Hi, Tammy! This is my New Year's present for you as food for thought or tea to brew....
It's my opinion that McLuhan's concept of a global village is related to the reversal of communications from the linearity, visual-base of print and literacy to the non-linear mode of "oral" commununication. Tywla's webpage
on the Toronto School of Communications provides a brief description what is called "secondary orality" by Walter Ong.
I make the paradoxial observation that blogs are the best visual demonstration of the internet's orality. Blogs reminds and calls to me the image of stories, myths and legends told around the campfire of the old tribal days. Now...it seems as if our personal stories, our intellectual stories, our networking stories, our stories of seperations or coming together, our stories of cultural differences and similiarities are being told and retold in infinite ways around our personal campfires of the computer screen in our homes. We've said it before, but I repeat here again that blogs have an interactivity that makes them very different from websites (which is the broadcast mode of the interactive internet), different from email (which is sort of one-to-one communication), totally different from TV broadcast, and very different from the aural-interactive phone conversation or the radio because it is visually recorded (in bytes) and has publicy.
Blogging can be a place where seperatism shows itself. It wouldn't have its mythic qualities if it didn't. My adventure into trying to decipher the language of quantum science has taught me that what you choose to observe is what you get. An intriguing question for me in observing the blogosphere would be "how do we show all the infinite faces of bloggers"? (I also ask as a riddle, how are the infinite faces of Brahma shown?)
In my journey of trying to understand the concept of a global mind, I sensed a link between the passionate thoughts of my two favorite heroes (of the moment)...Marshall McLuhan's "The media is the message" and Joseph Campbell's theory of the "grand myth", his "Hero with a Thousand Faces, his "Masks of God" which tells us the other story of that link of all mankind. Campbell, in his famous television interview with Bill Moyers talks about the need for a new modern myth, which will be a myth of the world. He mentions somewhere that the most important product of NASA's landing on the moon was the production of this deeply psychically awakening image of Earth/Gaia from outer space. I think there won't be one myth that will tell it all (I must admit, I've spent some time searching and will continue to search), there's all these new myths, new stories or maybe old myths being retold, being told now all the time, if only we opened our eyes and ears to see and hear it all...
Reading McLuhan, I now understand that this new myth is in the process of birthing by the medium of electricity. McLuhan's greatest contribution to mankind, sadly generally un-noticed, is his bringing of our attention to looking at the message of electricity. Most of us are numbed and don't notice its actual effect in transforming the psychic life of modern man. He calls it the reorganizing of the ratios of our sense proportions somewhere. He was sort of giving us a wake up call, which we are sort of sluggishly answering to. I hope mankind doesn't sleepwalk through it all to awaken rudely one day.
Just to maybe perplex you further... I would like to tell you the story about my experience of listening to your presentation, on that fateful day of Dec. 10. ... how it was sort of a surreal experience for me. In hindsight, I can describe it as sort of having some kind of "disembodied" experience of "seeing" you as a "guru" citing an "Upanishad" from "memory". I think I was tuning into your cultural heritage and long-held traditions of orality. (I read the Bhagavad Gita with a group of Indian friends some 4 years ago.) So your presentation was sort of an eye... or rather... ear opener for me that night. When I reflected on it and compared your oral method to my own so very visual-based, linearly arranged, Power Point presentation (which I feel I sort of muddled through and muddled up)...woke up in me some inner realization of how orality can work in this highly technical age of the internet. It has something to do with how the story changes with each storytelling, storyteller. It has something to do with what I blogged earlier about how humans are the ultimate transformer in this equation of our transformation to a global mind. It definitely had something to do with the blogging environment we were put into.
So my conclusions of MMS1 for me has been the discovery that..."the message" of the blogs is its interactivity, its sense of conversation or orality. The message of the internet as a new medium of electricity is how it has made us disembodied minds interacting with each other in multiple mediums, forging us all in some movement towards this shaping global mind.
Now, to belatedly take up your proposition for collaboration, (with your editing skills and connections), do you think we could co-write an article on this together for publication somewhere, sometime, somehow?..
A plus tard.
