The Network

Network (1976) is a politically charged, satirical film about a fictional television network, Union Broadcasting System (UBS), and its struggle with poor ratings. It was written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress and Best Screenplay.

Network has continued to receive recognition, decades after its initial release, for its heavy criticism of mainstream media and the absurdity of American corporate culture. In 2007, the film was ranked 64th among the Top 100 Greatest American Films by the American Film Institute. Check it out below.

The Mathematics of War

By pulling raw data from the news and plotting it onto a graph, physicist Sean Gourley and his team have come up with a stunning conclusion about the nature of modern war -- and perhaps a model for resolving conflicts:

I Am

The following clips are examples of the use of digital media to evoke a sense of emotional attachment to ideology and convention. 'Special interest groups' target a wide range people as a way to influence their behavior and increase control.

And because humans form personally adaptive ego-habits and decision-making patterns in relation to what is afforded them (within wider contexts of convention and institutional power) clips like these are very effective.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/user/Muradaldin

Source: http://www.molsoncanadian.ca/

Dreyfus on Merleau-Ponty

In this 1995 interview with Harry Kreisler, acclaimed U.C. Berkeley philosophy professor Dreyfus discusses the importance of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1908-1961) views in relation to computers, artificial intelligence, and the Internet.

Merleau-Ponty's primary focus on the "body" and "intercorporeality" is the key "coping" mechanism that allows us to "get a grip on reality," in a way that Dreyfus labels "normativity".

Part Two:

Dreyfus feels that Heidegger was more concerned with an existential critique of Cartesian "mental representations" in Being and Time, Merleau-Ponty's focus was always the "body with its skills that allows us to relate to things and others"... bodiless cyberspace cannot, for Dreyfus, eliminate this basic phenomenological premise.

Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Recently, StinkyJournalism.org and SavageMinds.org announced they will be simultaneously cross-publishing a series of essays exploring Jared Diamond’s controversial New Yorker Magazine article, “Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance is Ours.” Controversial, for example, in that Diamond is currently being sued and has been accused of endangering his informant's life.

The essay series titled, The Pig in a Garden: Jared Diamond and The New Yorker, is written and edited by ethics scholars in the fields of anthropology and communications, as well as journalists, environmental scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists et al.

As an anthropologist, i will be following these ‘explorations’ closely as professional anthropologists everywhere seem to be quite disturbed by how Diamond, a PhD in physiology, is representing their discipline in the public sphere. Not only does Diamond often make statements that seem to present his claims as accepted anthropological 'truths', he also blurs formal and ethical boundaries between popular science, journalism and Anthropology proper.

Personally i found Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel a fascinating read, well argued and broad enough in its claims to be a valuable supplement to current understandings of how human societies have emerged and evolved. Diamond shows – i believe – how differences in geography and natural ‘resources’ can often be deciding factors (although not determinate causes) when a particular group gains dominance over another, and how historical processes combine to afford an increased overall sociocultural complexity. [You can watch the documentary based on Diamond’s book here]

However, i think it’s interesting that anthropologists are finally getting enough moxie to openly and aggressively debate questions about ‘human nature’, culture and differences in social practice within mass culture. Anthropology as a formal body of knowledge has much to offer to both intellectual and lay discourse. As one author explains in her contribution to the series, part of the reason for furthering this ‘debate’ is to reclaim some of the attention and interest among general readers lost to popular writers like Diamond.

Well here’s hoping this series – and the passionate debate these essays may provoke - will do much towards creating a wider general audience for anthropological insights.

Follow This Debate: Here

The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations

Edward Saïd (1935–2003) was a Palestinian-American literary theorist, cultural critic, political activist, and controversial commentator on the Middle East. He was a distinguished and widely cited University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and is a founding contributor to ‘postcolonial theory’.

In 1993 Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington wrote an essay titled "The Clash of Civilizations?" and later he expanded into a book with the same title, but without the question mark. In this public lecture Said investigates and deconstructs Huntington’s claims and the main thesis of the book:

Open Source Democracy

On Nov 5, 2008, featured author, thinker and professor Douglas Rushkoff talked about his book Open Source Democracy at New York University. Here is that talk:

Foreword, by Douglas Alexander, to Rushkoff's paper on the same topic:

"The internet has become an integral part of our lives because it is interactive. That means people are senders of information, rather than simply passive receivers of 'old' media. Most importantly of all, we can talk to each other without gatekeepers or editors. This offers exciting possibilities for new social networks, which are enabled - but not determined - by digital technology.

In the software industry, the open source movement emphasises collective cooperation over private ownership. This radical idea may provide the biggest challenge to the dominance of Microsoft. Open source enthusiasts have found a more efficient way of working by pooling their knowledge to encourage innovation.

All this is happening at a time when participation in mainstream electoral politics is declining in many Western countries, including the US and Britain. Our democracies are increasingly resembling old media, with fewer real opportunities for interaction.

What, asks Douglas Rushkoff in this original essay for Demos, would happen if the 'source code' of our democratic systems was opened up to the people they are meant to serve? 'An open source model for participatory, bottom-up and emergent policy will force us to confront the issues of our time,' he answers.

