Podcast appearances and mentions of walter ong

Something alarming is happening with reading in America. Leisure reading by some accounts has declined by about 50 percent this century. Literacy scores are declining for fourth and eighth graders at alarming rates. And even college students today are complaining to teachers that they can't read entire books. The book itself, that ancient piece of technology for storing ideas passed down across decades, is fading in curricula across the country, replaced by film and TV and YouTube. Why, with everything happening in the world, would I want to talk about reading? The business podcaster Joe Weisenthal has recently turned me on to the ideas of Walter Ong and his book 'Orality and Literacy.' According to Ong, literacy is not just a skill. It is a specific means of structuring society's way of thinking. In oral cultures, Ong says, knowledge is preserved through repetition, mnemonics, and stories. Writing and reading, by contrast, fix words in place. One person can write, and another person, decades later, can read precisely what was written. This word fixing also allows literate culture to develop more abstract and analytical thinking. Writers and readers are, after all, outsourcing a piece of their memory to a page. Today, we seem to be completely reengineering the logic engine of society. The decline of reading in America is not the whole of this phenomenon. But I think that it's an important part of it. Today we have two conversations—one with a journalist and one with an academic. First, Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitch shares her reporting on the decline of reading at elite college campuses. And second, Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute tells us about the alarming decline in literacy across our entire student population and even among adults. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Rose Horowitch and Nat Malkus Producer: Devon Baroldi Links "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books" "Testing Theories of Why: Four Keys to Interpreting US Student Achievement Trends"  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You might want to jot down some notes on this one! In episode 122, Ellie and David explore where writing began, the value of writing, and our reasons for writing. Is the widespread use of generative AI technologies, such as ChatGPT, a threat to creative and academic writing? How did writing originate in cuneiform, and how does Derrida's deconstruction of logocentrism encourage us to reconsider the privileging of speech over writing? Listen to it all write here, write now! Plus, in the bonus, they get into some of our most pernicious myths and misconceptions about writing. They talk about the tortured writer trope, the solitary nature of writing, and the connection of writing to class. Check out the episode's extended cut here!Works Discussed:David Abram, The Spell of the SensuousGeoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques DerridaJacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”Jacques Derrida, Of GrammatologyJacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context”Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human SciencesJoan Didion, “Why I write”Walter Ong, Orality and LiteracyGeorge Orwell, “Why I write”Plato, The PhaedrusAlva Noë, The Entanglement, How Art and Philosophy Make Us Who We ArePeter Salmon, An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques DerridaAndrew Robinson, The Story of WritingSupport the showPatreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast Website | overthinkpodcast.comInstagram & Twitter | @overthink_podEmail | dearoverthink@gmail.comYouTube | Overthink podcast

What is this world we live in, and how did we get here? One of the finest thinkers on this subject is in the house. Santosh Desai joins Amit Varma in episode 356 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss Indian society and this changing world. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Santosh Desai on Twitter, the Times of India, LinkedIn, Futurebrands and his own website. 2. Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense Of Everyday India -- Santosh Desai. 3. Indian Society: The Last 30 Years — Episode 137 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Santosh Desai). 4. The Slimfit Conspiracy -- Santosh Desai. 5. Pushpesh Pant Feasts on the Buffet of Life — Episode 326 of The Seen and the Unseen. 6. The Great Indian Rope Trick? -- Santosh Desai. 7. We Are All Amits From Africa — Episode 343 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Krish Ashok and Naren Shenoy). 8. Subhashish Bhadra on Our Dysfunctional State — Episode 333 of The Seen and the Unseen. 9. Nothing is Indian! Everything is Indian! — Episode 12 of Everything is Everything. 10. Nick Carter, PG Wodehouse and Arthur Hailey on Amazon. 11. Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco on Amazon. 12. The Wisden Book of Test Cricket (1877-1977) — Compiled & edited by Bill Frindall. 13. Lessons from an Ankhon Dekhi Prime Minister — Amit Varma's column on reading. 14. Dom Moraes on Amazon, Wikipedia, Britannica and Poem Hunter. 15. The Indianness of Indian Food — Episode 95 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vikram Doctor). 16. Films, Feminism, Paromita — Episode 155 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Paromita Vohra). 17. The Poetic Feminism of Paromita Vohra — Episode 339 of The Seen and the Unseen. 18. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ramachandra Guha: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 19. A Meditation on Form — Amit Varma. 20. Dreamers: How Indians are Changing the World -- Snigdha Poonam. 21. Young India — Episode 83 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Snigdha Poonam). 22. The Loneliness of the Indian Man — Episode 303 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Nikhil Taneja). 23. India Moving — Chinmay Tumbe. 24. India = Migration — Episode 128 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Chinmay Tumbe). 25. The Guilty Pleasures of Digital Dawdling -- Santosh Desai. 26. 30 years on, you can get what you want but don't know what you need -- Santosh Desai. 27. How traditions give meaning to our lives -- Santosh Desai. 28. The Median Voter Theorem. 29. Mohammad Zubair's Twitter thread on the Dharam Sansad. 30. Inverting the Behaviour Change Paradigm? -- Santosh Desai. 31. A Life in Indian Politics — Episode 149 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Jayaprakash Narayan). 32. Jayaprakash Narayan Wants to Mend Our Democracy -- Episode 334 of The Seen and the Unseen. 33. India's Lost Decade — Episode 116 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra). 34. Living Two Lives in Digital India -- Santosh Desai. 35. Kashi Ka Assi — Kashinath Singh. 36. The Experience Machine. 37. Anarchy, State and Utopia — Robert Nozick. 38. Song of Myself — Walt Whitman. 39. Baaba Maal and Advaita on Spotify.. 40. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau, Paul Cézanne, Krishen Khanna, Jayasri Burman and Gogi Saroj Pal. 41. Sudhir Kakar, Ashis Nandy, Roland Barthes, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong and John Berger on Amazon. 42. Ways of Seeing -- John Berger. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘He Sees Everything' by Simahina.

William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land is without a doubt one of the weirdest entries in the annals of weird fiction. Set in the earth's distant future, after the sun has gone out and the planet has been cleaved in two by an unspecified disaster, a telepathic scientist dons his armour and weapons to brave the monster-haunted yet strangely monotonous wastes that engirdle the massive pyramid in which the last humans took refuge, hundreds of thousands of years earlier. If Samuel Beckett tripped hard on ayahuasca, he might have come up with something like Hodgson's genre-defying novel, which reads more like a report to committee of 17th-century heretics than a piece of speculative fiction from the early twentieth century. MIT Press recently released a (blessedly) abridged edition of The Night Land as part of their Radium Series. Journalist, scholar, and lecturer Erik Davis, who penned a brilliant foreword for the new edition, was kind enough to join Phil and JF to discuss this underrated masterpiece. Support us on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/weirdstudies) and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia (https://cosmophonia.podbean.com/). Download Pierre-Yves Martel's new album, Mer Bleue (https://pierre-yvesmartel.bandcamp.com/album/mer-bleue). Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop (https://bookshop.org/shop/weirdstudies) Find us on Discord (https://discord.com/invite/Jw22CHfGwp) Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau (https://cottonbureau.com/products/can-o-content#/13435958/tee-men-standard-tee-vintage-black-tri-blend-s)! SHOW NOTES William Hope Hodgeson, The Night Land (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780262546423) Weird Studies, Episode 37 with Stuart Davis (https://www.weirdstudies.com/37) Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780415538381) Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780674986916) William Hope Hodgeson, House on the Borderland (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9781492699774) Samuel Beckett, Molloy (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780802144478) Sumptuary Laws (https://refashioningrenaissance.eu/archival-work/sumptuary-laws/) Arcosanti (https://www.arcosanti.org/), arcology Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9781618950468) Pierre Schaeffer, “Traité des objets musicaux” Schitzophonia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophonia) H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780141439976)

Most of us probably don't stop to reflect on our use of technology and how the devices and apps we use affect our lives and society as a whole. What is it doing to our brains and our souls that we reach for our smartphones mindlessly hundreds of times a day? What do we say on social media that I wouldn't say in real life, and how does our behavior online make the world better – or, more likely, worse? Today's guest, L.M. Sacasas, is an incredible thinker and writer who has devoted his career to asking big questions of our technology and what it's doing to our communal life and individual lives. Sacasas has a great Substack newsletter called “The Convivial Society” that is host Mike Jordan Laskey's favorite thing to read these days. Sacasas has this amazing ability to read and absorb scholars from the past like Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Hannah Arendt and the Jesuit literary theorist Walter Ong and apply their arguments to our very different media environment today. In this conversation, Sacasas shares his thoughts on AI chat-bots like ChatGPT and Microsoft's new Bing and Google Bard. He and Mike also talk about social media and smartphones and artificial light and time and what countercultural roles faith communities might play in offering venues for incarnational, authentic community. Subscribe to “The Convivial Society”: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/ Read L.M. Sacasas on Fr. Walter Ong, SJ: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-inescapable-town-square Listen to L.M. Sacasas' interview on the Ezra Klein Show: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-lm-sacasas.html AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. www.jesuits.org/ www.beajesuit.org/ twitter.com/jesuitnews facebook.com/Jesuits instagram.com/wearethejesuits youtube.com/societyofjesus

