tom matrullo's possibly adjacent blog

The Nerve

Truth is, we're all bystanders now, ricocheting off one another's responses. James Wolcott

What plays best on television is melodrama, what I call "percussive punditry," in which the point is to pound and to stir resounding reverberations. That's easier done when you have polarized positions and simple, moralistic declarations. Todd Gitlin

Remember Bill Gates’s central nervous system analogy, vintage 1999? He was thinking of corporations, and how software and networks would give them borg-like qualities of awareness and response.

Perhaps he wasn't thinking big enough. We see now that the phenomenon of rippling repercussions is hardly limited to corporate “minds.” Gates simply misconceived the scale when he imagined his software would help, say, Larry Ellison, heh, become rich and famous.

The import of insights like those of Wolcott and Gitlin is more interesting: If “we” are receiving nothing but percussive reverb from mass media, where do we turn for something like original thinking and analysis?

Duh. The fundamental fallacy that's sucking the life out of media is that we wish someone else to do our thinking for us, when in fact what we want is to make up our minds and convey our own thoughts.

Wolcott and his bosses at AOLTW are still looking at blogs as they are practiced by mass media columnists like Sullivan and Layne. Strange how media simply can’t see and address anything that isn’t a mediated product of intermediated media...

There are blogs that consist of sounds. Of MP3s. Of comic book figures. Of fonts. Of vowels. Etc. They're not extensions of some other corporate media format – newspapers, tv, radio. They are extensions of individuals.

The hot little secret? Any human being whose mind has not already been assimilated does not wish to have Bill Gates or Howell Raines or Rupert Murdock installing, monitoring or debugging his or her nervous system. And as it turns out, this is not necessary. The current facility of the web plus basic human ingenuity is enabling individuals to fire many key synapses without assistance from corporate bodysnatchers.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t possible uses for the sort of thing Gates had in mind when he tossed out the analogy a few years ago.

E.g.: I order stuff all the time from Amazon and other companies on the Net and via print catalogs. Often in a single day, a UPS truck rolls up multiple times to drop off single items. Why couldn’t someone develop a ''nervous system'' that tracks orders from different sellers? That way if it turns out a couple of shipments are coming my way within the next day or two, UPS or whoever could make a single trip, constituting an efficiency for them and their customers, saving the atmosphere and roads, and hopefully saving me a bit of loose change.

If there's a problem here, it's greed. Getting competitors - or even noncompeting corporate entities - to conspire for some good greater than their own bottom line is downright Un-American.

So, Bill, I guess you're shite out of luck - I trust it won't prey on your nerves.

Invoking the ''we'' of some implicit audience of fellow ''cultural theorists,'' Douglas Rushkoff advises that our myths and our Gods are refuted by scientific reality. AKMA hints that Mr. Rushkoff might be assuming an exaggerated pontifical unity among his readers on the science = truth score.

Before he bases too much on a singularly straightjacketed notion of what cultural theorists and even some real people think, Mr. Rushkoff might take a quick look at the collision of religious, scientific and artistic icons engineered at Iconoclash.

With some sensitivity to the complexity of the cultural moment, Bruno Latour, one of the exhibit's curators, remarks:

It is only because each of us, visitors, curators and readers, harbors such a different pattern of belief, rage, enthusiasm, admiration, diffidence, fascination, suspicion, and spite for each of the three types of images that we bring them to bear on one another. What interests us, is the even more complex pattern created by their interference.

The notion that science - like some commodified book idea du jour - has usurped theological truth, and now stands tall-as-W. in the saddle, telling us what to believe, as we sing nigger work songs and subside into wide-eyed, open-jawed Spielbergian awe-circa-1982, is rich. (Everybody knows ''we'' actually be singing I get a kick out of you.)

Incidentally, Mr. Rushkoff seems to think James Joyce is a Post-Modernist writer. Some corrective Joyce resources might be in order here. Thanks to Wood's Lot for Rushkoff and Latour.