more machines."

temes memes memetics mecha evolution language machinelearning neuralnetworks datamining technology reproduction copy aura ghostinthemachine
march 2008 by adamcrowe

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Wired - The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know

"... people with autism spectrum disorder have a number of strengths: a higher prevalence of perfect pitch, enhanced ability with 3-D drawing and pattern recognition, more accurate graphic recall, and various superior memory skills."

neuroscience autism intelligence cognition psychology brain language evolution
february 2008 by adamcrowe

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Paul Graham - How to Do Philosophy

"No one after reading Aristotle's Metaphysics does anything differently as a result." Hehe

philosophy history thinking language
january 2008 by adamcrowe

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WSJ.com - What Did U $@y? Online Language Finds Its Voice

"TEh INTeRn3T i5 THr3@+EN1N9 t0 Ch@n93 thE W4Y wE $p34k."

language words communities
january 2008 by adamcrowe

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Maschmeyer - Don’t be Confused, Digital & Interactive are Different Creatures

"How do you make the marketing so interactive that it is invisible?"

language tools culture media product objects productnarratives socialobjects communities socialmedia socialweb protocols formats microformats brandedutility brands business economics data behaviours interactive performance design storytelling
january 2008 by adamcrowe

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The Guardian - Kremlin eyes internet control

"Another way would be to give every citizen a fixed IP address, which would go with you wherever you approach the internet." Well, we already have one (sort of): our mobile phone number.

ascii language surveillance russia china web internet networks damage war
january 2008 by adamcrowe

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roflbot - add text and captions to your pictures

"roflbot is for adding text to a picture, a.k.a. an image macro generator. You can do it all in your browser without using Photoshop."

lolcats lol vernacular language tools writing typography memes
december 2007 by adamcrowe

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LOLinator: i can haz websiet?
web lolcats vernacular funny generator language tools lulz
december 2007 by adamcrowe

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StupidFilter

"The solution we're creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. "

funny web filters text words etiquette manners language tools
november 2007 by adamcrowe

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FOWA07b - Leisa Reichelt. Strange Attractor: Picking out patterns in the chaos

"... you can only pick fleas on one primate at the time. Language allows you to "pick fleas" on more than one person at a time. Allows us to keep track of lots of poeple and who knows what and who and how they fit together and how you fit in with them."

language extensionsofman skin immunesystem ambientintimacy behaviours phatic communication ADHD attentiondeficithyperactivedisorder attention continuouspartialattention ambient intimacy presence grooming socialmedia selfservers
october 2007 by adamcrowe

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Bokardo - What Barnes & Noble could have said

'So what could Toulantis have said?: “Shop at Barnes & Noble to find your next favorite book. Use our “See Inside” feature to browse a book online, just like you do at a our stores”.'

positioning storytelling briefs tools language usability
october 2007 by adamcrowe

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Original Bboard Thread in which :-) was proposed

" I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers :-) "

:-) language text web internet communication history emotion emotionalintelligence geeks cyberculture via:zeroinfluencer
september 2007 by adamcrowe

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MisEntropy - One simple trick to master any language

"So, what's this trick? Just watch the TV news in the language you're trying to learn, every single day for 2 to 3 months. And that's all you'll need to do."

language learning tv context literaryculturevsoralculture news television
september 2007 by adamcrowe

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This Blog Sits at the - Death of marketing?

"This is a revolutionary moment because so much in the traditional purview of marketing has changed. The old regime has to topple. It has been hollowed out by the new realities. We have no choice. We have to move. "

backlash marketing language jargon words planning creativity framing
august 2007 by adamcrowe

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PSFK Conference Los Angeles - Dropping The Word 'Marketing' on PSFK

We dumped the word ‘marketing’... we felt that ‘marketing’ doesn’t really encompass the solutions that people are generating; that ‘marketing’ comes with all the bad baggage and isn’t accessible to a new generation of creative minds."

backlash marketing trends psfk language framing creativity ideas jargon planning
august 2007 by adamcrowe

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Lexical FreeNet

A Thesaurus! Online! What's not to like?

words language tools
august 2007 by adamcrowe

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Google - Translation Browser Buttons

"Add a translation browser button to your browser's Links Toolbar to translate web pages or pieces of text with a single click."

google words translation tools browser usability language web
july 2007 by adamcrowe

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Wikipedia - Phatic

"In linguistics, a phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information. The utterance of a phatic expression is a kind of speech act... "small talk", "grooming talking", etc"

language people linguistics speech behaviours phatic presence communication etiquette
july 2007 by adamcrowe

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BigShinyThing - Always Touched by Your Presence, Dear.

"Nightline: One of the techniques it teaches is that of ‘tapping’. lf a caller can’t or won’t speak, counsellors are told to ask them to just tap the receiver, ‘So that I know that you’re still there’ and so that a connection is made."

facebook presence counselling language communication bandwidth extensionsofman immunesystem
july 2007 by adamcrowe

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