Welcome back to the Convivial Society. In this installment, you'll find the audio version of two recent posts: “The Pathologies of the Attention Economy” and “Impoverished Emotional Lives.” I've not combined audio from two separate installments before, but the second is a short “Is this anything?” post, so I thought it would be fine to include it here. (By the way, I realized after the fact that I thoughtlessly mispronounced Herbert Simon's name as Simone. I'm not, however, sufficiently embarrassed to go back and re-record or edit the audio. So there you have it.)If you've been reading over the past few months, you know that I've gone back and forth on how best to deliver the audio version of the essays. I've settled for now on this method, which is to send out a supplement to the text version of the essay. Because not all of you listen to the audio version, I'll include some additional materials (links, resources, etc.) so that this email is not without potential value to those who do not listen to the audio. Farewell Real LifeI noted in a footnote recently that Real Life Magazine had lost its funding and would be shutting down. This is a shame. Real Life consistently published smart and thoughtful essays exploring various dimensions of internet culture. I had the pleasure of writing three pieces for the magazine between 2018 and 2019: ”The Easy Way Out,” “Always On,” and “Personal Panopticons.” I was also pleasantly surprised to encounter essays in the past year or two drawing on the work of Ivan Illich: “Labors of Love” and “Appropriate Measures,” each co-authored by Jackie Brown and Philippe Mesly, as well as “Doctor's Orders” by Aimee Walleston. And at any given time I've usually had a handful of Real Life essays open in tabs waiting to be read or shared. Here are some more recent pieces that are worth your time: “Our Friend the Atom The aesthetics of the Atomic Age helped whitewash the threat of nuclear disaster,” “Hard to See How trauma became synonymous with authenticity,” and “Life's a Glitch The non-apocalypse of Y2K obscures the lessons it has for the present.” LinksThe latest installment in Jon Askonas's ongoing series in The New Atlantis is out from behind the paywall today. In “How Stewart Made Tucker,” Askonas weaves a compelling account of how Jon Stewart prepared the way for Tucker Carlson and others: In his quest to turn real news from the exception into the norm, he pioneered a business model that made it nearly impossible. It's a model of content production and audience catering perfectly suited to monetize alternate realities delivered to fragmented audiences. It tells us what we want to hear and leaves us with the sense that “they” have departed for fantasy worlds while “we” have our heads on straight. Americans finally have what they didn't before. The phony theatrics have been destroyed — and replaced not by an earnest new above-the-fray centrism but a more authentic fanaticism.You can find earlier installments in the series here: Reality — A post-mortem. Reading through the essay, I was struck again and again by how foreign and distant the world of late 90s and early aughts. In any case, the Jon's work in this series is worth your time. Kashmir Hill spent a lot of time in Meta's Horizons to tell us about life in the metaverse: My goal was to visit at every hour of the day and night, all 24 of them at least once, to learn the ebbs and flows of Horizon and to meet the metaverse's earliest adopters. I gave up television, books and a lot of sleep over the past few months to spend dozens of hours as an animated, floating, legless version of myself.I wanted to understand who was currently there and why, and whether the rest of us would ever want to join them. Ian Bogost on smart thermostats and the claims made on their behalf: After looking into the matter, I'm less confused but more distressed: Smart heating and cooling is even more knotted up than I thought. Ultimately, your smart thermostat isn't made to help you. It's there to help others—for reasons that might or might not benefit you directly, or ever.Sun-ha Hong's paper on predictions without futures. From the abstract: … the growing emphasis on prediction as AI's skeleton key to all social problems constitutes what religious studies calls cosmograms: universalizing models that govern how facts and values relate to each other, providing a common and normative point of reference. In a predictive paradigm, social problems are made conceivable only as objects of calculative control—control that can never be fulfilled but that persists as an eternally deferred and recycled horizon. I show how this technofuture is maintained not so much by producing literally accurate predictions of future events but through ritualized demonstrations of predictive time.MiscellanyAs I wrote about the possibility that the structure of online experience might impoverish our emotional lives, I recalled the opening paragraph of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages. I can't say that I have a straightforward connection to make between “the passionate intensity of life” Huizinga describes and my own speculations the affective consequences of digital media, but I think there may be something worth getting at. When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child. Every even, every deed was defined in given and expressive forms and was in accord with the solemnity of a tight, invariable life style. The great events of human life—birth, marriage, death—by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of divine mystery. But even the lesser events—a journey, labor, a visit—were accompanied by a multitude of blessings, ceremonies, sayings, and conventions. From the perspective of media ecology, the shift to print as the dominant cultural medium is interpreted as having the effect of tempering the emotional intensity of oral culture and tending instead toward an ironizing effect as it generates a distance between an emotion and its experssion. Digital media curiously scrambles these dynamics by generating an instantaneity of delivery that mimics the immediacy of physical presence. In 2019, I wrote in The New Atlantis about how digital media scrambles the pscyhodynamics (Walter Ong's phrase) of orality and literacy in often unhelpful ways: “The Inescapable Town Square.” Here's a bit from that piece: The result is that we combine the weaknesses of each medium while losing their strengths. We are thrust once more into a live, immediate, and active communicative context — the moment regains its heat — but we remain without the non-verbal cues that sustain meaning-making in such contexts. We lose whatever moderating influence the full presence of another human being before us might cast on the passions the moment engendered. This not-altogether-present and not-altogether-absent audience encourages a kind of performative pugilism.To my knowledge, Ivan Illich never met nor corresponded with Hannah Arendt. However, in my efforts to “break bread with the dead,” as Auden once put it, they're often seated together at the table. In a similarly convivial spirit, here is an excerpt from a recent book by Alissa Wilkinson: I learn from Hannah Arendt that a feast is only possible among friends, or people whose hearts are open to becoming friends. Or you could put it another way: any meal can become a feast when shared with friends engaged in the activity of thinking their way through the world and loving it together. A mere meal is a necessity for life, a fact of being human. But it is transformed into something much more important, something vital to the life of the world, when the people who share the table are engaging in the practices of love and of thinking.Finally, here's a paragraph from Jacques Ellul's Propaganda recently highlighted by Jeffrey Bilbro: In individualist theory the individual has eminent value, man himself is the master of his life; in individualist reality each human being is subject to innumerable forces and influences, and is not at all master of his own life. As long as solidly constituted groups exist, those who are integrated into them are subject to them. But at the same time they are protected by them against such external influences as propaganda. An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups. Because such groups are organic and have a well-structured material, spiritual, and emotional life, they are not easily penetrated by propaganda.Cheers! Hope you are all well, Michael Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by music scholar and Weird Studies assistant Meredith Michael to discuss two strange and unsettling short stories: J.G. Ballard's "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon" (1964) and Ursula K. Le Guin's "She Unnames Them" (1985). Their plan was to talk about three stories, but they never got to Phil's pick, which will be the focus of episode 119. The reason is that Le Guin and Ballard's stories share surprising resonances that merited close discussion. From opposite perspectives, both tales put words to a region of reality that resists discursive description, a borderland where that which is named reveals its unnamed facet, and that which must remain unseen reveals itself to the inner eye. Support us on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/weirdstudies) Find us on Discord (https://discord.com/invite/Jw22CHfGwp) Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau (https://cottonbureau.com/products/can-o-content#/13435958/tee-men-standard-tee-vintage-black-tri-blend-s)! Get your Weird Studies merchandise (https://www.redbubble.com/people/Weird-Studies/shop?asc=u) (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop (https://bookshop.org/shop/weirdstudies) Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack (https://pierre-yvesmartel.bandcamp.com/album/weird-studies-music-from-the-podcast-vol-1) REFERENCES J. G. Ballard, “The Giaconda of the Twilight Noon,” from The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (https://bookshop.org/books/the-complete-stories-of-j-g-ballard/9780393339291) Ursula K. Le Guin, "She Unnames Them," from The Real and the Uneal (https://bookshop.org/books/the-unreal-and-the-real-the-selected-short-stories-of-ursula-k-le-guin-reprint/9781481475976) Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), The Birds (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056869/) Jung's concept of the collective unconscious (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious) Walter Pater, The Renaissance (https://bookshop.org/books/the-renaissance-studies-in-art-and-poetry-9781146765725/9780486440255) Ursula K. Le Guin, “She Unnames Them” in The Real and the Unreal Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (https://bookshop.org/books/creative-evolution-9781497915053/9781420940435) M. C .Richards, Centering (https://bookshop.org/books/centering-in-pottery-poetry-and-the-person-revised/9780819562005) Weird Studies, Episode 35 on Centering (https://www.weirdstudies.com/35) Weird Studies, Episode 81 on The Course of the Heart (https://www.weirdstudies.com/81) Weird Studies, Episode 84 on the Empress (https://www.weirdstudies.com/84) Linguistically deprived children (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation#:~:text=There%20are%20several%20known%20cases,%22wild%20boy%20of%20Aveyron%22.) Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (https://bookshop.org/books/orality-and-literacy-30th-anniversary-edition/9780415538381) Samuel Taylor Coleridge's thoughts on on imagination and fancy can be found in Biographia Literaria (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm) Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

Welcome to a special installment of the Convivial Society featuring my conversation with Andrew McLuhan. I can’t recall how or when I first encountered the work of Marshall McLuhan, I think it might’ve been through the writing of one of his most notable students, Neil Postman. I do know, however, that McLuhan, and others like Postman and Walter Ong who built on his work, became a cornerstone of my own thinking about media and technology. So it was a great pleasure to speak with his grandson Andrew, who is now stewarding and expanding the work of his grandfather and his father, Eric McLuhan, through the McLuhan Institute, of which he is the founder and director. I learned a lot about McLuhan through this conversation and I think you’ll find it worth your time. A variety of resources and sites were mentioned throughout the conversation, and I’ve tried to provide links to all of those below. Above all, make sure you check out the McLuhan Institute and consider supporting Andrew’s work through his Patreon page. LinksMcLuhan Institute’s Twitter account and Instagram accountAndrew McLuhan’s Twitter accountThe image of McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter on the beach which Andrew mentions can be seen at the :30 mark of this YouTube video featuring audio of Carpenter describing his friendship with McLuhanEric McLuhan’s speech, “Media Ecology in the 21st Century,” on the McLuhan Institute’s YouTube page (the setting is a conference in Bogota, Columbia, so McLuhan is introduced in Spanish, but he delivers his talk in English)Laws of Media: The New Science by Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhanMarshall McLuhan/Norman Mailer exchangeMarshall McLuhan/W.H. Auden/Buckminster Fuller exchangeJeet Heer’s essay on McLuhan from 2011Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Critical Edition)Understanding Me: Lectures and InterviewsMarshall McLuhan Speaks Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

The Book of Probes contains a assortment of aphorisms and maxims from the work of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, each one set to evocative imagery by American graphic designer David Carson. McLuhan called the utterances collected in this book "probes," that is, pieces of conceptual gadgetry designed not to disclose facts about the world so much as blaze new pathways leading to the invisible background of our time. In this episode, Phil and JF use an online number generator to discuss a random yet uncannily cohesive selection of of McLuhanian probes. REFERENCES Marshall Mcluhan and David Carson, The Book of Probes (https://bookshop.org/books/the-book-of-probes/9781584232520) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (https://bookshop.org/books/to-the-lighthouse-9780156907392/9780156907392) Marshall Mcluhan, The Mechanical Bride (https://bookshop.org/books/the-mechanical-bride-folklore-of-industrial-man/9781584232438) Aristotle, System of causation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_causes) G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (https://bookshop.org/books/orthodoxy-chesterton/9781511903608) Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (https://bookshop.org/books/preface-to-plato/9780674699069) Weird Studies, Episode 71 on Marshall Mcluhan (https://www.weirdstudies.com/71) Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (https://bookshop.org/books/orality-and-literacy-30th-anniversary-edition/9780415538381) Christiaan Wouter Custers, A Philosophy of Madness (https://bookshop.org/books/a-philosophy-of-madness-the-experience-of-psychotic-thinking/9780262044288) Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (https://bookshop.org/books/the-logic-of-sense-revised/9780231059831) Marshall Mcluhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (https://bookshop.org/books/the-gutenberg-galaxy/9781442612693) Harry Partch (https://www.harrypartch.com), American composer Marc Augé, Non-Places (https://bookshop.org/books/non-places-an-introduction-to-supermodernity/9781844673117) Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/sapir-whorf-hypothesis) Denis Villeneuve (dir.), Arrival (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt254316/) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (https://bookshop.org/books/a-thousand-plateaus-capitalism-and-schizophrenia/9780816614028) Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (https://bookshop.org/books/on-bullshit/9780691122946)

"The strongest memory is weaker than the lightest ink." -Chinese proverb, (via Louis Lavelle, La Parole et I'ecriture, Paris, 1947) "...the Hebrew term 'dabar' means ‘word' and ‘event'." -Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982) "...when we speak...we also always express a mood. There are no words uttered without this added spin. The act of saying something is part of the meaning we express, whether we like it or not. We can't separate the *what we say* from the *how we say it*...The same phrase said by ten different people will be ten different experiences - perform ten different events." -Daniel Coffeen and Matthew Deren, A Space For New Things (2020) Sources and Discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/k36jw6/17_ong_and_orality/?

Connor and Jack dive into the poem that opens Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony. Along the way they discuss Plato's Symposium, Walter Ong's writings on orality and literacy, and the historical significance of World War Two on the civil rights movement along with much more. You can learn more about Leslie Marmon Silko, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/leslie-marmon-silko Excerpt from Ceremony By: Leslie Marmon Silko Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman, is sitting in her room and whatever she thinks about appears. She thought of her sisters Nau’ts’ity’i and I’tcts’ity’i and together they created the Universe this world and the four worlds below. Thought-Woman, the spider, named things and as she named them they appeared. She is sitting in her room Thinking of a story now I’m telling you the story she is thinking. Ceremony I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren’t just for entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories. Their evil is mighty but it can’t stand up to our stories. So they try to destroy the stories let the stories be confused or forgotten They would like that They would be happy Because we would be defenseless then. He rubbed his belly. I keep it in here [he said] Here, put your hand on it. See, it is moving. There is life here for the people. And in the belly of this story the rituals and the ceremony are still growing. What She Said: The only cure I know is a good ceremony, That’s what she said. Sunrise. Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking 
Find us on Twitter at: twitter.com/closetalking
 Find us on Instagram: @closetalkingpoetry You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at closetalkingpoetry@gmail.com.

On today's episode of The Pickup Line we continue our reading and discussion of Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy" as we learn about the evolution of rhetoric and the shaping of the modern academic rhetorical approach. Join me! J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement (2011) Gumboots (with the Boyoyo Boys) by Paul Simon || Graceland --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/justin-r-cary/message

Join me today for a brief discussion about how Twitch is helpin me rethink how writing works and a few more pages from Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy!" Huntin4Games on Twitch Epoch99 on Twitch (justinrcary) "Radio Nowhere" by Bruce Springsteen "America Online" by The Midnight --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/justin-r-cary/message

Today we discuss more from Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy" and think a little bit about how we name and understand our writing tools. Thanks for tuning in! "Bigger Than My Body" by John Mayer --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/justin-r-cary/message

Today we continue looking at Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy" and talk about the evolution of the alphabet and aide-memorie (and more) that languge truly is. Seasame Street: Sing the Alphabet Song! "Memories" by The Midnight --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/justin-r-cary/message

Join me as we continue our discussion of Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy", chat about signs and symbols and discuss the eternal power of sound. "Diamonds on the Souls of Her Shoes" by Paul Simon "Los Angeles" by The Midnight --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/justin-r-cary/message

Join me from the Pickup Line as we talk more about Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy". Can sound be still? How do we remember? Have you ever heard the Japanse phrase, "Mono No Aware?" Let's talk about it! "Memories" by The Midnight --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/justin-r-cary/message

In this short clip, I share some of my initial reactions to the Hartley introduction for "Orality and Literacy" --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/justin-r-cary/message

El tercer capítulo de la segunda temporada de “Iberoamérica de Cuento” estuvo dedicado a Chile, país que pasa por una severa crisis social y política, esperando que enviar ánimo y fuerza para abrazar los procesos de cambio. El programa estuvo centrado en la tradición oral y popular, de modo que lo titulamos “La voz de la tradición”.La entrevista en profundidad la realizó Andrés Montero al chileno Pedro Yáñez, un cantautor y payador de origen campesino que nos contó acerca de la “mentira”, particular forma narrativa de la que es cultor. En la recientemente inaugurada sección “Historias de cuentos”, recibimos anécdotas de Mariaje Paniagua, Estrella Ortiz, Aurora Maroto, Jesús Buiza y Pnina Felman. Tuvimos un muy interesante conversatorio acerca de los cuentos populares junto al editor Gustavo Puerta. También, en este capítulo abrimos la nueva sección de Tradición, para la cual Nicole Castillo entrevistó al investigador y folklorista chileno Manuel Peña. En agenda, Juan Pablo Vallejos nos contó acerca del movimiento “Cuentos contra el miedo”, creado en estas semanas en Chile. En España, Juan Arjona repasó la programación del VIII Ciclo de Narración Oral de Mairena del Aljaraf; Ernesto Rodríguez Abad nos dio pistas sobre el XXVII Festival de Los Silos; Susu Benítez nos envió una crónica del ya finalizado Paiporta Monte Contes, y pudimos conocer algo de lo que el Parla Cuenta.Para finalizar, Pep Bruno recomendó el libro “Oralidad y escritura” de Walter Ong, mientras que Javier Soler nos invitó a escuchar la charla TED “Narrarse la vida tal como decíamos vivirla”, de la narradora argentina Ana María Bovo. Como es usual, la música la puso Joan Bruno y los bellos cuentos de inicio y final fueron contados por la narradora portuguesa Ana Sofia Paiva.Nos puedes encontrar en Twitter (https://twitter.com/IBdeCuento), Facebook [facebook.com/IBdeCuento] o escribirnos a nuestro email decuento@emilcar.fm.El equipo del podcast somos: Nicole Castillo (https://twitter.com/NicoleNarradora), Manuel Castaño (https://twitter.com/nelocrespo), Andrés Montero (https://twitter.com/andrescuentero) y Pep Bruno (https://twitter.com/pep_bruno).

