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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Amy Burvall

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Amy Burvall

Stop Stealing Dreams (the entire manifesto on the web) - Stop Stealing Dreams - 1 views

sethgodin.typepad.com/...tire-manifesto-on-the-web.html

education manifesto

shared by Amy Burvall on 14 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • every student brave enough to stand up and speak up
  • every student brave enough to stand up and speak up
    • Amy Burvall
      Amy Burvall on 16 Aug 12
       
      That's you my dearest TOK students!
Amy Burvall

The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan « NextNature.net - 2 views

www.nextnature.net/...boy-interview-marshall-mcluhan

McLuhan media technology education communication

shared by Amy Burvall on 09 May 12 - Cached
  • hem in th
  • I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks.
  • I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences — until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.
  • ...68 more annotations...
  • f man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment.
  • self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.
  • unconscious, toward a realization that technology is an extension of our own bodies.
  • Because inherent in the artist’s creative inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change. It’s always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who reco
  • gnizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it
  • the medium itself that
  • s the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the massage — that, all puns aside
  • Because we are benumbed by any new technology — which in turn creates a totally new environment — we tend to make the old environment more visible; we do so by turning it into an art form and by attaching ourselves to the objects and atmosphere that characterized it, just as we’ve done with jazz, and as we’re now doing with the garbage of the mechanical environment via pop art.
  • Today, in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total a
  • nd near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes
  • Because of today’s terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the
  • onal corporate family feeling is excised from his relationship with his social milieu.
  • creates extensions of the human body and senses, from clothing to the computer. And a vital point I must stress again is that societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media with which men communicate than by the content of the communication
  • creates extensions of the human body and senses, from clothing to the computer. And a vital point I must stress again is that societies have always been shaped more by the nature of t
  • Oral cultures act and react simultaneously, whereas the capacity to act without reacting, without involvement, is the special gift of “detached” literate man.
  • simultaneous and discontinuous, and also far richer than those of literate man. By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were drawn together into a tribal mesh; and since the spoken word is more emotionally laden than the written — conveying by intonation such rich emotions as anger, joy, sorrow, fear — tribal man was more spontaneous and passionately volatile
  • connected and visual mode that we still consider the norm of “rational” existence. The whole man became fragmented man; the alphabet shattered the charmed circle and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished “individuals,”
  • environmental forces shaping us — and thus win back control of our own destinie
  • McLUHAN: The electronically induced technological extensions of our central nervous systems, which I spoke of earlier, are immersing us in a world-pool of information movement and are thus enabling man to incorporate within himself the whole of mankind.
  • This division of sight and sound and meaning causes deep psychological effects, and he suffers a corresponding separation and impoverishment of his imaginative, emotional and sensory life. He begins reasoning in a sequential linear fashion; he begins categorizing and classifying data. As knowledge is extended in alphabetic form, it is localized and fragmented into specialties
  • ed man, first sundered by the alphabet, was at last diced into bite-sized tidbits. From that point on, Western man was Gutenberg man.
  • he two go hand in hand. Printing, remember, was the first mechanization of a complex handicraft; by creating an analytic sequence of step-by-step processes, it became the blue-print of all mechanization to follow. The most important quality of print is its repeatability; it is a visual statement that can be reproduced indefinitely, and repeatability is the root of the mechanical principle that has transformed the world since Gutenberg
  • The use of the electronic media constitutes a break boundary between fragmented Gutenberg man and integral man, just as phonetic literacy was a break boundary between oral-tribal man and visual man.
  • cal institutions caused by the electric media in general and television in particular.
  • men were tribal emperors on a scale theretofore unknown in the world, because they all mastered their media.
  • overhauling of our traditional political system is only one manifestation of the retribalizing process wrought by the electric media, which is turning the planet into a global village.
  • onal corporate family feeling is excised from his relationship with his social milieu. This division of sight and sound and meaning causes deep psychological effects, and he suffers a corresponding separati
  • instant nature of electric-information movement is decentralizing — rather than enlarging — the family of man into a new state of multitudinous tribal existences.
  • . If we don’t adapt our educational system to their needs and values, we will see only more dropouts and more chaos.
  • McLUHAN: Because education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression, imposing upon retribalized youth the obsolescent visual values of the dying literate age. Our entire educational system is reactionary, oriented to past values and past technologies, and will likely continue so until the old generation relinquishes power.
  • educational system is totally rearview mirror. It’s a dying and outdated system founded on literate values and fragmented and classified data totally unsuited to the needs
  • Today’s child is growing up absurd because he is suspended between two wo
  • rlds and two value systems, neither of which inclines him to maturity because he belo
  • child finds if difficult if not impossible to adjust to the fragmented, visual goals of our education after having had all his senses involved by the electric media; he craves in-
  • mosaic image of the TV screen generates a depth-involving nowness and simultaneity in the lives of children that makes them scorn the distant visualized goals of traditional education as unreal, irrelevant and puerile.
  • there is simply too much to learn by the traditional analytic methods; this is an age of information overload.
  • Book learning is no longer sufficient in any subject; the children all say now, “Let’s talk Spanish,” or “Let the Bard be heard,” reflecting their rejection of the old sterile system where education begins and ends in a book.
  • TV can deeply involve youth in the process of learning, illustrating graphically the complex interplay of people and events, the development of forms, the multileveled interrelationships between and among such arbitrarily segregated subjects as biology, geography, mathematics, anthropology, history, literature and languages.
