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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Mike Wesch

Mike Wesch

antropologi.info - anthropology in the news blog - Do we (still) need journals? - 0 views

  • For the most part, presses and journals as they now exist do not serve the interests of intellectual or cultural development. To the contrary, their proliferation is symptomatic of increasing hyper-specialization in which there is more and more about less and less. This is going in the opposite direction of history, in which there is increasing interconnectedness. So my advice is to forget journals – I no longer read any academic journals and I stopped publishing in them years ago. The only function presses and journals serve is to authorize those who write for them among a dwindling group of peers. If ideas are to matter – and I believe it is crucial that they do – we must completely change the way in which they are communicated.
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    For the most part, presses and journals as they now exist do not serve the interests of intellectual or cultural development. To the contrary, their proliferation is symptomatic of increasing hyper-specialization in which there is more and more about less and less. This is going in the opposite direction of history, in which there is increasing interconnectedness. So my advice is to forget journals - I no longer read any academic journals and I stopped publishing in them years ago. The only function presses and journals serve is to authorize those who write for them among a dwindling group of peers. If ideas are to matter - and I believe it is crucial that they do - we must completely change the way in which they are communicated.
Mike Wesch

Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice | Video on TED.com - 0 views

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    Go to 8:00 to start hearing about the effects of too much choice in our culture
Mike Wesch

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Social Media Gurus Offer Their Predic... - 0 views

  • "Many of us are going to wake up in 2009 wondering what did we eat?  Everything from hastily assembled friends list to twitter followers to groups, apps, and widgets that we "impulse adopted" yet rarely revisited.   Some of us will join the Social Media equivalent of Weight Watchers eager to trim the excess and rediscover a modicum of "don't follow everything" discipline."
Mike Wesch

Gives Life Meaning: Homeless Mind - Modernity's Discontents - 2 - 0 views

  • The discontents derived from the bureaucratization of major institutions are very similar to the ones just mentioned. However, they are even broader in scope for the simple reason that bureaucratization has affected nearly every sector of social life.
  • A congregation of Tibetan Buddhist monks, let us say, transplanted to the United States, can start using electric razors without thereby altering the character of their social relations. If, however, this monastic community started to bureaucratize its procedures, the very fabric of its social life would change almost immediately.
  • The individual is "surrounded" by bureaucracy far more effectively than he is by the technologized economy,
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  • Political life has become anonymous, incomprehensible and anomic to broad strata of the population
  • All the major public institutions of modern society have become "abstract."
  • Because of the religious crisis in modern society, social "homelessness" has become metaphysical--that is, it has become "homelessness" in the cosmos.
  • Modernity has accomplished many far-reaching transformations, but it has not fundamentally changed the finitude, fragility and mortality of the human condition. What it has accomplished is to seriously weaken those definitions of reality that previously made that human condition easier to bear. This has produced an anguish all its own, and one that we are inclined to think adds additional urgency and weight to the other discontents we have mentioned.
  • In the private sphere, "repressed" irrational impulses are allowed to come to the fore. A specific private identity provides shelter from the threats of anonymity. The transparency of the private world makes the opacity of the public one tolerable.
  • A limited number of highly significant relationships, most of them chosen voluntarily by the individual, provide the emotional resources for coping with the multi-relational reality "outside."
  • The most fundamental function of institutions is probably to protect the individual from having to make too many choices.
  • Human beings are not capable of tolerating the continuous uncertainty (or, if you will, freedom) of existing without institutional supports.
  • In their private lives individuals keep on constructing and reconstructing refuges that they experience as "home." But, over and over again, the cold winds of "homelessness" threaten these fragile constructions. It would be an overstatement to say that the "solution" of the private sphere is a failure; there are too many individual successes. But it is always very precarious.
Mike Wesch

Gives Life Meaning: Homeless Mind - Modernity's Discontents - 1 - 0 views

  • As we have seen, modern technological production brings about an anonymity in the area of social relations. What we have called componentiality, which is intrinsically related to the manner in which modern technology deals with material objects, is transferred to individual relations with others, and ultimately with the self. This anonymity carries with it a constant threat of anomie. The individual is threatened not only by meaninglessness in the world of his work, but also by the loss of meaning in wide sectors of his relations with other people.
  • Furthermore, he is constantly in the situation of having too many balls in the air simultaneously. In the words of the classical American joke: He has "too many choices" all the time. The complexity of the multi-relational modern world puts a strain on all standard operating procedures, not only in the individual's activity but in this consciousness as well.
  • Once more the result is tension, frustration and, in the extreme case, a feeling of being alienated from others.
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    As we have seen, modern technological production brings about an anonymity in the area of social relations. What we have called componentiality, which is intrinsically related to the manner in which modern technology deals with material objects, is transferred to individual relations with others, and ultimately with the self. This anonymity carries with it a constant threat of anomie. The individual is threatened not only by meaninglessness in the world of his work, but also by the loss of meaning in wide sectors of his relations with other people.
Mike Wesch

YouTube - Reclaim Your Mind - 0 views

  • Catalysts to say what has never been said, to see what has never been seen. To draw, paint, sing, sculpt, dance and act what has never before been done. To push the envelope of creativity and language. And whats really important is, I call it, the felt presence of direct experience. Which is a fancy term which just simply means we have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture. Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time, where you are now, is the most immediate sector of your universe. And if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, you are disempowered. You are giving it all away to icons. Icons which are maintained by an electronic media, so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion. And what is real is you and your friends, your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, and your fears. And we are told no. We're unimportant, we're peripheral, get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. Where is that at?"
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    just the audio of McKenna - no music
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