What do you think Siri looks like? Is she someone you would tell your secrets to? She’s not a person—but she’s getting more personal than ever—could she change our real relationships? In this episode Chris & Adam chat up the voice part of “voice assistants.” More talking and less typing—what happens when as we shift our interaction with technology to the very personal medium of voice? Links & Quotes Alexa, How Will You Change Us by Judith Shulevitz (The Atlantic) Female Voice Assistants Fuel Damaging Gender Stereotypes, says a UN Study (MIT Technology Review) “Oral verbalization, unlike writing, is thus natural. The word comes to each of us first orally in our mother tongue. It’s association with mother and early nature and nurture is why speech is so closely involved with our personal identity and with cultural identity. (22)… No real word can be present all at once as the letters in a written word are. The real word, the spoken word, is always an event…. Oral utterance thus encourages a sense of continuity with life, a sense of participation, because it itself is participatory.” — Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Cultures

--About the Lecture Two Catholic professors of English literature made remarkable and prophetic contributions to our understanding of how deeply we are influenced by the communication media we use. Assuming no prior knowledge of their work, this lecture will introduce key insights from the devout Canadian layman Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980) and the American Jesuit priest Walter Ong (1912 – 2003) and indicate their continuing relevance for how we read and respond to the world. --About the Speaker John Sullivan is Emeritus Professor (Christian Education) at Liverpool Hope University and Visiting Professor (Theology and Education) at Newman University. Author and editor of eight books, the most recent of which is The Christian Academic in Higher Education: The Consecration of Learning (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), he continues to explore the crossroads where theology meets education and the factors that influence the communication of Christian faith. --About the Seminar Series This talk is part of the Catholic Theology Research Seminar Series, a regular forum for scholarly discussion of pertinent issues in the Catholic traditions of theology and Church. The seminar series ranges across the traditional theological disciplines (scriptural, historical, philosophical, systematic, liturgical, ethical and practical/pastoral), Catholic social thought and practice, and social-scientific approaches to Catholicism.

Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast | PlayerFM Keep up with the North Star Podcast. My guest today is Michael Nielsen a scientist, writer and computer programmer who works as a research fellow at Y Combinator Research. Michael has written on various topics from quantum teleportation, geometric complexity and the future of science. Michael is the most original thinker I have discovered in a long time when it comes to artificial intelligence, augmenting human intelligence, reinventing explanation and using new media to enable new ways of thinking. Michael has pushed my mind towards new and unexpected places. This conversation gets a little wonky at times, but as you know, the best conversations are difficult. They are challenging because they venture into new, unexplored territory and that's exactly what we did here today.  Michael and I explored the history of tools and jump back to the invention of language, the defining feature of human collaboration and communication. We explore the future of data visualization and talk about the history of the spreadsheet as a tool for human thought.  “Before writing and mathematics, you have the invention of language which is the most significant event in some ways. That’s probably the defining feature of the human species as compared to other species.” LINKS Find Michael Online Michael’s Website Michael’s Twitter Michael’s Free Ebook: Neural Networks and Deep Learning Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science Quantum Computation and Quantum Information Mentioned In the Show 2:12 Michael’s Essay Extreme Thinking 21:48 Photoshop 21:49 Microsoft Word 24:02 The David Bowie Exhibit 28:08 Google AI’s Deep Dream Images 29:26 Alpha Go 30:26 Brian Eno’s Infamous Airport Music 33:41 Listen to Speed of Life by Dirty South Books Mentioned 46:06 Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig 54:12 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut People Mentioned 13:27 Rembrandt Van Rijn’s Artwork 15:01 Monet’s Gallery 15:02 Pierre Auguste Renoir’s Impressionist Art 15:05 Picasso’s Paintings 15:18 Paul Cezanne’s Post-Impressionist Art 25:40 David Brooke’s NYT Column 35:19 Franco of Cologne 56:58 Alan Kay’s Ted Talk on the future of education 57:04 Doug Engelbart 58:35 Karl Schroeder 01:02:06 Elon Musk’s Mars-bound company, SpaceX 01:04:25 Alex Tabarrok Show Topics 4:01 Michael’s North Star, which drives the direction of his research 5:32 Michael talks about how he sets his long-term goals and how he’s propelled by ideas he’s excited to see in the world. 7:13 The invention of language. Michael discusses human biology and how it’s easier to learn a language than writing or mathematics.  9:28 Michael talks about humanity’s ability to bootstrap itself. Examples include maps, planes, and photography  17:33 Limitations in media due to consolidation and the small number of communication platforms available to us  18:30 How self-driving cars and smartphones highlight the strange intersection where artificial intelligence meets human interaction and the possibilities that exist as technology improves 21:45 Why does Photoshop improve your editing skills, while Microsoft Word doesn’t improve your writing skills? 27:07 Michael’s opinion on how Artificial Intelligence can help people be more creative “Really good AI systems are going to depend upon building and currently depend on building very good models of different parts of the world, to the extent that we can then build tools to actually look in and see what those models are telling us about the world.”  30:22 The intersection of algorithms and creativity. Are algorithms the musicians of the future? 36:51 The emerging ability to create interactive visual representations of spreadsheets that are used in media, internally in companies, elections and more. “I’m interested in the shift from having media be predominantly static to dynamic, which the New York Times is a perfect example of. They can tell stories on newyorktimes.com that they can’t tell in the newspaper that gets delivered to your doorstep.” 45:42 The strategies Michael uses to successfully trail blaze uncharted territory and how they emulate building a sculpture   53:30 Michael’s learning and information consumption process, inspired by the idea that you are what you pretend to be 56:44 The foundation of Michael’s worldview. The people and ideas that have shaped and inspired Michael.  01:02:26 Michael’s hypothesis for the 21st century project involving blockchain and cryptocurrencies and their ability to make implementing marketplaces easier than ever before “The key point is that some of these cryptocurrencies actually, potentially, make it very easy to implement marketplaces. It’s plausible to me that the 21st century [project] turns out to be about [marketplaces]. It’s about inventing new types of markets, which really means inventing new types of collective action.” Host David Perell and Guest Michael Nielsen TRANSCRIPT Hello and welcome to the North Star. I'm your host, David Perell, the founder of North Star Media, and this is the North Star podcast. This show is a deep dive into the stories, habits, ideas, strategies, and rituals that guide fulfilled people and create enormous success for them, and while the guests are diverse, they share profound similarities. They're guided by purpose, live with intense joy, learn passionately, and see the world with a unique lens. With each episode, we get to jump into their minds, soak up their hard-earned wisdom and apply it to our lives. My guest today is Michael Nielson, a scientist, writer, and computer programmer, who works as a research fellow at Y Combinator Research. Michael's written on various topics from quantum teleportation to geometric complexity to the future of science, and now Michael is the most original thinker I've discovered in a long time. When it comes to artificial intelligence to augmenting human intelligence, reinventing explanation, or using new media to enable new ways of thinking, Michael has pushed my mind towards new and unexpected places. Now, this conversation gets a little wonky at times, but as you know, the best conversations are difficult. They're challenging because they venture into new, unexplored territory and that's exactly what we did here today. Michael and I explored the history of tools. This is an extension of human thought and we jump back to the invention of language, the defining feature of human collaboration and communication. We explore the future of data visualization and talk about the history of this spreadsheet as a tool for human thought. Here's my conversation with Michael Nielson. DAVID: Michael Nielson, welcome to the North Star Podcast. MICHAEL: Thank you, David. DAVID: So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. MICHAEL: So day to day, I'm a researcher at Y Combinator Research. I'm basically a reformed theoretical physicist. My original background is doing quantum computing work. And then I've moved around a bit over the years. I've worked on open science, I've worked on artificial intelligence and most of my current work is around tools for thought. DAVID: So you wrote an essay which I really enjoyed called Extreme Thinking. And in it, you said that one of the single most important principle of learning is having a strong sense of purpose and a strong sense of meaning. So let's be in there. What is that for you? MICHAEL: Okay. You've done your background. Haven't thought about that essay in years. God knows how long ago I wrote it. Having a strong sense of purpose. What did I actually mean? Let me kind of reboot my own thinking. It's, it's kind of the banal point of view. How much you want something really matters. There's this lovely interview with the physicist Richard Feynman, where he's asked about this Indian mathematical prodigy Ramanujan. A movie was made about Ramanujan’s mathematical prowess a couple of years ago. He was kind of this great genius. And a Feynman was asked what made Ramanujan so good. And the interview was expecting him to say something about how bright this guy was or whatever. And Feynman said instead, that it was desire. It was just that love of mathematics was at the heart of it. And he couldn't stop thinking about it and he was thinking about it. He was doing in many ways, I guess the hard things. It's very difficult to do the hard things that actually block you unless you have such a strong desire that you're willing to go through those things. Of course, I think you see that in all people who get really good at something, whether it be sort of a, just a skill like playing the violin or something, which is much more complicated. DAVID: So what is it for you? What is that sort of, I hate to say I want to just throw that out here, that North Star, so to speak, of what drives you in your research? MICHAEL: Research is funny. You go through these sort of down periods in which you don't necessarily have something driving you on. That used to really bother me early in my career. That was sort of a need to always be moving. But now I think that it's actually important to allow yourself to do that. That's actually how you find the problems, which really get, get you excited. If you don't sort of take those pauses, then you're not gonna find something that's really worth working on. I haven't actually answered your question. I think I know I've jumped to that other point because that's one thing that really matters to me and it was something that was hard to learn. DAVID: So one thing that I've been thinking a lot about recently is you sort of see it in companies. You see it in countries like Singapore, companies like Amazon and then something like the Long Now Foundation with like the 10,000-year clock. And I'm wondering to you in terms of learning, there's always sort of a tension between short-term learning and long-term learning. Like short-term learning so often is maybe trying to learn something that feels a little bit richer. So for me, that's reading, whereas maybe for a long-term learning project there are things I'd like to learn like Python. I'd like to learn some other things like that. And I'm wondering, do you set long-term learning goals for yourself or how would you think about that trade off? MICHAEL: I try to sit long-time learning goals to myself, in many ways against my better judgment. It's funny like you're very disconnected from you a year from now or five years from now, or 10 years from now. I can't remember, but Eisenhower or Bonaparte or somebody like that said that the planning is invaluable or planning plans are overrated, but planning is invaluable. And I think that's true. And this is the right sort of attitude to take towards these long-term lending goals. Sure. It's a great idea to decide that you're going out. Actually, I wouldn't say it was a great idea to say that you're going to learn python, I might say. However, there was a great idea to learn python if you had some project that you desperately wanted to do that it required you to learn python, then it's worth doing, otherwise stay away from python. I certainly favor, coupling learning stuff to projects that you're excited to actually see in the world. But also, then you may give stuff up, you don't become a master of python and instead you spend whatever, a hundred hours or so learning about it for this project that takes you a few hundred hours, and if you want to do a successor project which involves it, more of it. Great, you'll become better. And if you don't, well you move onto something else. DAVID: Right. Well now I want to dive into the thing that I'm most excited to talk to you about today and that's tools that extend human thought. And so let's start with the history of that. We'll go back sort of the history of tools and there's had great Walter Ong quote about how there are no new thoughts without new technologies. And maybe we can start there with maybe the invention of writing, the invention of mathematics and then work through that and work to where you see the future of human thought going with new technologies. MICHAEL: Actually, I mean before writing and mathematics, you have the invention of language, which is almost certainly the most significant single event in some ways. The history of the planet suddenly, you know, that's probably the defining feature of the human species as compared to other species. Um, I say invention, but it's not even really invention. There's certainly a lot of evidence to suggest that language is in some important sense built into our biology. Not the details of language. Um, but this second language acquisition device, it seems like every human is relatively very set to receive language. The actual details depend on the culture we grow up on. Obviously, you don't grow up speaking French if you were born in San Francisco and unless you were in a French-speaking household, some very interesting process of evolution going on there where you have something which is fundamentally a technology in some sense languages, humans, a human invention. It's something that's constructed. It's culturally carried. Um, it, there's all these connections between different words. There's almost sort of a graph of connections between the words if you like, or all sorts of interesting associations. So in that sense, it's a technology, something that's been constructed, but it's also something which has been over time built into our biology. Now if you look at later technologies of thought things like say mathematics, those are much, much later. That hasn't been the same sort of period of time. Those don't seem to be built into our biology in quite the same way. There's actually some hints of that we have some intrinsic sense of number and there's some sort of interesting experiments that suggest that we were built to do certain rudimentary kinds of mathematical reasoning but there's no, you know, section of the brain which specializes sort of from birth in solving quadratic equations, much less doing algebraic geometry or whatever, you know, super advanced. So it becomes this cultural thing over the last few thousand years, this kind of amazing process whereby we've started to bootstrap ourselves. If you think about something like say the invention of maps, which really has changed the way people relate to the environment. Initially, they were very rudimentary things. Um, and people just kept having new ideas for making maps more and more powerful as tools for thought. Okay. I can give you an example. You know, a very simple thing, if you've ever been to say the underground in London or most other subway systems around the world. It was actually the underground when this first happened, if you look at the map of the underground, I mean it's a very complicated map, but you can get pretty good at reasoning about how to get from one place to another. And if you look at maps prior to, I think it was 1936, in fact, the maps were much more complicated. And the reason was that mapmakers up to that point had the idea that where the stations were shown on the map had to correspond to the geography of London. Exactly. And then somebody involved in producing the underground map had just a brilliant insight that actually people don't care. They care about the connections between the stations and they want to know about the lines and they want some rough idea of the geography, but they're quite happy for it to be very rough indeed and he was able to dramatically simplify that map by simply doing away with any notion of exact geography. DAVID: Well, it's funny because I noticed the exact same thing in New York and so often you have insights when you see two things coming together. So I was on the subway coming home one day and I was looking at the map and I always thought that Manhattan was way smaller than Brooklyn, but on the subway map, Manhattan is actually the same size as Brooklyn. And in Manhattan where the majority of the subway action is, it takes up a disproportionate share of the New York City subway map. And then I went home to go read Power Broker, which is a book about Robert Moses building the highways and they had to scale map. And what I saw was that Brooklyn was way, way bigger than Manhattan. And from predominantly looking at subway maps. Actually, my topological geographical understanding of New York was flawed and I think exactly to your point. MICHAEL: It's interesting. When you think about what's going on there and what it is, is some person or a small group of people is thinking very hard about how to represent their understanding of the city and then the building, tools, sort of a technological tool of thought that actually then saves millions or in the case of a New York subway or the London underground, hundreds of millions or billions of people, mostly just seconds, sometimes, probably minutes. Like those maps would be substantially more complicated sort of every single day. So it's only a small difference. I mean, and it's just one invention, right? But, you know, our culture is of course accumulated thousands or millions of these inventions. DAVID: One of my other favorite ones from being a kid was I would always go on airplanes and I'd look at the route map and it would always show that the airplanes would fly over the North Pole, but on two-dimensional space that was never clear to me. And I remember being with my dad one night, we bought a globe and we took a rubber band and we stretched why it was actually shorter to fly over the North Pole, say if you're going from New York to India. And that was one of the first times in my life that I actually didn't realize it at the time, but understood exactly what I think you're trying to get at there. How about photography? Because that's another one that I think is really striking, vivid from the horse to slow motion to time lapses. MICHAEL: Photography I think is interesting in this vein in two separate ways. One is actually what it did to painting, which is of course painters have been getting more and more interested in being more and more realistic. And honestly, by the beginning of the 19th century, I think painting was pretty boring. Yeah, if you go back to say the 16th and 17th centuries, you have people who are already just astoundingly good at depicting things in a realistic fashion. To my mind, Rembrandt is probably still the best portrait painter in some sense to ever live. DAVID: And is that because he was the best at painting something that looked real? MICHAEL: I think he did something better than that. He did this very clever thing, you know, you will see a photograph or a picture of somebody and you'll say, oh, that really looks like them. And I think actually most of the time we, our minds almost construct this kind of composite image that we think of as what David looks like or what our mother looks like or whatever. But actually moment to moment, they mostly don't look like that. They mostly, you know, their faces a little bit more drawn or it's, you know, the skin color is a little bit different. And my guess, my theory of Rembrandt, is that he may have actually been very, very good at figuring out almost what that image was and actually capturing that. So, yeah, I mean this is purely hypothetical. I have no real reason to believe it, but I think it's why I responded so strongly to his paintings. DAVID: And then what happened? So after Rembrandt, what changed? MICHAEL: So like I said, you mean you keep going for a sort of another 200 years, people just keep getting more and more realistic in some sense. You have all the great landscape painters and then you have this catastrophe where photography comes along and all of a sudden you're being able to paint in a more and more realistic fashion. It doesn't seem like such a hot thing to be doing anymore. And if for some painters, I think this was a bit of a disaster, a bit of dose. I said of this modern wave, you start to see through people like Monet and Renoir. But then I think Picasso, for me anyway, was really the pivotal figure in realizing that actually what art could become, is the invention of completely new ways of seeing. And he starts to play inspired by Cezanne and others in really interesting ways with the construction of figures and such. Showing things from multiple angles in one painting and different points of view. And he just plays with hundreds of ideas along these lines, through all of his painting and how we see and what we see in how we actually construct reality in their heads from the images that we see. And he did so much of that. It really became something that I think a lot of artists, I'm not an artist or a sophisticated art theory person, but it became something that other people realized was actually an extraordinarily interesting thing to be doing. And much of the most interesting modern art is really a descendant of that understanding that it's a useful thing to be doing. A really interesting thing to be doing rather than becoming more and more realistic is actually finding more and more interesting ways of seeing and being able to represent the world. DAVID: So I think that the quote is attributed to Marshall McLuhan, but I have heard that Winston Churchill said it. And first, we shape our tools and then our tools shape us. And that seems to be sort of the foundation of a lot of the things that you're saying. MICHAEL: Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, on the other side, you also have, to your original question about photography. Photographers have gradually started to realize that they could shape how they saw nature. Ansel Adams and people like this, you know. Just what an eye. And understanding his tools so verbally he's not just capturing what you see. He's constructing stuff in really, really interesting ways. DAVID: And how about moving forward in terms of your work, thinking about where we are now to thinking about the future of technology. For example, one thing that frustrates me a bit as a podcast host is, you know, we just had this conversation about art and it's the limits of the audio medium to not be able to show the paintings of Rembrandt and Cezanne that we just alluded to. So as you think about jumping off of that, as you think about where we are now in terms of media to moving forward, what are some of the challenges that you see and the issues that you're grappling with? MICHAEL: One thing for sure, which I think inhibits a lot of exploration. We're trapped in a relatively small number of platforms. The web is this amazing thing as our phones, iOS and whatnot, but they're also pretty limited and that bothers me a little bit. Basically when you sort of narrow down to just a few platforms which have captured almost all of the attention, that's quite limiting. People also, they tend not to make their own hardware. They don't do these kinds of these kinds of things. If that were to change, I think that would certainly be exciting. Something that I think is very, very interesting over the next few years, artificial intelligence has gotten to the point now where we can do a pretty good job in understanding what's actually going on inside a room. Like we can set up sufficient cameras. If you think about something like self-driving cars, essentially what they're doing is they're building up a complete model of the environment and if that model is not pretty darned good, then you can't do self-driving cars, you need to know where the pedestrians are and where the signs are and all these kinds of things and if there's an obstruction and that technology when brought into, you know, the whole of the rest of the world means that you're pretty good at passing out. You know what's inside the room. Oh, there's a chair over there, there's a dog which is moving in that direction, there's a person, there’s a baby and sort of understanding all those actions and ideally starting to understand all the gestures which people are making as well. So we're in this very strange state right at the moment. Where the way we talk to computers is we have these tiny little rectangles and we talk to them through basically a square inch or so of sort of skin, which is our eyes. And then we, you know, we tap away with our fingers and the whole of the rest of our body and our existence is completely uncoupled from that. We've effectively reduced ourselves to our fingers and our eyes. We a couple to it only through the whatever, 100 square inches, couple hundred square inches of our screens or less if you're on a phone and everything else in the environment is gone. But we're actually at a point where we're nearly able to do an understanding of all of that sufficiently well that actually other modes of interaction will become possible. I don't think we're quite there yet, but we're pretty close. And you start to think about, something like one of my favorite sport is tennis. You think about what a tennis player can do with their body or you think about what a dancer can do with their body. It's just extraordinary. And all of that mode of being human and sort of understanding we can build up antibodies is completely shut out from the computing experience at the moment. And I think over the next sort of five to ten years that will start to reenter and then in the decades hence, it will just seem strange that it was ever shut out. DAVID: So help me understand this. So when you mean by start to reenter, do mean that we'll be able to control computers with other parts of our bodies or that we'll be spending less time maybe typing on keyboards. Help me flesh this out. MICHAEL: I just mean that at the moment. As you speak to David, you are waving your arms around and all sorts of interesting ways and there is no computer system which is aware of it, what your computer system is aware of. You're doing this recording. That's it. And even that, it doesn't understand in any sort of significant way. Once you've gained the ability to understand the environment. Lots of interesting things become possible. The obvious example, which everybody immediately understands is that self driving cars become possible. There's this sort of enormous capacity. But I think it's certainly reasonably likely that much more than that will become possible over the next 10 to 20 years. As your computer system becomes completely aware of your environment or as aware as you're willing to allow it to be. DAVID: You made a really interesting analogy in one of your essays about the difference between Photoshop and Microsoft Word. That was really fascinating to me because I know both programs pretty well. But to know Microsoft word doesn't necessarily mean that I'm a better writer. It actually doesn't mean that at all. But to know Photoshop well probably makes me pretty good at image manipulation. I'm sure there's more there, but if you could walk me through your thought process as you were thinking through that. I think that's really interesting. MICHAEL: So it's really about a difference in the type of tools which are built into the program. So in Photoshop, which I should say, I don't know that well, I know Word pretty well. I've certainly spent a lot more time in it than I have ever spent in Photoshop. But in Photoshop, you do have these very interesting tools which have been built in, which really condense an enormous amount of understanding of ideas like layers or an idea, different brushes, these kinds of ideas. There's just a tremendous amount of understanding which has been built in there. When I watch friends who are really good with these kinds of programs, what they can do with layers is just amazing. They understand all these kind of clever screening techniques. It seems like such a simple idea and yet they're able to do these things that let you do astonishing things just with sort of three or four apparently very simple operations. So in that sense, there are some very deep ideas about image manipulation, which had been built directly into Photoshop. By contrast, there's not really very many deep ideas about writing built into Microsoft Word. If you talk to writers about how they go about their actual craft and you say, well, you know, what heuristics do use to write stories and whatnot. Most of the ideas which they use aren't, you know, they don't correspond directly to any set of tools inside Word. Probably the one exception is ideas, like outlining. There are some tools which have been built into word and that's maybe an example where in fact Word does help the writer a little bit, but I don't think to nearly the same extent as Photoshop seems to. DAVID: I went to an awesome exhibit for David Bowie and one of the things that David but we did when he was writing songs was he had this word manipulator which would just throw him like 20, 30 words and the point wasn't that he would use those words. The point was that by getting words, his mind would then go to different places and so often when you're in my experience and clearly his, when you're trying to create something, it helps to just be thrown raw material at you rather than the perennial, oh my goodness, I'm looking at a white screen with like this clicking thing that is just terrifying, Word doesn't help you in that way. MICHAEL: So an example of something which does operate a little bit in that way, it was a Ph.D. thesis was somebody wrote at MIT about what was called the Remembrance Agent. And what it would do, it was a plugin essentially for a text editor that it would, look at what you are currently writing and it would search through your hard disk for documents that seemed like they might actually be relevant. Just kind of prompt you with what you're writing. Seems like it might be related to this or this or this or this or this. And to be perfectly honest, it didn't actually work all that well. I think mostly because the underlying machine learning algorithms it used weren't very clever. It's defunct now as far as I know. I tried to get it to run on my machine or a year or two ago and I couldn't get it running. It was still an interesting thing to do. It had exactly this same kind of the belly sort of experience. Even if they weren't terribly relevant. You kind of couldn't understand why on earth you are being shown it. It's still jogged your mind in an interesting way. DAVID: Yeah. I get a lot of help out of that. Actually, I’ll put this example. So David Brooks, you know the columnist for the New York Times. When he writes, what he does is he gets all of his notes and he just puts his notes on the floor and he literally crawls all around and tries to piece the notes together and so he's not even writing. He's just organizing ideas and it must really help him as it helps me to just have raw material and just organize it all in the same place. MICHAEL: There's a great British humorist, PG Boathouse, he supposedly wrote on I think it was the three by five-inch cards. He'd write a paragraph on each one, but he had supposedly a very complicated system in his office, well not complicated at all, but it must have looked amazing where he would basically paste the cards to the wall and as the quality of each paragraph rose, he would move the paragraph up the wall and I think the idea was something like once it got to the end, it was a lion or something, every paragraph in the book had to get above that line and at that point it was ready to go. DAVID: So I've been thinking a lot about sort of so often in normal media we take AI sort of on one side and art on another side. But I think that so many of the really interesting things that will emerge out of this as the collaboration between the two. And you've written a bit about art and AI, so how can maybe art or artificial intelligence help people be more creative in this way? MICHAEL: I think we still don't know the answer to the question, unfortunately. The hoped-for answer the answer that might turn out to be true. Real AI systems are going to build up very good models of different parts of the world, maybe better than any human has of those parts of the world. It might be the case, I don't know. It might be the case that something like the Google translate system, maybe in some sense that system already knows some facts about translation that would be pretty difficult to track down in any individual human mind and sort of so much about translation in some significant ways. I'm just speculating here. But if you can start to interrogate that understanding, it becomes a really useful sort of a prosthetic for human beings. If you've seen any of these amazing, well I guess probably the classics, the deep dream images that came out of Google brain a couple of years ago. Basically, you take ordinary images and you're sort of running them backwards through a neural net somehow. You're sort of seeing something about how the neural net sees that image. You get these very beautiful images as a result. There's something strange going on and sort of revealing about your own way of seeing the world. And at the same time, it's based on some structure which this neural net has discovered inside these images which is not ordinarily directly accessible to you. It's showing you that structure. So sort of I think the right way to think about this is that really good AI systems are going to depend upon building and do currently depend on building very good models of different parts of the world and to the extent that we can then build tools to actually look in and see what those models are telling us about the world, we can learn interesting new things which are useful for us. I think the conventional way, certainly the science fiction way to think about AI is that we're going to give it commands and it's going to do stuff. How you shut the whatever it is, the door or so on and so forth, and there was certainly will be a certain amount of that. Or with AlphaGo what is the best move to take now, but actually in some sense, with something like AlphaGo, it's probably more interesting to be able to look into it and see what it's understanding is of the board position than it is to ask what's the best move to be taken. A colleague showed me a go program, a prototype, what it would do. It was a very simple kind of a thing, but it would help train beginners. I think it was Go, but by essentially colorizing different parts of the board according to whether they were good or bad moves to be taking in its estimation. If you're a sophisticated player, it probably wasn't terribly helpful, but if you're just a beginner, there's an interesting kind of a conditioning going on there. At least potentially a which lets you start to see. You get a feeling for immediate feedback from. And all that's happening there is that you're seeing a little bit into one of these machine learning algorithms and that's maybe helping you see the world in a slightly different way. DAVID: As I was preparing for this podcast, you've liked a lot to Brian Eno and his work. So I spent as much time reading Brian Eno, which I'm super happy that I went down those rabbit holes. But one of the things that he said that was really interesting, so he's one of the fathers of ambient music and he said that a lot of art and especially music, there will sort of be algorithms where you sort of create an algorithm that to the listener might even sound better than what a human would produce. And he said two things that were interesting. The first one is that you create an algorithm and then a bunch of different musical forms could flower out of that algorithm. And then also said that often the art that algorithms create is more appealing to the viewer. But it takes some time to get there. And had the creator just followed their intuition. They probably would have never gotten there. MICHAEL: It certainly seems like it might be true. And that's the whole sort of interesting thing with that kind of computer-generated music is to, I think the creators of it often don't know where they're gonna end up. To be honest, I think my favorite music is all still by human composers. I do enjoy performances by people who live code. There's something really spectacular about that. So there are people who, they will set up the computer and hook it up to speakers and they will hook the text editor up to a projector and they'll have essentially usually a modified form of the programming language list a or people use a few different systems I guess. And they will write a program which producers music onstage and they'll just do it in real time and you know, it starts out sounding terrible of course. And that lasts for about 20 seconds and by about sort of 30 or 40 seconds in, already it's approaching the limits of complex, interesting music and I think even if you don't really have a clue what they're doing as they program, there's still something really hypnotic and interesting about watching them actually go through this process of creating music sort of both before your eyes and before your ears. It's a really interesting creative experience and sometimes quite beautiful. I think I suspect that if I just heard one of those pieces separately, I probably wouldn't do so much for me, but actually having a done in real time and sort of seeing the process of creation, it really changes the experience and makes it very, very interesting. And sometimes, I mean, sometimes it's just beautiful. That's the good moment, right? When clearly the person doing it has something beautiful happen. You feel something beautiful happen and everybody else around you feel something beautiful and spontaneous. It's just happened. That's quite a remarkable experience. Something really interesting is happening with the computer. It's not something that was anticipated by the creator. It arose out of an interaction between them and their machine. And it is actually beautiful. DAVID: Absolutely. Sort of on a similar vein, there's a song called Speed of Life by Dirty South. So I really liked electronic music, but what he does is he constructs a symphony, but he goes one layer at a time. It's about eight and a half minute song and he just goes layer after layer, after layer, after layer. And what's really cool about listening to it is you appreciate the depth of a piece of music that you would never be able to appreciate if you didn't have that. And also by being able to listen to it over and over again. Because before we had recording, you would only hear a certain piece of music live and one time. And so there are new forms that are bursting out of now because we listen to songs so often. MICHAEL: It's interesting to think, there's a sort of a history to that as well. If you go back, essentially modern systems for recording music, if you go back much more than a thousand years. And we didn't really have them. There's a multi-thousand-year history of recorded music. But a lot of the early technology was lost and it wasn't until sort of I think the eighth, ninth century that people started to do it again. But we didn't get all the way to button sheet music overnight. There was a whole lot of different inventions. For instance, the early representations didn't show absolute pitch. They didn't show the duration of the note. Those were ideas that had to be invented. So in I think it was 1026, somebody introduced the idea of actually showing a scale where you can have absolute pitch. And then a century or two after that, Franco of Cologne had the idea of representing duration. And so they said like tiny little things, but then you start to think about, well, what does that mean for the ability to compose music? It means now that actually, you can start to compose pieces, which for many, many, many different instruments. So you start to get the ability to have orchestral music. So you go from being able to basically you have to kind of instruct small groups of players that's the best you can hope to do and get them to practice together and whatever. So maybe you can do something like a piece for a relatively small number of people, but it's very hard to do something for an 80 piece orchestra. Right? So all of a sudden that kind of amazing orchestral music I think becomes possible. And then, you know, we're sort of in version 2.0 of that now where of course you can lay a thousand tracks on top of one another if you want. You get ideas like micropolyphony. And these things where you look at the score and it's just incredible, there are 10,000 notes in 10 seconds. DAVID: Well, to your point I was at a tea house in Berkeley on Monday right by UC Berkeley's campus and the people next to me, they were debating the musical notes that they were looking at but not listening to the music and it was evident that they both had such a clear ability to listen to music without even listening to it, that they could write the notes together and have this discussion and it was somebody who doesn't know so much about music. It was really impressive. MICHAEL: That sounds like a very interesting conversation. DAVID: I think it was. So one thing that I'm interested in and that sort of have this dream of, is I have a lot of friends in New York who do data visualization and sort of two things parallel. I have this vision of like remember the Harry Potter book where the newspaper comes alive and it becomes like a rich dynamic medium. So I have that compared with some immersive world that you can walk through and be able to like touch and move around data and I actually think there's some cool opportunities there and whatnot. But in terms of thinking about the future of being able to visualize numbers and the way that things change and whatnot. MICHAEL: I think it's a really complicated question like it actually needs to be broken down. So one thing, for example, I think it's one of the most interesting things you can do with computers. Lots of people never really get much experience playing with models and yet it's possible to do this. Now, basically, you can start to build very simple models. The example that a lot of people do get that they didn't use to get, is spreadsheets. So, you can sort of create a spreadsheet that is a simple model of your company or some organization or a country or of whatever. And the interesting thing about the spreadsheet is really that you can play with it. And it sort of, it's reactive in this interesting way. Anybody who spends as much time with spreadsheets is they start to build up hypotheses, oh, what would happen if I changed this number over here? How would it affect my bottom line? How would it affect the GDP of the country? How would it affect this? How would it affect that? And you know, as you kind of use it, you start to introduce, you start to make your model more complicated. If you're modeling some kind of a factory yet maybe you start to say, well, what would be the effect if a carbon tax was introduced? So you introduce some new column into the spreadsheet or maybe several extra columns into the spreadsheet and you start to ask questions, well, what would the structure of the carbon tax be? What would help you know, all these sorts of what if questions. And you start very incrementally to build up models. So this experience, of course, so many people take for granted. It was not an experience that almost anybody in the world had say 20 or 30 years ago. Well, spreadsheets data about 1980 or so, but this is certainly an experience that was extremely rare prior to 1980 and it's become a relatively common, but it hasn't made its way out into mass media. We don't as part of our everyday lives or the great majority of people don't have this experience of just exploring models. And I think it's one of the most interesting things which particularly the New York Times and to some extent some of the other newsrooms have done is they've started in a small way to build these models into the news reading experience. So, in particular, the data visualization team at the New York Times, people like Amanda Cox and others have done this really interesting thing where you start to get some of these models. You might have seen, for example, in the last few elections. They've built this very interesting model showing basically if you can sort of make choices about how different states will vote. So if such and such votes for Trump, what are Hillary's chances of winning the election. And you may have seen they have this sort of amazing interactive visualization of it where you can just go through and you can sort of look at the key swing states, what happens if Pennsylvania votes for so and so what happens if Florida does? And that's an example where they've built an enormous amount of sort of pulling information into this model and then you can play with it to build up some sort of understanding. And I mean, it's a very simple example. I certainly think that you know, normatively, we're not there yet. We don't actually have a shared understanding. There's very little shared language even around these models. You think about something like a map. A map is an incredibly sophisticated object, which however we will start learning from a very young age. And so we're actually really good at parsing them. We know if somebody shows us a map, how to engage, how to interpret it, how to use it. And if somebody just came from another planet, actually they need to learn all those things. How do you represent a road? How do you represent a shop on a map? How do you represent this or that, why do we know that up is north like that's a convention. All those kinds of things actually need to be learned and we learned them when we were small. With these kinds of things which the Times and other media outlets are trying to do, we lack all of that collective knowledge and so they're having to start from scratch and I think that over a couple of generations actually, they'll start to evolve a lot of conventions and people will start to take it for granted. But in a lot of contexts actually you're not just going to be given a narrative, you know, just going to be told sort of how some columnist thinks the world is. Instead, you'll actually expect to be given some kind of a model which you can play with. You can start to ask questions and sort of run your own hypotheses in much the same way as somebody who runs a business might actually set up a spreadsheet to model their business and ask interesting questions. It's not perfect. The model is certainly that the map is not the territory as they say, but it is nonetheless a different way of engaging rather than just having some expert tell you, oh, the world is this way. DAVID: I'm interested in sort of the shift from having media be predominantly static to dynamic, which the New York Times is a perfect example. They can tell stories on Newyorktimes.com that they can't tell in the newspaper that gets delivered to your doorstep. But what's really cool about spreadsheets that you're talking about is like when I use Excel, being able to go from numbers, so then different graphs and have the exact same data set, but some ways of visualizing that data totally clicked for me and sometimes nothing happens. MICHAEL: Sure. Yeah. And we're still in the early days of that too. There's so much sort of about literacy there. And I think so much about literacy is really about opportunity. People have been complaining essentially forever that the kids of today are not literate enough. But of course, once you actually provide people with the opportunity and a good reason to want to do something, then they can become very literate very quickly. I think basically going back to the rise of social media sort of 10 or 15 years ago, so Facebook around whatever, 2006, 2007 twitter a little bit later, and then all the other platforms which have come along since. They reward being a good writer. So all of a sudden a whole lot of people who normally wouldn't have necessarily been good writers are significantly more likely to become good writers. It depends on the platform. Certainly, Facebook is a relatively visual medium. Twitter probably helps. I think twitter and text messaging probably are actually good. Certainly, you're rewarded for being able to condense an awful lot into a small period. People complain that it's not good English, whatever that is. But I think I'm more interested in whether something is a virtuosic English than I am and whether or not it's grammatically correct. People are astonishingly good at that, but the same thing needs to start to happen with these kinds of models and with data visualizations and things like that. At the moment, you know, you have this priestly caste that makes a few of them and that's an interesting thing to be able to do, but it's not really part of the everyday experience of most people. It's an interesting question whether or not that's gonna change as it going to in the province of some small group of people, or will it actually become something that people just expect to be able to do? Spreadsheets are super interesting in that regard. They actually did. I think if you've talked to somebody in 1960 and said that by 2018, tens of millions of people around the world would be building sophisticated mathematical models as just part of their everyday life. It would've seemed absolutely ludicrous. But actually, that kind of model of literacy has become relatively common. I don't know whether we'll get to 8 billion people though. I think we probably will. DAVID: So when I was in high school I went to, what I like to say is the weirdest school in the weirdest city in America. I went to the weirdest high school in San Francisco and rather than teaching us math, they had us get in groups of three and four and they had us discover everything on our own. So we would have these things called problem sets and we would do about one a week and the teacher would come around and sort of help us every now and then. But the goal was really to get three or four people to think through every single problem. And they called it discovery-based learning, which you've also talked about too. So my question to you is we're really used to learning when the map is clear and it's clear what to do and you can sort of follow a set path, but you actually do the opposite. The map is unclear and you're actually trailblazing and charting new territory. What strategies do you have to sort of sense where to move? MICHAEL: There's sort of a precursor question which is how do you maintain your morale and the Robert Pirsig book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He proposes a university subject, gumptionology 101. Gumption is almost the most important quality that we have. The ability to keep going when things don't seem very good. And mostly that's about having ways of being playful and ways of essentially not running out of ideas. Some of that is about a very interesting tension between having, being ambitious in what you'd like to achieve, but also being very willing to sort of celebrate the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest successes. Suddenly a lot of creative people I know I think really struggle with that. They might be very good at celebrating tiny successes but not have that significant ambitions, but they might be extremely ambitious, but because they're so ambitious, if an idea doesn't look Nobel prize worthy, they're not particularly interested in it. You know, they struggle with just kind of the goofing around and they often feel pretty bad because of course most days you're not at your best, you don't actually have the greatest idea. So there's some interesting tension to manage there. There's really two different types of work. One is where you have a pretty good goal, you know what success looks like, right? But you may also be doing something that's more like problem discovery where you don't even know where you're going. Typically if you're going to compose a piece of music. Well, I'm not a composer, but certainly, my understanding from, from friends who are, is that they don't necessarily start out with a very clear idea of where they're going. Some composers do, but a lot, it's a process of discovery. Actually, a publisher once told me somebody who has published a lot of well-known books that she described one of her authors as a writing for discovery. Like he didn't know what his book was going to be about, he had a bunch of kind of vague ideas and the whole point of writing the book was to actually figure out what it was that he wanted to say, what problem was he really interested in. So we'd start with some very, very good ideas and they kind of get gradually refined. And it was very interesting. I really liked his books and it was interesting to see that. They looked like they'd been very carefully planned and he really knew what he was doing and she told me that no, he'd sort of come in and chat with her and be like, well, I'm sort of interested over here. And he'd have phrases and sort of ideas. But he didn't actually have a clear plan and then he'd get through this process of several years of gradually figuring out what it was that he wanted to say. And often the most significant themes wouldn't actually emerge until relatively late in that whole process. I asked another actually quite a well-known writer, I just bumped into when he was, he was reporting a story for a major magazine and I think he'd been working, he'd been reporting for two weeks, I think at that point. So just out interviewing people and whatever. And I said, how's it going? And he said, Oh yeah, pretty good. I said, what's your story about? He said, I don't know yet, which I thought was very interesting. He had a subject, he was following a person around. But he didn't actually know what his story was. DAVID: So the analogy that I have in my head as you're talking about this, it's like sculpture, right? Where you start maybe with a big thing of granite or whatnot, and slowly but surely you're carving the stone or whatnot and you're trying to come up with a form. But so often maybe it's the little details at the end that are so far removed from that piece of stone at the very beginning that make a sculpture exceptional. MICHAEL: Indeed. And you wonder what's going on. I haven't done sculpture. I've done a lot of writing and writing often feels so sometimes I know what I want to say. Those are the easy pieces to write, but more often it's writing for discovery and there you need to be very happy celebrating tiny improvements. I mean just fixing a word needs to be an event you actually enjoy, if not, the process will be an absolute nightmare. But then there's this sort of instinct where you realize, oh, that's a phrase that A: I should really refine and B: it might actually be the key to making this whole thing work and that seems to be a very instinctive kind of a process. Something that you, if you write enough, you start to get some sense of what actually works for you in those ways. The recognition is really hard. It's very tempting to just discount yourself. Like to not notice when you have a good phrase or something like that and sort of contrary wise sometimes to hang onto your darlings too long. You have the idea that you think it's about and it's actually wrong. DAVID: Why do you write and why do you choose the medium of writing to think through things sometimes? I know that you choose other ones as well. MICHAEL: Writing has this beautiful quality that you can improve your thoughts. That's really helpful. A friend of mine who makes very popular YouTube videos about mathematics has said to me that he doesn't really feel like people are learning much mathematics from them. Instead, it's almost a form of advertising like they get some sense of what it is. They know that it's very beautiful. They get excited. All those things are very important and matter a lot to him, but he believes that only a tiny, tiny number of people are actually really understanding much detail at all. There's actually a small group who have apparently do kind of. They have a way of processing video that lets them understand. DAVID: Also, I think you probably have to, with something like math, I've been trying to learn economics online and with something like math or economics that's a bit complex and difficult, you have to go back and re-watch and re-watch, but I think that there's a human tendency to want to watch more and more and more and it's hard to learn that way. You actually have to watch things again. MICHAEL: Absolutely. Totally. And you know, I have a friend who when he listens to podcasts, if he doesn't understand something, he, he rewinds it 30 seconds. But most people just don't have that discipline. Of course, you want to keep going. So I think the written word for most people is a little bit easier if they want to do that kind of detailed understanding. It's more random access to start with. It's easier to kind of skip around and to concentrate and say, well, I didn't really get that sentence. I'm going to think about it a little bit more, or yeah, I can see what's going to happen in those two or three paragraphs. I'll just very quickly skip through them. It's more built for that kind of detailed understanding, so you're getting really two very different experiences. In the case of the video, very often really what you're getting is principally an emotional experience with some bits and pieces of understanding tacked on with the written word. Often a lot of that emotion is stripped out, which makes can make it much harder to motivate yourself. You need that sort of emotional connection to the material, but it is actually, I think a great deal easier to understand sort of the details of it. There's a real kind of choice to be to be made. There's also the fact that people just seem to respond better to videos. If you want a large audience, you're probably better off making YouTube videos than you are publishing essays. DAVID: My last question to you, as somebody who admires your pace and speed of learning and what's been really fun about preparing for this podcast and come across your work is I really do feel like I've accessed a new perspective on the world which is really cool and I get excited probably most excited when I come across thinkers who don't think like anyone who I've come across before, so I'm asking to you first of all, how do you think about your learning process and what you consume and second of all, who have been the people and the ideas that have really formed the foundation of your thought? MICHAEL: A Kurt Vonnegut quote from his book, I think it's Cat's Cradle. He says, we become what we pretend to be, so you must be careful what we pretend to be and I think there's something closely analogously true, which is that we become what we pay attention to, so we should be careful what we pay attention to and that means being fairly careful how you curate your information diet. There's a lot of things. There's a lot of mistakes I've made. Paying attention to angry people is not very good. I think ideas like the filter bubble, for example, are actually bad ideas. And for the most part, it sounds virtuous to say, oh, I'm going to pay attention to people who disagree with me politically and whatever. Well, okay, there's a certain amount of truth to that. It's a good idea probably to pay attention to the very best arguments from the very best exponents of the other different political views. So sure, seek those people out, but you don't need to seek out the random person who has a different political view from you. And that's how most people actually interpret that kind of injunction. They, they're not looking for the very best alternate points of view. So that's something you need to be careful about. There's a whole lot of things like that I enjoy. So for example, I think one person, it's interesting on twitter to look, he's, he's no longer active but he's still following people is Marc Andreessen and I think he follows, it's like 18,000 people or something and it's really interesting just to look through the list of followers because it's all over the map and much of it I wouldn't find interesting at all, but you'll find the strangest corners people in sort of remote villages in India and people doing really interesting things in South Africa. Okay. So he's a venture capitalist but they're not connected to venture capital at all. So many of them, they're just doing interesting things all over the world and I wouldn't advocate doing the same thing. You kind of need to cultivate your own tastes and your own interests. But there's something very interesting about that sort of capitalist city of interests and curiosity about the world, which I think is probably very good for almost anybody to cultivate. I haven't really answered your question. DAVID: I do want to ask who were the people or the ideas or the areas of the world that have really shaped and inspired your thinking because I'm asking selfishly because I want to go down those rabbit holes. MICHAEL: Alright. A couple of people, Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart, who are two of the people who really developed the idea of what a computer might be. In the 1950's and 60's, people mostly thought computers were machines for solving mathematical problems, predicting the weather next week, computing artillery tables, doing these kinds of things. And they understood that actually there could be devices which humans would use for themselves to solve their own problems. That would be sort of almost personal prosthetics for the mind. They'd be new media. We could use to think with and a lot of their best ideas I think out there, there's still this kind of vision for the future. And if you look particularly at some of Alan Kay's talks, there's still a lot of interesting ideas there. DAVID: That the perspective is worth 80 IQ points. That's still true. MICHAEL: For example, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, right? He's actually, he's got a real gift for coming up with piddly little things, but there's also quite deep ideas. They're not two-year projects or five-year projects, they're thousand year projects or an entire civilization. And we're just getting started on them. I think that's true. Actually. It's in general, maybe that's an interesting variation question, which is, you know, what are the thousand year projects? A friend of mine, Cal Schroeder, who's a science fiction writer, has this term, The Project, which he uses to organize some of his thinking about science fictional civilizations. So The Project is whatever a civilization is currently doing, which possibly no member of the civilization is even aware of. So you might ask the question, what was the project for our planet in the 20th century? I think one plausible answer might be, for example, it was actually eliminating infectious diseases. You think about things like polio and smallpox and so many of these diseases were huge things at the start of the 20th century and they become much, much smaller by the end of the 20th century. Obviously AIDS is this terrible disease, but in fact, by historical comparison, even something like the Spanish flu, it's actually relatively small. I think it's several hundred million people it may have killed. Maybe that was actually the project for human civilization in the 20th century. I think it's interesting to think about those kinds of questions and sort of the, you know, where are the people who are sort of most connected to those? So I certainly think Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay. DAVID: Talk about Doug Engelbart, I know nothing about him. MICHAEL: So Engelbart is the person who I think more than anybody invented modern computing. He did this famous demo in 1968, 1969. It's often called the mother of all demos, in front of an audience of a thousand people I believe. Quite a while since I've watched it and it demonstrates a windowing system and what looks like a modern word processor, but it's not just a word processor. They're actually hooked up remotely to a person in another location and they're actually collaborating in real time. And it's the first public showing I believe of the mouse and of all these different sorts of ideas. And you look at other images of computers at the time and they're these giant machines with tapes and whatever. And here's this vision that looks a lot more like sort of Microsoft Windows and a than anything else. And it's got all these things like real-time collaboration between people in different locations that we really didn't have at scale until relatively recently. And he lays out a huge fraction of these ideas in 1962 in a paper he wrote then. But that paper is another one of these huge things. He's asking questions that you don't answer over two years or five years. You answer over a thousand years. I think it's Augmenting Human Intellect is the title of that paper. So he's certainly somebody else that I think is a very interesting thinker. There's something really interesting about the ability to ask an enormous question, but then actually to have other questions at every scale. So you know what to do in the next 10 minutes that will move you a little bit towar