  • fragmented mechanical world and its fossilized educational system, which is designed in their minds solely to fit them into classified slots in bureaucratic society.
  • bringing us back in touch with ourselves as well as with one another.
  • totally retribalized world of depth involvements. Through radio, TV and the computer, we are already entering a global theater in which the entire world is a Happening
  • The day of the individualist, of privacy, of fragmented or “applied” knowledge, of “points of view” and specialist goals is being replaced by the over-all awareness of a mosaic world in which space and time are overcome by television, jets and computers — a simultaneous, “all-at-once” world in which everything resonates with everything else
  • Individual talents and perspectives don’t have to shrivel within a retribalized society; they merely interact within a group consciousness that has the potential for releasing far more creativity than the old atomized culture. Literate man is alienated, impoverished man; retribalized man can lead a far richer and more fulfilling life — not the life of a mindless drone but of the participant in a seamless web of interdependence and harmony.
  • our new electronic environment compels commitment and participation, and fulfills man’s psychic and social needs at profound levels.
  • Literate mechanical society separated the individual from the group in space, engendering privacy; in thought, engendering point of view; and in work, engendering specialism — thus forging all the values associated with individualism. But at the same time, print technology has homogenized man, creating mass militarism, mass mind and mass uniformity
  • he electric media open up totally new means of registering popular opinion. The old concept of the plebiscite, for example, may take on new relevance;
  • release from the uniformity, alienation and dehumanization of literate society. Print centralizes socially and fragments psychically, whereas the electric media bring man together in a tribal village that is a rich and creative mix, where there is actually more room for creative diversity than within the homogenized mass urban society of Western man.
  • The tribal will is consensually expressed through the simultaneous interplay of all members of a community that is deeply interrelated and involved,
  • electrically imploded tribal society discards the linear forward-motion of “progress.” We can see in our own time how, as we begin to react in depth to the challenges of the global village, we all become reactionaries.
  • spontaneous and instantaneous communal involvement in all areas of decision making
  • why not a feed-forward of thought whereby a world consciousness links into a
  • cities, corporate extensions of our physical organs, are withering and being translated along with all other such extensions into information systems, as television and the jet — by compressing time and space — make all the world one village and destroy the old city-country dichotomy
  • ncept of the job, replacing it with a role, and giving men the breath of leisure. The electric media will create a world of dropouts from the old fragmented society, with its neatly compartmentalized analytic functions, and cause people to drop in to the new integrated global-village community.
  • Computer technology can — and doubtless will — program entire environments to fulfill the social needs and sensory preferences of communities and nations. The content of that programing, however, depends on the nature of future societies — but that is in our own hands.
  • we can’t escape this perpetual embrace of our daily technology unless we escape the technology itself and flee to a hermit’s cave. By consistently embracing all these technologies, we inevitably relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. Thus, in order to make use of them at all, we must serve them as we do gods
  • , to the spoils belongs the victor.
  • reciprocates man’s devotion by rewarding him with goods and services and bounty. Man’s relationship with his machinery is thus inherently symbiotic.
  • 20th Century man’s relationship to the computer is not by nature very different from prehistoric man’s relationship to his boat or to his wheel — with the important difference that all previous technologies or extensions of man were partial and fragmentary, whereas the electric is total and inclusive
  • Now man is beginning to wear his brain outside his skull and his nerves outside hi
  • McLUHAN: The first and most vital step of all, as I said at the outset, is simply to understand media and its revolutionary effects on all psychic and social values and institutions. Understanding is half the battle.
  • ape this environmental blitzkrieg, for there is, quite literally, no place to hide. But if we diagnose what is happening to us, we can reduce the ferocity of the winds of change and bring the best elements of the old visual culture, during this transitional period, into peaceful coexistence with the new retribalized society.
  • approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience — from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student.
  • h these self-protective modifications; they must be the collective effort of society, because they affect all of society; the individual is helpless against the pervasiveness of environmental change: the new garbage — or mess-age — induced by new technologies
  • change proceeds so instantaneously through the new media that it may be possible to institute a global education program that will enable us to seize the reins of our destiny
  • ined by the Chinese emperors, who used to execute messengers bringing bad news. The new technological environments generate the most pain among those least prepared to alter their old value structures.
  • When an individual or social group feels that its whole identity is jeopardized by social or psychic change, its natural reaction is to lash out in defensive fury. But for all their lamentations, the revolution has already taken place.
  • The Western world is being revolutionized by the electric media as rapidly as the
  • I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new
  • Amy Burvall on 09 May 12
     
    The quintessential!
Amy Burvall

7 Memes That Went Viral Before The Internet Existed | Cracked.com - 0 views

www.cracked.com/l-before-internet-existed.html

meme society technology viral

shared by Amy Burvall on 12 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • In the very likely case that you're on the Internet right now, you already know what a "meme" is. But you may not realize that the concept -- a meaningless phrase, image or joke getting repeated endlessly for no reason at all -- predates the Internet generation by a long shot. Although it was more difficult for a phrase or image to "go viral" before all this technology, pointless memes still found their way to every corner of the globe. Such as ...
Amy Burvall

mental_floss Blog » 15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent - 1 views

www.mentalfloss.com/...94828

language ways-of-knowing

shared by Amy Burvall on 03 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Amy Burvall on 03 Aug 11
     
    The Global Language Monitor estimates that there are currently 1,009,753 words in the English language. Despite this large lexicon, many nuances of human experience still leave us tongue-tied. And that's why sometimes it's necessary to turn to other languages to find le mot juste. Here are fifteen foreign words with no direct English equivalent.
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