That's a profound thought at a time when governments are recognising the limits of centralised political institutions. The open source community recognises that solutions to problems emerge from the interaction and participation of lots of people, not by central planning.

Rushkoff challenges us all to participate in the redesign of political institutions in a way which enables new solutions to social problems to emerge as the result of millions interactions. In this way, online communication may indeed be able to change offline politics."

Source: http://www.computersandsociety.net/

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)

Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director. An influential theatre practitioner of the twentieth century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble—the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife and long-time collaborator, the actress Helene Weigel—with its internationally acclaimed productions.

From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his 'epic theatre', synthesized and extended the experiments of Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the 'epic form' of the drama.

This dramatic form is related to similar modernist innovations in other arts, including the strategy of divergent chapters in James Joyce's novel Ulysses, Sergei Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist 'montage' in the cinema, and Picasso's introduction of cubist 'collage' in the visual arts.

In contrast to many other avant-garde approaches, however, Brecht had no desire to destroy art as an institution; rather, he hoped to 're-function' the theatre to a new social use. In this regard he was a vital participant in the aesthetic debates of his era—particularly over the 'high art/popular culture' dichotomy — vying with the likes of Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and developing a close friendship with Benjamin.

Brechtian theatre articulated popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to create a modernist realism that stood in sharp contrast both to its psychological and socialist varieties. "Brecht's work is the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg," Raymond Williams argues, while Peter Bürger dubs him "the most important materialist writer of our time."

Collective and collaborative working methods were inherent to Brecht's approach, as Fredric Jameson (among others) stresses. Jameson describes the creator of the work not as Brecht the individual, but rather as 'Brecht': a collective subject that "certainly seemed to have a distinctive style (the one we now call 'Brechtian') but was no longer personal in the bourgeois or individualistic sense."

During the course of his career, Brecht sustained many long-lasting creative relationships with other writers, composers, scenographers, directors, dramaturgs and actors. This is "theatre as collective experiment [...] as something radically different from theatre as expression or as experience." [Jameson 1998:10-11]

There are few areas of modern theatrical culture that have not felt the impact or influence of Brecht's ideas and practices. In addition to the theatre, Brechtian theories and techniques have exerted considerable sway over certain strands of film theory and cinematic practice.

"This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time... Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives."

_ Tyler Durden

Žižek on Violence and Ideology

Slavoj Žižek is a Post-Marxist Lacanian sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic. In 1989, with the publication of his first book written in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek achieved international recognition as a major social theorist. Since then, Žižek he has continued to develop his status as an intellectual outsider and confrontational maverick.

This talk took place at Google on September 12, 2008.

“The age of philosophy is in a sense, again, that we are confronted, more and more, often with philosophical problems on an everyday level. It is not just that you withdraw from daily life into a world of philosophical contemplation. On the contrary: you cannot find your way around daily life itself without answering certain philosophical questions. It is a unique time where everyone is in a way forced to be some kind of philosopher.”

-- Slavoj Žižek

The Carbon Crisis Continues

At TED2009, Al Gore presented updated slides from around the globe to make the case that global warming trends are even worse than scientists predicted, and to make clear his stance on so-called "clean coal."



It is wake up time people! Our species CAN NOT afford to stay ignorant and confused.

Life and Language with the Pirahã

In 1980, Daniel Everett, an American missionary and linguist, set off into the heart of the Amazon to track down some of the world's most elusive words: the language of the Pirahã, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians living on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil.

Intending to translate the Bible into Pirahã, Everett found himself lost in an alien tongue. For the next 20 years Everett, the son of a California cowboy, tried to hack his way through this impenetrable language, coming across verbs that grew into the most contorted shapes, sentences without subordinate clauses and forests of nouns that seemed to change without reason or pattern.

Pirahã, now spoken by fewer than 400 people, is not related to any other known living language, the people who speak it are monolingual, no outsider had ever mastered it before. The language has no simple colour words, no comparatives, no abstract concepts, no stories of the past, nor visions of the future. The Pirahã have no history, no fiction, no creation myth and no folklore. They have no concept of numbers, and no sense of right or left.

The language has three vowels and eight consonants for men, and the same number of vowels but only seven consonants for women. There is a supply of nouns, but each verb has up to 16 suffixes, which may be present or absent: thus, 2 to the power of 16, making 65,536 possible forms for each and any Pirahã verb.

To complicate matters further, there is hum speech, musical speech and whistle speech. Struggling through the linguistic undergrowth was only one challenge, alongside anacondas, tarantulas and river pirates. Everett's wife and daughter both caught malaria and almost died.

Everett's new book on the Pirahã is called 'Don't Sleep there are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle'; and is reviewed: Here

It's probably accurate to say that Pirahã is the most controversial language in the world owing to Daniel Everett arguing that the language doesn't have recursion, as Chomsky's 'universal' language theory predicts.

The New Scientist explains:

Edge also has an article by Everett that put his case forward, NPR had a radio show on the debate, and The New Yorker has some wonderfully in-depth coverage of the issue.

Learn More about the Pirahã: Here