When Gmail says, “It seems like you forgot to attach a file,” that precise phrasing is the result of careful deliberation by a design team. It's one example Erika Hall gives in her book Conversational Design. She explains her work as “designing with words” rather than literary writing, and asserts that collaboration by designers, writers, and engineers is required for meaningful user experiences. Listener questions address previous episodes about Duplex and, our favorite scapegoat, blockchain. Show Notes Welcome (0:12) Purchase Conversational Design by Erika Hall on A Book Apart (0:30) Purchase Conversational Design by Erika Hall on Amazon (0:30) Netflix's company culture (0:37)  Patty McCord's slide deck: “You should try to build a great company to be from.” Discussion with Erika Hall (2:41) Erika Hall, cofounder of Mule Design Studio The importance of non-verbal signs in communication (12:54) Lightweight prototyping of communication interaction as part of design process and concept of minimal viable conversation (17:18) How does reading poetry help someone become a conversational designer? (19:08) William Carlos Williams: The Red Wheelbarrow (19:21) Should it ever be ok for a computer to pretend to be a human? (21:49) All the ways to interact with Amazon: “Amazon's Quest for Global Domination” (video, Wall Street Journal) (24:33) Rev. Walter Ong, Jesuit teacher and scholar of language (New York Times) (26:11) Listener questions (28:47) You came out strongly against Duplex. Can you explain why for someone who would like to be sympathetic to your viewpoint? I feel like I missed chapter 1-5 on what is so wrong with what they did. (29:03) Episode 29 of the All Turtles Podcast featured a discussion on Duplex. (29:03) I don't understand the reference to blockchain in episode 28. Can you explain? (31:00) Episode 28 of the All Turtles Podcast featured the taxonomy discussion (31:03) We want to hear from you Please send us your comments, suggested topics, and questions for future episodes: Email: hello@all-turtles.com Twitter: @allturtlesco with hashtag #askAT For more from All Turtles, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to our newsletter on our website.

This is a preview of a premium bonus episode. To get access to this episode subscribe for $5/month at patreon.com/champagnesharks. This will not only give you access to this current premium episode you’re previewing, but also all the back premium episodes you may have missed as well and all future bonus premium episodes. Also, remember to review and rate the podcast in Itunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/champ…d1242690393?mt=2.ou do not need an Apple product to rate and review the show, just click here to create the AppleID needed to rate and review: https://appleid.apple.com/account#!&page=create. Also don’t forget to check out the Champagne Sharks reddit at http://reddit.com/r/champagnesharks and the Champagne Sharks Twitter account at http://twitter.com/champagnesharks. Discussed in this episode: Clip from Mandingo where the slaveowner finds out his wife has a sensual past and sensual desires: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WC0F0_57LQ Clip from Mandingo where the slaveowner starts falling for his black bed wench: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRq_ue2I7u0 This thread describes how the Nazis used this idea of intellectual refined visuals as a celebration of whiteness and white beauty to advance white supremacist ideals: https://twitter.com/NowIsNotGood/status/899339804441272323 Tyler the Creator's interview with Larry King https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kC3y_9PNaoM 'No Rice, No Curry And No Blacks' - The sexual racism running rampant within the LGBT community https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/sexuality/agenda/article/2016/08/25/no-rice-no-curry-and-no-blacks-sexual-racism-running-rampant-within-lgbt Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong https://amzn.to/2KTOraa Voodoo Doughnuts coverage: "Voodoo Doughnuts Have People Under A Sweet Spell" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob1yxoGK_cQ Swedish racist cake controversy https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/9210826/Swedish-bomb-threat-after-racist-cake-controversy.html The battle over the traditional Swedish pastry "Negro Balls". Removed from the Swedish dictionary: https://www.thelocal.se/20150323/swedish-dictionary-to-advise-against-racist-words; The Battle of the Swedish Chocolate Ball https://watchingtheswedes.com/2014/05/12/the-battle-of-the-swedish-chocolate-ball/

  We're back with a full-length episode! For episode 27, we crack open our shiny new copy of Emily Wilson's translation of Odyssey! After a chat about the challenges of accessing myths through translation, we  take a look at a small episode that makes up a big part of the Trojan War myth. We hope we do this beautiful translation justice! We also have listener mail from Andrew, who asks us for some reading recommendations. Check out our recommended reading and listening!   Source Passages Odyssey 8. 482- 520 (Trans. Wilson). Translation Sources Homer. Odyssey. Trans. Emily Wilson. 2018. Homer. Odyssey. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. 1967.   Recommended Listening Aven McMaster & Mark Sundaram. The Endless Knot. Episode 50: Translating the Odyssey, with Emily Wilson. Jan. 3, 2018.  Curtis Dozier. Mirror of Antiquity. Episode 1: Translating the Past, with Rachel Kitzinger. Jan. 2, 2018.  Jeff Wright. Trojan War: The Podcast.  Recommended Reading  Bruce Meyer. Heroes: From Heracles to Superman. 2007. Bruno Snell. The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature. 2011. Christopher Logue. All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten. 2004.  Joseph Campbell. Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. 2013. Joseph Campbell. Hero of a Thousand Faces. 2008. Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2008. Walter Ong. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 1982.  Patrons These people like our show so much, they decided to support us on Patreon! Thank you so much! Aven McMaster & Mark Sundaram (Alliterative); Joelle Barfoot; Erika Dilworth; Stargate Pioneer (Better Podcasting); Greg Beu. We want to hear from you! Join us on Twitter @InnesAlison and @darrinsunstrum or #MythTake. Give us a like, let us know what you think, and follow along on Facebook at MythTake. Subscribe on iTunes or Google Play so you don’t miss an episode! Find our RSS on Podbean. Like what you hear? Please support us on Patreon. We're a part of the #HumanitiesPodcasts podcasting community. Check out the hashtag and follow @HumCommCasters to find many more engaging and knowledgeable podcasts. This week’s theme music: “Super Hero” by King Louie’s Missing Monuments from the album “Live at WFMU” (2011). Used under Creative Commons license. Music used under Creative Commons license and available from Free Music Archive.  

With our seventh episode, we are pleased to rebroadcast an audio essay composed and performed by SLU's own Abigail Lambke (Assistant Professor of English at Avila University) for the journal Harlot (http://harlotofthearts.org/). Of this audio essay, she writes, "Many of us are familiar with the name Walter Ong, and some of us have read him, either pieces of his famous Orality and Literacy, or the often anthologized “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction.” Ong’s scholarship was concerned with sound, with the transition from oral culture to literate culture, and the way technology impacts communication. In that way, Ong was a forerunner of Sonic Rhetorics because his scholarship suggests how sounded words, or oral/aural words, affect the relationship of language to knowledge. Many of us have read him, but how many have listened to him? I mean listened not metaphorically, but literally listened to his voice. In this audio essay, I contend that in listening to Walter Ong, we can expand our understanding of his scholarship and approach to sonic rhetoric"

  Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people, and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I'm Mary Hedengren, and this last week, I had the fantastic experience of meeting one of you. That's right, an actual listener in the actual flesh. Somebody who wasn't just one of my colleagues, or one of my friends, or my mom, who listens to this podcast. It was a really cool experience. And she was very nice and very enthusiastic, and I'm really grateful that I got the chance to meet her. But it made me think a little bit about who I think you guys are when I make these podcasts, how much I create who you are in my mind, and how much you respond to the way that I've created you. This made me think of a really important article that came out back before I was born in May of 1984. The article is called "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy." And it was written by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, who are kind of the dynamic duo of composition theory. They co-authored a lot of articles together, and kind of became synonymous with each other.  In this groundbreaking article, they summarize a debate that's taking place at the time -- a debate with sort of two sides. On one side, audience is concrete and should be appeased. You think about the audience that is out there, and you respond to their own needs. On the other side is audience invoked: an audience that is invented -- that comes from the imagination of the writer. In describing the audience addressed, Ede and Lunsford sort of pull to this new movement -- this writing in the disciplines idea where in some ways the degree to which the audience is real or imagined and the ways it differs from the speaker's audience are generally either ignored or subordinated to a sense of the audience's powerfulness. Audience, in this situation, is everything. And writers should respond to the needs of the audience.  This is the stuff that you will often get in a first year composition class, where you're asked to go read the newspaper that you want to publish in, you might go to a website like Wikipedia or Quantcast to find out information about who subscribes to that newspaper, and sort of do everything you can to respond to that audience that is sort of out there. In some ways, this is a great way. Especially to teach young college students who might have a hard time thinking outside of their own lives. But in another sense, this model puts more emphasis on the role of the audience than it does on the writer itself. As they say, one way to pinpoint the source of the imbalance in this formulation is to note that they emphasize the role of readers, but are wrong in failing to recognize the equally essential role that writers play throughout the composing process, not only as creators, but as readers of their own writing as well. Instead, this perspective says in a typical writing in the disciplines way, "we defend only the right of audiences to set their own standards and we repudiate the ambitions of English departments to monopolize that standard-setting. If bureaucrats and scientists are happy with the way they write, then no one should interfere." There's sort of a "you do you" theme going on here that, in some ways aeems a little unethical. Listen to this example that they give. "The toothpaste ad that promises improved personality, for instance, knows too well how to address the audience." But such ads, they say, “ignore ethical questions completely." After all, as they cite Burke, "we're in the art of discovering good reasons. There's an imbalance that has ethical consequences. For rhetoric has traditionally been concerned not only with the effectiveness of rhetoric, but been concerned also with truthfulness." Another concern that they have is that envisioning audience as addressed, something out there, suggests an overly simplified view of language. Discourse isn't just something that we put on our words and our ideas. You need to have some sort of unifying, balancing understanding of language use, and not overemphasize just one aspect of discourse. Now on the other hand, they're not entirely off the hook on those who are on the audience invoked side. These audience invoked sorts believe that the audience is a created fiction. The best example that they have is Walter Ong's study, which is -- appropriately enough -- titled "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction". In this, Ong says -- and they quote him – "What do we mean by saying the audience is a fiction? Two things at least. First, that the writer must always construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role... Second, we mean that the audience must correspondingly fictionalize itself." In this sense, the writer is creative. They're able to project and alter audiences. But Ede and Lunford do take issue with Ong's idea that you can do whatever you can to create a reader, but there are still "constraints on the writer and the potential sources of and possibilities for the reader's role. And they're more complex and diverse than this perspective might imagine." Ede and Lunsford point out that the reader is willing to accept another role, but also perhaps may actually yearn for it. They may be willing to accept some roles and not others. In this sense, there are constraints what the writer can do. The writer can't make her audience into something that they don't want to be. In accepting a certain role, her readers do not have to play the game of being a member of an audience that does not really exist, but they do have to recognize in themselves the strengths and the characteristics that the writer describes, and accept the writer's implicit [inaudible] of these strengths and characteristics to what the writer hopes that the audience's response will be to any proposal. This is because a reader's role "has already been established and formalized in a series of other conventions. If a writer is successful, they will effectively internalize some of these conventions and present the material in a way that will be effective for the audience." So the answer that Ede and Lunsford give is that both are appropriate. At times, the reader may establish the role for a reader that indeed does not coincide with the role in the rest of their life. At other times, one of the writer's primary tasks may be analyzing the real life audience, and adapting discourse to it. As they say,  "One of the factors that makes writing so difficult is that we have no recipes. Each rhetorical situation is unique, and thus requires the writer, catalyzed and guided by a strong sense of purpose, to reanalyze and reinvent solutions."  Think about it. As they say,  "All of the audience roles we specify -- friend, self, colleague, critic, mass audience and future audience -- may be invoked or addressed. It is the writer who, as writer and reader of her own text, one guided with a sense of purpose and with the particularities of a specific rhetorical situation, establishes the range of potential roles an audience may play. There needs to be, in some sense, a synthesis of the perspectives we have termed 'audience addressed' with its focus on the reader, and 'audience invoked' with its focus on the writer.  One last quote, I promise. Ede and Lunsford finally say, "A fully elaborated view of audience then must balance the creativity of the writer with the different, but equally important creativity of the reader, and must account for a wide and shifting range of roles for both addressed and invoked audiences. Finally, it must relate the matrix created by the intricate relationship of writer and audience to all of the elements in the rhetorical situation." I think this is a really useful model to think about the ways that we deal with audience. In some ways, any sort of writer needs to know what her audience is like, what are some of their characteristics and constraints? What are they willing to see themselves as, and what seems beyond the pale? This sort of audience analysis is really useful in a lot of situations. Additionally though, the writer can invoke the audience -- talk to them in a certain way that encourages them to respond. This is something I thought about in meeting this listener of the podcast earlier this week. In some ways, I thought about who she was. An advanced and graduate student, somebody who is going to go to graduate school soon, who is interested in rhetorical history in some way. And I thought about what her needs might be in terms of a podcast for something like this. To keep it interesting, keep it relevant, keep it focused on rhetoric. But in another way, I invoke her and the rest of you when I make a podcast. I talk to you as if you are interested in rhetoric. As if this is something important to you. And you somehow willingly fill the role. Well, thanks for doing that. Thanks for being the audience. If you want to show me how real you are, or invoke me right back at you, please feel free to send me an email. My email address is mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com. And until then, thanks for being real and addressed, and thanks for being imagined and invoked. 

How and how far did orality play a part in the circulation of literature in early modern Italy? A lecture by Professor Brian Richardson. The literary culture of the period can be seen, in the terms of Walter Ong, as ‘residually oral’, since many kinds of compositions were diffused through the voice, in speech or song, as well as, or rather than, in writing. This paper will consider which kinds of texts might be performed, the occasions on which they were performed in public or in private, the professionals or amateurs who performed them, how and in which varieties of languages they were performed, using evidence from contemporary accounts and from the texts themselves. It will also suggest possible answers to the more difficult question of what the perceived benefits of performance might have been for the performer and the audience.

How and how far did orality play a part in the circulation of literature in early modern Italy? A lecture by Professor Brian Richardson. The literary culture of the period can be seen, in the terms of Walter Ong, as ‘residually oral’, since many kinds of compositions were diffused through the voice, in speech or song, as well as, or rather than, in writing. This paper will consider which kinds of texts might be performed, the occasions on which they were performed in public or in private, the professionals or amateurs who performed them, how and in which varieties of languages they were performed, using evidence from contemporary accounts and from the texts themselves. It will also suggest possible answers to the more difficult question of what the perceived benefits of performance might have been for the performer and the audience.

Dr. Bettina Bildhauer, Reader an der St Andrews University in Grossbritannien, unterhält sich mit Dr. Udo Thiedeke über die Nähe des Mittelalters zu unserem Denken, die Grenze zwischen Subjekten und Objekten und warum wir beim Blick zurück entdecken können, wie die Dinge das Handeln lernten. Shownotes: #00:03:30# Kritik der modernen Vorstellungen von der angeblichen Weltsicht einer "flachen Erde" im Mittelalter. Vgl. z.B. Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1991: Inventing the Flat Earth. Columbus and Modern Historians. New York: Praeger. Jürgen Wolf, 2004: Die Moderne erfindet sich ihr Mittelalter – oder wie aus der ‚mittelalterlichen Erdkugel‘ eine ‚neuzeitliche Erdscheibe‘ wurde (= Colloquia academica Nr. 5), Stuttgart: Steiner. #00:04:10# Zu den Vorstellungen des Soziologen Max Weber zum okzidentalen Sonderweg des Rationalismus. Vgl. z.B. Wolfgang Schluchter, 1980: Rationalismus der Weltbeherrschung. Studien zu Max Weber. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Besonders S. 23-38. #00:07:10# Keine universelle Gültigkeit des christlichen Weltbilds im Mittelalter. Vgl. z. B. Robert Bartlett, 2008: The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. #00:08:57# Zur Trennung von Subjekt und Objekt in der Moderne kann man vielleicht festhalten, dass die mittelalterliche Vorstellung, das Subjektive sei das Sein der Dinge und die Objekte realisierten sich in den Gedanken davon (etwa bei Wilhelm von Ockham) in der Moderne dahingehend überschritten wird, dass das Subjekt als nur noch sich selbst unterworfenes Objekte nur wahrnimmt (Kant) oder sich den Objekten in seiner Umwelt nun gegenüber sieht und diese manipuliert (etwa bei Marx und Engels). #00:11:50# Mittelalterliche Vorstellungen von Menschen als Teil von Netzwerken. Vgl. z. B. Jan-Dirk Müller, 1998: Spielregeln für den Untergang. Die Welt des Nibelungenliedes. Tübingen: Niemeyer oder Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Hrsg.), Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. Ethics and Objects. Washington, DC: Oliphaunt, Online. #00:13:10# Zur Bedeutung des Blutes im Mittelalter siehe Bettina Bildhauer 2006: Medieval Blood. Cardiff: University of Wales Press; oder Caroline Walker Bynum, 2006: Wonderful Blood. Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. #00:15:48# Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte. #00:16:25# Die Gog und Magog. #00:17:00# Zum Frontispiz und Ikonografie des Leviathan vgl. Horst Bredekamp, 2003: Thomas Hobbes, Der Leviathan. Das Urbild des modernen Staates und seine Gegenbilder. 1651 - 2001. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. #00:18:55# Zum Staat als Körper im Policraticus des John of Salisbury vgl. z.B. Jacques Le Goff, 1989. Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages. In: Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff und Nadia Tazi (Hrsg.) Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 3. New York: Zone Books, S. 12-26. #00:19:12# Herbert Spencer, Gesellschaft als Organismus. Vgl. Spencer, Herbert, 1967: The Evolution of Society. Selections from Herbert Spencer's Principles of Society. Hrsg. Robert L. Carneio. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. #00:21:10# Die Siegfried-Sage als Teil der Nibelungensage und das Nibelungenlied. #00:27:18# Zur französischen Annales-Schule in der Geschichtswissenschaft. #00:31:00# Zahlreiche Ratgeber zur Selbstverbesserung des perfekten höfischen Menschen (Fürstenspiegel), z. B. Thomasin von Zirklaere, Der wälsche Gast #00:34:00# Positives Verständnis der Selbstaufgabe im Mittelalter, besonders in der Mystik, vgl. Kurt Ruh, Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik. 4 Bände. München: Beck, 1990-1999. #00:36:40# Zum Mittelalter als mythischer Vorgeschichte vgl. Arthur Lindley, 1998: The ahistoricism of medieval film. Online. #00:40:00# Zum Ritter als Assemblage vgl. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 2003. Medieval Identity Machines. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Besonders Kapitel 2 Chevalerie. #00:41:05# Zu den Effigies vgl. Horst Bredekamp, 2001: Vom Wachskörper zur Goldkrone. Die Versprechungen der Effigies. In: Deutsches Historisches Museum et al. (Hrsg.): Preußen 1701. Eine europäische Geschichte. Aust.-Kat. Essay-Bd. Berlin. S. 353-357. #00:43:39# Zu Bruno Latours Kritik der Moderne vgl. Bruno Latour, 1995: Wir sind nie modern gewesen. Versuch einer symmetrischen Anthropologie. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. #00:44:13# Die Turnschuhe, in denen Joschka Fischer den Amtseid als hessischer Umweltminister ablegte, heute im "Haus der Geschichte" in Bonn ausgestellt. #00:44:52# Zur Struktur des Rhizoms von Deleuze und Guattari vgl. Gilles Deleuze und Félix Guattari, 1977: Rhizom. Berlin: Merve. #00:46:50# Subjekt-Objekt-Unterscheidung im Mittelalter weniger ausgeprägt. Vgl. Kellie Robertson, 2008. Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicism and the Premodern Object. Literature Compass 5. Online. #00:48:00# Bücher über die Kraft der Edelsteine z. B. von Albertus Magnus, hier Abdruck eines englischen Druckversion von 1604. Online. #00:50:40# Podcast Episode mit Markus Hilgert "5412 Jahre Vertrauen in Materialität - Prof. Dr. Markus Hilgert im Gespräch" #00:51:37# Zu den anfänglichen Problemen mit der Glaubwürdigkeit von handschriftlichen Texten beim Übergang von der Oralität zur Literalität verweist Walter Ong auf Clanchy, 1979: 24f. Vgl. Michael T. Clanchy, 1979: From Memory to Written Record, England 1066-1307. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. #00:55:40# Zur Behauptung einer Umbruchphase in der Literatur im 13. Jhr. vgl. Christa Bertelsmeier-Kierst und Christopher Young (Hrsg.), 2003: Eine Epoche im Umbruch. Volkssprachliche Literalität 1200-1300. Cambridger Symposium 2001. Tübingen: De Gruyter. #00:56:10# Zur Veränderlichkeit von mittelalterlichen Texten in Manuskripten (statt Erhalten eines "Originals") siehe Forschungen der "New Philology". Vgl. Paul Zumthor,1972: Essai de poétique médiévale. Paris: Seuil. #00:57:20# Informationen zum Codex Manesse in der Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg. #00:59:40# Zur Macht der Gegenstände im Mittelalter im Sprachgebrauch, siehe Bettina Bildhauer, 2013: Der Gralsroman aus Sicht des Grals: Stil und das Mithandeln der Dinge. In Elizabeth Andersen, Ricarda Bauschke, McLelland (Hrsg.): Stil: Mittelalterliche Literatur zwischen Konvention und Innovation. Berlin: Akademie Verlag oder James A. Schultz, 2006: Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. #01:00:05# Zum mittleren Modus und Zigarettenrauchen siehe Bruno Latour, 2010: On the Cult of the Factish Gods, trans. Catherine Porter und Heather MacLean, in: ders.: On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. S. 1-66. #01:04:50# Zur KI (Künstlichen Intelligenz) oder AI (Artifical Intelligence) Online. #01:05:27# Zu Flussers Überlegungen über ein "neues Mittelalter" vgl. Vilém Flusser, 1993: Die Wiederkunft des Mittelalters. In: ders. Nachgeschichte. Eine korrigierte Geschichtsschreibung. Schriften Bd. 2. Bensheim/Düsseldorf: Bollmann. S. 143-154. Zu Filmen und neuen Medien als Boten eines neuen Mittelalters siehe Bettina Bildhauer, 2009: Vorwand into the passt. Film as a medieval medium. In: Anke Bernau, Bettina Bildhauer (Hrsg.), Medieval Film. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. S. 40-59. #01:06:17# Zum wachsenden wissenschaftlichen Interesse an Materialität siehe etwa: Jan-Hendrik Passoth, 2008: Zum Verstehen von Dingen: die sprachliche Erforschung des Nichtsprachlichen in verschiedenen Disziplinen, in: Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Dana Giesecke, Thomas Dumke (Hrsg.): Die Natur der Gesellschaft. Verhandlungen des 33. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Kassel 2006. Teilbd. 1 u. 2. Frankfurt/M., New York: Campus. S. 1990-1999. #01:09:10# Ray Kurzweil entwickelt Ideen zur Speicherung des Gedächnisses. Online. #01:10:10# Zur mittelalterlichen "Gehirn-Bibliothek" Mary Carruthers, 2008: The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. #01:11:10# Zur Erfahrung der Macht der Dinge in der Weimarer Republik und im Weimarer Kino vgl. Thomas Elsaesser, 2000: Weimar Cinema and After. Germany’s Historical Imaginary. London: Routledge; Hermann Kappelhoff, 2000: Jenseits der Wahrnehmung - Das Denken der Bilder: Ein Topos der Weimarer Avantgarde und ein ‘psychoanalytischer Film’ von G. W. Papst. In: Harro Segeberg (Hrsg.): Die Perfektionierung des Scheins. Das Kino der Weimarer Republik im Kontext der Künste. Mediengeschichte des Films 3. München: Fink, S. 299-318 oder Béla Balázs, 2001: Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. #01:14:10# Zur sog. Schwarmintelligenz vgl. z.B. Constanze Kurz und Udo Thiedeke, 2010: Picknick mit Cyborgs. Ein interdisziplinäres Gespräch über die alltägliche Vernetzung. München: Grin S. 97/99; Ingeborg Breuer, 2012: Schwarmintelligenz im Internet. Modebegriff für neue demokratische Formen. Deutschlandfunk. Studiozeit. Aus Kultur und Sozialwissenschaften. 28.06.2012 Online. #01:17:00# Zu Vilém Flussers Vorstellung vom Übergang von Daten (dem Gegebenen) zu Fakten (dem Gemachten) vgl. Vilém Flusser, 1998: Technik entwerfen. In: Ders.: Vom Subjekt zum Projekt Menschwerdung. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer TB-Verlag. S. 133-146. [alle Links aktuell Oktober/November 2012] Dauer 01:20:10 Folge direkt herunterladen

Dr. Markus Hilgert, ordentlicher Professor für Assyrologie mit dem Schwerpunkt Sumerologie an der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg und Sprecher des SFB 933 "Materiale Textkulturen. Materialität und Präsenz des Geschriebenen in non-typographischen Gesellschaften" der DFG, unterhält sich mit Dr. Udo Thiedeke über Materialität und Präsenz der Schrift im alten Orient und über die Bedingungen und Konsequenzen, die das Vertrauen in die Materialität des Geschriebenen als soziale Praxis kennzeichnen. Shownotes #00:06:57# So sieht das Keilschriftzeichen für den Stern aus #00:07:46# Informationen zu Uruk #00:12:43# Beispiele für Keilschriftlisten; weitere Beispiele; Markus Hilgert, 2009: Von 'Listenwissenschaft' und 'epistemischen Dingen': Konzeptuelle Annäherungen an altorientalische Wissenspraktiken". Journal for General Philosophy of Science 40/2, 277–309. #00:16:33# Zur theoretischen Konzeption von Individualmedien siehe: Udo Thiedeke, 2012: Soziologie der Kommunikationsmedien. Medien - Formen - Erwartungen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. S. 133ff.; 159ff. #00:21:05# Zum Übergang von Oralität zur Literalität: Walter Ong, 1987: Oralität und Literalität. Die Technologisierung des Wortes. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag [1982: Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen] #00:25:30# Zur medientheoretischen Differenzierung der Kommunikationsmedien siehe: Udo Thiedeke, 2012: Soziologie der Kommunikationsmedien. Medien - Formen - Erwartungen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. S. 133ff.; 144ff. #00:29:50# Zur stratifizierten Gesellschaften siehe: Niklas Luhmann, 1997: Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurtr/M.: Suhrkamp. S. 678ff. #00:30:45# Zur Idee der "imaginären Gemeinschaft": Benedict Anderson, 1988: Die Erfindung der Nation. Zur Karriere eines erfolgreichen Konzepts. Frankfurt/M., New York: Campus [1983: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso] #00:37:25# Die Stele des Hammurapi #01:00:00# Zu den Tschuringas, die Lévi-Strauss mit Urkunden vergleicht: Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1968: Das wilde Denken. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. S. 280 [1962: La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon] #01:03:07# Auratische Präsenz bei Gumbrecht: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, 2004: Diesseits der Hermeneutik. Die Produktion von Präsenz. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp #01:09:08# Zu den Sinnwelten der Medienwirklichkeiten siehe: Udo Thiedeke, 2012: Soziologie der Kommunikationsmedien. Medien - Formen - Erwartungen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. S. 313ff. #01:10:23# Zum Begriff der "Aktanten" bei Bruno Latour: z. B. Bruno Latour, 2007: Eine neue Soziologie für eine neue Gesellschaft. Einführung in die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie. Aus dem Englischen von Gustav Roßler. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp #01:11:35# Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, 2006: Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge. Eine Geschichte der Proteinsynthese im Reagenzglas. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp #01:12:55# Niklas Luhmann zur Differenz von Medium und Form siehe: Niklas Luhmann, 1997: Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurtr/M.: Suhrkamp. S. 195ff. #01:14:30# Zum Affordanz-Begriff: z. B. Brian Bloomfield, Y. Latham, Theodore Vurdubakis, 2010: Bodies, technologies and action possibilities: when is an affordance? Sociology, vol. 44, no. 3. S.415-433. #01:15:28# Fukasawa über Affordanz #01:16:42# Zum Poststrukturalismus: z. B. Stephan Moebius, Andreas Reckwitz (Hg.), 2008: Poststrukturalistische Sozialwissenschaften. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp #01:23:30# So funktioniert "SIRI" die "intelligente" Sprachsteuerung für das iPhone laut Apple. #01:23:40# Zur Funktionsweise des I-Nets als "Cloud", als weltumspannendes Speichermedium. #01:24:10# Zur "Turing Maschine", die man auch schon mal aus Lego bauen kann und Jean-Paul Delahaye zu selbstreduplizierenden Automaten wie von John v. Neumann angedacht. [alle Links aktuell Juli/August 2012] Dauer 01:26:07 Folge direkt herunterladen

This show continues the unfinished and fascinating discussion that we had with Dr. Thomas Farrell on the philosophy of Walter Ong (Check our archives, the show aired on 9/11/09). Ok, so this picture is not of Ong, but of PETRUS RAMUS. Don’t know who he is and why he matters? Listen. But here it a hint -- he was a philosopher/logician who transformed the way that logic is taught. Ramus was the subject of Ong’s masterpiece, Ramus, Method and The Decay of Dialogue. This is a hard book, but Dr. Thomas Farrell, a renowned Ong scholar who has read the book multiple times, will help us to understand some of its key lessons. In this show, we focus on Ong’s claim about how Ramus took Western Culture from a visual culture to a ‘hypervisual’ one -- thereby affecting the nature of communication and of knowledge itself. It gets better, because communication, in turn, shapes and molds consciousness or, as Dr. Farrell puts it, ‘the sensorium’. What does this have to do with ethics you might ask? A lot. Listen to one of the leading scholars on Walter Ong engage in stimulating discussion about how different modes of communication contribute to the flourishing of the individual and the species.

In this show, we discuss the fascinating and profound ideas of Walter Ong, S.J. with Dr. Thomas J. Farrell, a renowned Ong scholar. Author of numerous articles on Ong as well as the critically acclaimed, Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication, Dr. Farrell will discuss Ong's philosophy about the relationship amongst the spoken word (primary orality), the written word (literacy) and technology (secondary orality). We will introduce the listener to some of the ideas of Ong, and will demonstrate their poignancy and relevancy as the internet evolves into Web 3.0 -- and arguably into a new (tertiary) form of orality and the spoken word.

Scripture: Luke 9References:  Against the Day by Thomas Pinchon,Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong.