My other half says I forgot "blather" in my taxonomy.
As in: Students will learn to blather on endlessly on topics of interest to no one but them.
Good point. How could I have missed that.
Wait. That wasn't a dig, was it?
Haven't read Bloom's in a while. But I found myself having to do so recently.
It was nice to get a refresher because now I remember that the problem with it is the primacy it gives to pure knowledge over applied knowledge.
I would structure my sequence of deepening knowledge like this:
(I snuck understanding in there because it doesn't show up in Bloom's. Certainly not at a higher order of awareness.)
Why this order?
Because I define those words differently, and truly-informed application (as opposed to mere use) is the product of all the other knowledge tools, not a step that must eventually be discarded in the quest for true understanding and knowledge. It is this very arrangement which has ensconced higher education in its own glass tower and left it wondering why it doesn't get the respect it deserves. It is assuming that knowledge in pure form is superior to knowledge applied for practical good. And most of the rest of the world is left wondering "we are subsidizing this why?"
In this sense we are going back to the days of the Greeks, when any true citizen would never sully their hands with something so base as application. But everything in the taxonomy is useless if it cannot in the end be applied to something.
On the other hand, perhaps the problem is that there needs to be two trees (making the Greeks right in at least one sense), one which encapsulates the depth of understanding and the other the depth of application. This stands in opposition to the current taxonomy, which treats application as a single step in the ladder to deeper understanding, rather than something that can have its own tiers. That is a little harder. Interesting how we have so many words for how to think about things, but so few on how to use things. I never thought about that before. Very interesting indeed. Many of the verbs put forward as "application" in Blooms are really either forms of the other categories or of presentation, not of actual application.
"Schedule" is an odd word out except in certain contexts I don't get at the moment. And "practice" has so many meanings that it could occur at any level, from acquisition (practice the guitar) to analysis/synthesis/application (practice medicine).
Then again maybe I am just biased because the idea of 1950s education psychologists reminds of my learning as a psychology undergrad of just how much damage psychologists in the middle of the 20th century did to their own field in an attempt to be the next technocratic hegemon. Fortunately, most of it was thoroughly discredited. Except for the educational psychologists. Most probably because they took something abstract and gave it concrete labels that make bean counters happy. Yeesh, I mean, these are the people who thought they could build valid tools of psychological assessment by comparing inpatients in a Midwestern U.S. psychiatric hospital to the family members that would come to visit them.
Anyway, I want to propose a new taxonomy, I call it Mootly's taxonomy, just because Bloom's taxonomy is already taken. Here's a first draft with lots of sloppy wording to drive all true prescriptivists nuts:
Tier 1: Knowledge discovery
Appropriate for primary education through early post-secondary, as well as for purely informational fields.
Tier 2: Knowledge-working
Appropriate for higher-education at all levels, but especially undergraduates and trade skills.
Tier 3: Knowledge creation
Appropriate for higher education,especially at the higher levels. Mandatory at the graduate level and for all professionals deserving of the appellation.
If you look there are now three paths in play. There is acquisition to synthesis, comprehension to creation, and presentation to application. Okay, that is kind of contrived, but with a little tweaking there could be. There is a path of pure knowledge working in the series, and one of application in the series. This allows there to be Tier 3 values for skill-based learning. And it even pushed the third tier beyond the expectations in Bloom's taxonomy by accommodating such things as post-doctoral work and professionals who are contributing and generating knowledge rather than consuming it.
Now I just need some fancy analysis of verbs to make it as dogmatic and robust as Bloom's, while at the same time less problematic.
In the current Democratic race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama the Democratic party may have painted itself into a bit of a corner. The issue here is the superdelegates. The superdelegates were instituted to create a sense of party unity by the following process:
The problem is that the superdelegates are casting their votes early, committing to one side or the other in the current primary before the general public has had the time to vote. Most of them are voting for Hillary.
If Obama wins the popular vote in the primary, this creates an interesting situation.
What happens if he wins the popular vote, but not by enough to override the votes of the superdelegates. Then the American public is given the distinct impression that they chose their candidate, but their vote was ignored and the Party chose who it wanted and not who the people wanted. This will reflect badly on them.
But if those who have already committed change their minds to follow the majority of voters, opponents can leap on them as being weak and indecisive, which will also hurt them.
And then things get interesting. If Obama gets the popular vote, he did it without Florida and Michigan, who had their delegates stripped for violating parole ... errr ... primary rules. Both states went to Hillary. In a tight race, those votes could be the deciding factor between Hillary and Obama.
So unless either Obama pretty much takes the rest of the country for a solid victory or Hillary wins the primary without Florida and Michigan, and without including the superdelegates in the count, expect a dust up before this thing settles and we have a candidate. And expect the dust up to hurt the Democrats in the general election.
Please review this book
For next week. Just need to read
1200 pages.
[http://www.ancestry.com/facts/Mootly-occupations.ashx]
[http://www.cardomain.com/id/mootly]
[http://neoseeker.com/members/profiles/Mootly/]
Yim, Jaeyeon. 'State Identity' and 'Collective Self': Problems and Solutions Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hilton Chicago and the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL, Sep 02, 2004. 2006-10-05 [http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p59936_index.html]
Abstract: While we take for granted the prevalence of “self” in key terms such as self-help, self-preservation, or self-determination in the theory of international relations, the ways in which the collective “self” should be conceptualized and applied to the analysis of conflicts between selves remain obscure. The constructivist perspective, as one of many efforts to understand interstate relations by way of situating a “self” with relation to an “other” positioned to play a counterrole at the interpersonal level, explains interactions between states by using the notion of “state identity.” This perspective offers limited insights due to the incompatible components of the term “state identity,” which is oriented toward an external, as opposed to internal, perspective of “identity.” As a result of using “state identity” in this way, we construe an actor’s identity not by what the actor does, but by virtue of how an author has ascribed a certain “identity” to the state; the term “identity” is treated as a mere taxonomic tool according to a particular author’s research focus, which is separate from the actor’s self-conception and the actor’s identification with and commitment to that “identity.” As a result, the distinct perspective resulting from such a consideration of “identity” leaves the real actors and their self-identification out of the study of international relations. In this paper I question the theoretical postulation of “state identity,” i.e., state as a unitary actor, in two ways: (1) I point out that the convention of seeing the state as a unitary actor who plays an assigned role is derived from a dramaturgical metaphor and I question how the metaphor can be adequately applied to the study of “state identity” by covering two important aspects of the actor––what constitutes the actor and the way in which an actor’s self-conceptualization affects his choice of action in different contexts; and (2) I reconsider the use of metonymy in ordinary language. Metonymy enables us to refer to the subject of an action as though it were a single coherent entity and I show that the concept of “state identity” is an example of metonymy.
Because the subject of “identity” shifts between individuals and groups, in order to make sense of an actor’s “identity” in international relations, we should examine the ways in which members of a nation interact with their political leaders in the process of identifying who they are, on the one hand, the ways in which political leaders as co-members of the nation implement certain national policies against other nations, on the other. Based on the insights of a social identity perspective from social psychology, I present “collective self” as a useful concept for international relations by focusing on people’s identification of “self” within the context of the group to which they belong. Viewed from the perspective of the subjective self or others, what the “self” is represents a different identity. I highlight the role of memory in the subjective meaning of one’s “identity” and sense of “self.” In further developing the notion of memory, I introduce three conceptual stages of “collective self”––remembering self, securitizing self, and legalizing self––as part of a larger conceptual framework which inks constitution of the “collective self” to the sources, formulation, and implementation of national security policy.
It's a dead end discussion anyway. Easy enough to say that our socially-defined roles are in conflict with themselves, the functional role and the ideal role no longer corresponding to each other, but where do you go after that?
In other words: you may be a free individual, equal to me because of your humanity, but your a still just a janitor, how dare you say "hi' to the CEO.
But it is not the issue of conformance. It is the issue of abstracted ideals traditionally being the demense of the elite, and being elite, the elite were provided with a support structure that promoted this abstracted ideal self. But today, when everyone has an abstracted ideal self in a model of equality and freedom, the social support networks don't function, since they are still largely focused on one's role in society rather than the ideal they profess to support. It is not that the model is wrong, it is just that it has no support structure to bolster it, so it comes off feeling like nothing more than an empty promise to too many. Given our current political systems, the only way to preserve equality is through hierarchy ... go figure. If something requires that it be its own antithesis in order to function, what does that say about it? Definitely a thorny question.
But the point it was all coming out of was that the self of freedom and equality is an abstracted self, and in that sense a fictional, contrived, or constructed self that is often at odds with the socially perceived and socially defined self. Perhaps then the first step in the idea of constructed selves that is in line with modern attitudes toward self, as well as the ability of real people to become fictional through the process of media, as well as the ability of fictional people to become real through the same vehicle.
Okay, last time I suggested that a strong platform of humans rights creates an interesting conundrum. It assigns an arbitrary, idealized definition of self to all individuals that has no bearing on nor interaction with their role in society. It is not a social standing, but an abstract ideal. Furthermore, I suggested that such an abstract ideal was formerly reserved for nobility and the clergy, the members of which represented high level abstract notions of nobility and divinity.
Although interestingly stated, we probably haven't escaped basic anthropology yet.
So the next step and question has to do with the significance of this assertion. What happens when people lose strong, clearl defined identities for abstract and arbitrary ones? What happens is lots of discourse about the loss of self. But interestingly, though some nobility and clergy have gone insane in dramatic ways, that can mostly be explained by huge amounts of inbreeding and the fact that power attracts the eccentrics. So, if the nobility and clergy of days gone by could keep their sense of self when functioning as metonym for social abstractions, why can't everyone else.
Well, it seems there are a few reasons. The simplest is that being a member of an exclusive club ensures that the number of people arguing about what it means to be a member of said exclusive club means. In fact, there is a strong impetus for conformity so that you don't get kicked out of the exclusive club.
In other words, and the more important reason, there is a social support network, either positive or negative in its agency, that assists in creating a strong sense of self for nobility and clergy.
However, when the idealized self is abstracted out to all people, the support network does not scale with it. This is where the problem resides, and where all the discourse about the current loss of self comes from. It is not the self that is lacking, but the social support network that is now faced with many contradictory messages. On one hand, the social support network is supposed to promote one's role in society. On the other hand, one's role in society has been redefined as mutuable and fluid, something to be countermanded by one's right to change their station in life. And this mutability is in direct conflict with older social networks which attempt to define one's role in older more static social models. We have conflicting social messages that are not necessarily commensurable.
So the question then is not how to instill a strong sense of self in people again (which would involve a rather draconian solution), but rather how to create social networks that can support and promote a sense of self within the context of a deep self that is, in the end, and unrealizable ideal. Certainly the unrealizable ideal is not the issue. Pure nobility and pure divinity are also both unrealizable ideals, and yet there were social support networks to keep them in place.
It should be noted that some people are perfectly successful in the new social model, so it is not something inherint in human nature, but rather a contextual factor. I would propose that these successful people come in two categories: those who cling successfully to the old models of social station, and those who have found away to define themselves comfortably as mutable and have found a sense of self external to social station.
So, if the latter is preferable, what is it about these people that allows them to comfortably define themselves as mutable? How broadly can such a definition of self be spread to others?
Which is a good question to end on.
My real life minio- errr, counterpart has annual reports due in two weeks. And here I had more to add to my thread on the nature of the mediated self. Oh well.
I got, got, got, got no time.
I am totally, totally exhausted and New Years hasn't hit yet. Then again, I got to do plenty of night-time driving on Long Island expressways ... that I have never driven before ... in the rain ... with all the white stripes worn to nothing ... a navigator who had much to say about the questionable usefulness of the maps we had, but not much else that could be taken as productive ... and a complement of other drivers who alternately thought that 55 miles per hour meant 70 or thought that a rainy night meant the speed limit was 30. Guess which one was in front and which behind me at any given time.
By the time I was out of the City again and found a place to stop, my hands had to be pried off the steering wheel and my fingers uncramped. Any more and I would have been hallucinating a score counter in the corner of the windshield. So I surrendered the wheel to visiting peeps coming back to my place and passed out in the back seat.
I keep forgetting that there is a spur off to the east of NYC the size of a small state. I am pretty sure it is a willful act of forgetting. I think Robert Moses designed it to make anyone who didn't have to live there afraid of even approaching it so that the wealthy white people at the other end would be left well-enough alone. But I have relatives who have decided it is important to remind me of it's existence. So important that they moved there.
I hereby decree that from now on all relatives must be country mice, those that insist on remaining city mice will be replaced with more amenable relatives. The Hamptons do not qualify as country, even if I should suddenly have relatives who could afford to live there, since there is a city in the way.
Okay, love NYC, just having to pass through it to the other side that drives me buggy. So maybe if they win the lottery and buy me a pied-à-terre in Manhattan I will allow them to stay in Long Island. Then I can take a taxi back to a warm bed.
Check out the Web site for the United States Access Board at [http://www.access-board.gov/]. Ideally in Firefox, where you can turn on alt attributes in the Web developers' toolbar. Look at the alt value for the masthead: "banner with Board logo and photo of Board office".
They do have the name of the site above it, hidden away with CSS, for text readers, but still ...
So.
Equivalent content! Equivalent content is content that serves the same function as that which is replaces. This equivalency is one of intent and meaning, not of visual appearance.
It is really annoying to be looking for what something is and find a description of what it looks like. Imagine the following conversation.
Bob: Hey, that's a great looking car you bought. I've never seen one like it. What kind is it?
Phil: It's a blue one.
Bob: I can see that, but what kind is it?
Phil: Well, it's a sleek little sports coupe.
Bob: Very funny Phil. Really, who makes it?
Phil: The company makes this sleek little sports coupe.
Depending on the amount of beer involved, Bob may or may not hit Phil at this point. This is the sort of thing that happens when you use alt attributes to describe what something pretty obviously is, instead of providing the needed information. We really don't need badly chosen descriptions mixed with beer leading to interpersonal violence.
Perhaps another example is in order more in keeping with the nature of the infraction here.
Bobbi: Hey, Philomena! I hear you got a new job.
Philomena: Yeah. I really like it.
Bobbi: Cool, where's it at?
Philomena: The company logo with the corporate motto forming a circle around it.
Bobbi: Oooo-kay.
Bobbi moves slowly away from Philomena, and Philomena later wonders why Bobbi won't go clubbing with her anymore. Another friendship destroyed by bad descriptions.
You get the idea.
Maybe it would be better if the alt text for the logo was exactly what the text in the logo is: "The United States Access Board - A Federal Agency Committed to Accessible Design". Then if the image doesn't load, there is something useful in its place.
Seems like a no brainer. Maybe not.
why do we seek to
deconstruct identity —
being without self
five five five five five
seven seven seven sev —
oh poop, doesn't scan
My favorite haiku that I didn't write goes:
I wrote a haiku,
but it is not very good.
No, you can't read it.
Okay, so what did I mean when I said that:
I think people are becoming so subsumed under their signifiers that their signifiers are becoming more real than they are. This was a category of non-existence that was once reserved for nobility, but is now available, if not actively imposed, on every person dealing with modern society.
More specifically, what did I mean about it being reserved for nobility?
Well, first off, that is not really true, it was reserved for nobility, clergy, and men of note (because, well, it was mostly men back then).
What I mean by a category of non-existence reserved for nobility has to do with the nature of social roles in society. Everyone always has (and presumably always will) played a role in society which labeled them as fitting that role. Historically, most of these roles directly related to the person and who they were: farmer, butcher, baker, beggar, highwayman. These roles described the person and who they were and were tightly integrated into the real being of the individual in a concrete way. A butcher does not represent butcher-ness, but rather is, simply, a butcher. The word butcher relates directly to a vocation. Same for many other social roles.
This was (and is) different for nobility and the clergy. A noble does not engage in in the vocation of nobility, rather they represent that which is noble. They are a signifier of which the signified is nobility. Whether they are an accurate signifier or a mockery of the signified, they are a signifier. They represent a concept.
The same goes for clergy, who signify, at least in Western culture, the word of god with a capital G. Once again their effectiveness as signifier does not change that this is what they are.
This is why, and how, nobility and religious orders could (and still do) stand above the common people. They are not people, they are signifiers of a higher, and purportedly better, state. This is where they metonymy comes in. The noble as person is subsumed under and replaced by the noble as signifier of nobility.
With the rise of the merchant class, and then the middle
class, this notion of being subsumed under the signifier spread downward into the masses. More representations came, where people represented social concepts of worth. With the downward spread of the person as signifier, there also developed the increasing need for a clearly defined identity outside of the person through which to identify them.
With the developing notions of human rights, it becomes imperative that all people be given a clear identity that is, ironically, defined by the state. Otherwise rights become unenforceable and are merely dependent on the notoriously fickle goodwill of others. Remember that government systems not driven by any special caste are for and of the people. But to be so, people need to be subsumed into a model where they are defined as participant citizens of the state.
Okay, yes, that glosses over a great deal and makes oversimplification look like a model of intricate delving, but the point is there.
With the development of the welfare state, the notion of state-sponsored identity that represented some ideal moved from the mark of a good citizen to a requirement for anyone who is subject to the system. At the same time, this took the idea of identity through social roles and threw it out the window in favor of a legal fiction, something contrived to allow more effective oversight of the citizenry. So not only an abstract identity, but an entirely arbitrary one as well.
This, of course, raises the question as to whether the modern quest for identity was as much driven by consumerism as people may suggest, or whether it was a pre-existing condition caused by social change that abstracted the person from a concrete identity. This includes the notion of universal human rights, since equality is incommensurable with solidly defined social roles, and industrialization, urbanization, and their impacts on older social patterns. It also creates the expectation that the average person has an identity that represents some ideal that is abstracted from the self.
As such consumerism merely filled the gap, and promised us we could all be nobility if we purchased the trappings of nobility. If we cannot achieve the abstract ideal we are expected to define ourselves through, perhaps we can buy it instead. Without concrete definitions of social order that were tied to the social context of the self, we had to create social order through the trappings thereof.
So you can ignore what I said before.
Excuse me while I play.
Silly template.
Took me forever to unbreak changes I made. Looked great in everything but MSIE, which still gets it wrong. So I gave up and formatted it so it looks right but different in MSIE.
Course it looks so little like the original that maybe I should have just created a new template for scratch rather than tweaking the one I had.
That's the next step.
Playing with settings, excuse the mess.
Woohoo! All done. For now.
The font you don't get to see unless you have quite the collection is "Handwriting - Dakota". It's pretty.
WoW is the root of all evil. That is all I have to say. Though I do now have a level 70 BE pally spec'd to tank.
That is all I have to say. Okay, that is all I have time to say, which is almost the same thing.
Deep thoughts continue to gestate. But I thought I would opt for the if you can't make time to say something profound, make time to say pithy little dorky things.
My Question of the day:
Why can people prove who they are with a legal document, but not prove who they are by being them? If we take a legal document to be the inscription of a legal fiction upon the world (the creation of a contrived state of being within an abstracted system or structuring reality), does that mean that any legal representation of identity is also a fiction? Furthermore, does that mean identity, in the sense of a legally binding one, itself is a fiction?
I postulate the existence of the metonymic person, a person whose very existence has been replaced by its own signifier, such that they no longer have existence outside the signifiers that represent this existence. Furthermore, I postulate that this is a very recent occurance.
This can be seen in obvious ways such as the number of places people are noted by an account number, or a driver's license, or a federal ID number. But I think it goes deeper than that. I think people are becoming so subsumed under their signifiers that their signifiers are becoming more real than they are. This was a category of non-existence that was once reserved for nobility, but is now available, if not actively imposed, on every person dealing with modern society.
Perhaps it is a factor of consumption, our real selves must be consumed under a legal fiction of identity into order to create the mental state necessary for us to consume new, ready made, identities.
Of course as a fictional character that only represents myself, perhaps I trend in the other direction, a signifier without a signified becoming the thing signified by caveat. But I am not sure that derives from the first point.
And here I said I wasn't going to say anything. Maybe I should say that more often.
Hazards of being a fictional character: the inability to operate a keyboard. It's an intangibility thing, though as soon as I find a way to post to my blog with a fictional keyboard, I'll be good to go. Until then, I'm stuck with relying on someone else, and, well ... they've been busy.
==========
As a fictional character, I can't help but wonder how many real people in the world are fictional like me.
Huh?
No, that is not sarcasm, or condemnation, but a real question.
To make my example, very crudely, otherwise it will be a book, not a blog:
Many Asian cultures differentiate between public self and private self.
The Japanese make a sharp distinction on this front, and accept the idea that the private shelf that is shared with friends can be radically different for the one shared with business associates which may be different again from the one shared with strangers.
In fact, this is played out in social customs of doing things such as holding business meetings over drinks, where one can lets one's hair down and discuss matters (indirectly, of course) as friends instead of co-workers. There are even culturally established norms for acting drunk and who you should and should not act drunk in front of. So someone who among friends appears to be so drunk that they can barely stand may suddenly seem very sober if the boss or spouse calls them on the phone. Unless, of course they really are plastered and not just politely drunk.
The Chinese split their zodiac into three levels. Most of us know the Chinese New Year and the animals associated with the years. To be born in a specific year associates you with a specific sign and determines certain aspects of your personality. What many people don't realize is that there are also animals associated with the month, and with the exact time of birth. The last one is as complicated as trying to calculate star signs in the Western tradition, where you need the exact time and location to calculate the positions of the stars and moon and the like. So each person has three signs too represent them. They may all be the same, but more likely they are different.
The three signs interact to determine personalities, which is why people are all unique and not so easily grouped into twelve categories of personality. The yearly sign is the public face you wear, and since cultural attitudes do tend to cycle with generations, there may very well be some truth to the cycle, who knows? But the yearly sign is modified by the other two.
The monthly sign is the face you show to your close circle of friends and family. In the social sense, it is the real you. The real you. That means that public face is not the real you. So then what is it? It is a convenient fiction, a face you are expected to present in public, through which your real self interfaces through the world, but in mediated form. Part of the cycle of life is trying to slowly make the shift that brings the talents of the private self to the fore, while still maintaining the public self as is expected of you.
So then, if we have the public self and private self covered, then what is the third sign? The third sign is your secret self. It is the self you share with no one, and the self you strive to be. In a sense, it is also a true self, but it is one that is not shared, and one you may not even yourself be aware of, but it influences how your other two selves interact with each other and with the world.
If we want to talk about it in Freudian terms, well, we will fail ... but we can make pretend that these three match to superego, ego, and id respectively. For those who know their Freud, hopefully you can see the fail point in this description, but also how it is useful. The public self is the socially determined self, the private self is the personally determined self, and the secret self is the underlying motivation that may or may not be clear to the person in question.
But the primary point of these two examples is that in both of them there is a public sphere / private sphere distinction in which the public sphere is where you are expected to behave according to specific social norms, only taking the mask off in private. Want some fun? Try getting a newly met Japanese friend to take their mask off. Just don't get pushy and offend them.
This explicitly acknowledged division is lacking in much of Western culture. Unless you are a rugged New Englander, firmly of the opinion that what goes on behind closed doors has nothing to do with your private face (which is why Boston probably has more liquor stores than bars, and no strip joints but a color supplement in the Yellow Pages for call girls) you are raised to think that people are who they are. This creates an interesting conflict of personality when people feel that they are not who they are in public, because it is something that according to Freud is definitely a neurotic state. This is an interesting assertion in the Victorian age, which was all about suppressing the true self.
So anyway, what I am saying here is that we are all convenient fictions, personalities created for interacting with the world through whatever mode we prefer to interact with it in. Even the terse a-social habits of hard-core computer geeks still are appropriate for their environment, where lack of personal contact reduces hygiene needs and terseness necessary where all communication is by keyboard and the fastest fingers win. Though in some ways they may be more honestly themselves than the rest of us.
Our public selves exist to interface with the public. They may not be who we perceive ourselves to be, but who we must be in order to operate. Every living, breathing person is, in their own way, a convenient fiction.
So what about me? I am a fiction. Am I also a convenient fiction? Or am I closer to my true self than I could ever be by being a real person? That is a question to ponder.
Been reading Marshall McLuhan this week. For those who don't know him, he is the grandpappy of media studies. Being a mediated personality and all, I sort of feel it is important to have a good solid grasp on my heritage, so ...
Amidst the many really interesting things he says about the nature of media and the mediated life, one little phrase really leapt out at me and caught my eye,
to make the news is to become fictionalized.
Really had to stop and think. What does that mean? But a little thinking led to the conclusion that, well, he was right. To make the news is to become fictionalized. Even for a brief moment, they cease to be who they are, and become a mediated fiction.
But before I explain what that means, first I should make clear, there are two ways to make news. One is to write it. The other is to be it. Since the writer is abstracted from the news and we don't necessarily know who they are, they are not put in the position to be fictionalized. It is those who make the news who become fictionalized.
So what is it to become fictionalized through the news?
Well, to make the news is also to become the news. They key lies in that turn of phrase. To become the news is to cease to be one's self and to instead be a news item, a short snippet of narrative divorced from its context and thus made mythic. Suddenly, Joe Fireman is no longer a stressed but happy husband with a wife, two kids, and a sick mom who needs to be moved to a nursing him. Instead, Joe Fireman is the hero who rescued the little girl from the well. And the little girl down the well? Well, she is, of course, the little girl down the well. She is not a person, she is not the girl who is going to grow up to marry her college roommate's cousin, she is the girl down the well.
In making the news, one becomes iconic, a fiction defined by the moment that is only tangentially attached to the person behind the icon.
So you are probably saying, "Yeah, yeah Moot. That's old news. Tell us something new."
So, okay, I will.
You see, McLuhan was writing in the early 1960s. The United States (and Canada, where he was writing) was different back then. Our relation to media was different. The television was just coming into power. The personal computer did not exist yet, and the Internet to connect that computer up to was a nagging concept in some people's minds that could help to build a better military. Computer-mediated communication was a full generation of peoples down the road still.
At the time of the writing, the world was not yet small, and the living did not yet outnumber the dead.
McLuhan observed that there was a division between how we perceived television and movies. We saw movies, in essence, as pre-recorded plays, but television we saw as something more immediate, something more real. One sociological aspect of this is that people who worshipped celebrities worshipped movie stars and television characters. Let me say that again: movie stars and television characters.
This is important in part because it is not longer true. McLuhan's perspective makes sense for his time period. People don't remember Casablanca as that World War II movie, or that one about the love affair between Rick and Ilsa, they remember it as a movie that starred Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains. No one went to go see a Bogart film because of the movie hype, or the comic book it was based on, but because it was a Bogart film. Movie icons of the period were worshipped as actors, not as characters.
On the other hand, when it comes to television, and except those characters that portray themselves, we sometimes cannot even remember the names of our favorite actors. Fast, who plays Bart Simpson? The dad in the original Brady Bunch? The boys on South Park? Seven of Nine? Dr. Baltar? Tony Soprano? Dr. House? Yeah, hard core fans will know. The rest of us don't know and don't care. In television, we are not interested in the actors, but the characters.
Times change. Our attitude toward television has changed the way we relate to movies. We no longer worship the actors. There too we have begun to worship the characters. The early days of television followed the model of movies, and television shows were designed as vehicles for famous actors and performers. This changed with the abstracted world of the sit com and soap opera, where the character was divorced from the person playing it. (Though interestingly, perhaps because they are running out of "safe" ideas more and more shows are coming out that are merely vehicles for popular comedians.)
At the time McLuhan was writing, there was a clear split between the famous actor in movies and the famous characters on TV. After he wrote his most famous works, there was a shift, and movies, like TV, moved away from being vehicles for famous actors. Instead, they became movies sold based on genre, plot, entertainment value, or amount of over the top action. As much as anything, this is probably because studios wanted more blockbusters and fewer studios were interested in just plain dramas. The actor became insignificant in the face of the character. Most of us don't think of the Indiana Jones movies as Harrison Ford movies, but Indiana Jones movies, and we find people who think if Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, not the other way around.
I for one cannot remember any of the following names, even though they are quite famous: the people playing Harry Potter, Spiderman, all of the Batmen (know most of them but can't remember which is which), all of the X-Men except Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, all of the Lord of the Rings cast except for ... ummm ... Ian KcKellan. (What can I say, Patrick Stuart and Ian McKellen are hotties.) The point is though we may have favorite actors, we tend to think of movies in terms of the characters now, and not the actors.
Abstracting the character from the actor may be a good thing for the movies (and television) since it allows a deeper exploration of themes through fiction. Things designed as vehicles for actors are more likely to have the depth of an Albert and Costello movie than a Bogart flick. In other words, the separation of the actor from the role allows for a greater possibility of better story telling. This is a good thing. The fact that the story line is too often abandoned in favor of a bigger special effects budget is its own unrelated problem.
This shift has implications for McLuhan's theories.
I propose that the corollary to his assertion that to make the news is to become fictionalized, is as follows:
for a fictional character to make the news is to become real.
Not physically tangible, but psychically real in the eyes of the viewing public. Followers of the Harry Potter movie don't follow it because the main character is played by Daniel Radcliffe, or even that Ralph Fiennes plays Voldemort (which reminds me, how many people were weirded out by their favorite Bond playing a bad guy in the Avengers?), they follow it because of Harry Potter. To them, Harry Potter is real.
And Harry Potter is very real, in the sense of a cultural meme now deeply embedded in our psyches. He has been thoroughly and completely reified through a process of social realization. Harry Potter is real. Spiderman is real. The X-Men are real. How real are they?
Well, a while ago a psychiatric center in the Northwest United States was looking for counseling staff that spoke Klingon. Why? Because some of their patients were firmly convinced they were Klingon, and the center felt that it was important to be sensitive to their unique cultural identity. Okay, sounds hokey, but it probably helped with their care and therapy immensely.
But to be be so firmly convinced of the reality of something to believe that one is that thing is an impressive achievement, even if the vehicle of choice ends up being a psychiatric patient. And, though I won't swear to this, but I am pretty sure that some of those Klingon and Jedi and Sailor Moon otaku at the cons are actually quite sane, somewhere deep down inside.
In fictionalizing themselves, these people have made their adopted fictions real. By the same process, the media reporting on fictional characters as newsworthy makes those characters real. Very few people probably think that they are Harry Potter, but there are probably quite a few that believe in the reality of Harry Potter.
So, if by the mere distribution of a fictional character as a meme, we can reify that character and make them real, what does that say about the nature of fiction and our relation to it?
Okay, out of time, but maybe we can work on that question later. Why ruin an important point by answering it right away?
What is identity when a fictional character can have a concrete and real presence in the world? A question to ponder. Ponder. Ponder. Ponder. It is something I am good at. Now, if I would just stop pondering and act.
Can a fictional character influence the real world? Yes! For instance, not all the world religions can be right, since some exist in diametrical opposition to each other. Therefore, even if some of them are fictionalized accounts of deeper underlying truths, they are still fictions, or at least myths. And look at the impact they all have had. But to avoid religious debates, which I just flat out refuse to engage in with anyone who professes to actually believe anything, because when that happens I find myself face to face with someone willing to defend their very identity, violently if necessary, against things so simple as questions, let's try a less contentious example.
How many of us were influenced by the stories of Dr. Seuss? How about Winnie the Pooh? Peter Pan? Alice and her trip through Wonderland? Alice, in particular, has become a global meme that has spread like wildfire, infecting, especially, Japan, or so it seems. The Japanese love Alice. She is a fictional character, but the sheer number of morality plays they have teased out of her ...
The benefit of fictional characters is that they allow us to step aside from ourselves and explore morality plays in the safety of the written word, or the movie, or the theater play, or any other media where people can be fictions created to entertain and to instruct. From fiction we learn without being threatened by the reality of what we see.
Perhaps one of the greatest failings in the newest computer media, like games, both online and stand-alone, is the loss of the character. The actors in the game are not longer characters, but mere placeholders for the people behind them, or place holders for some single-dimensional concept, such as "something I have to kill before it kills me". Many online games allow players to become actors that are nothing but mythic versions of the players.
A fictional character is a character. They have dimension and depth. They are their own people. Even when the actors portraying them are not present, they are still there, simply being, as a shadow that reflects the real world back at itself for introspection. How do we avoid losing something that precious in the trend away from communal media and toward more shallow forms as individualized entertainment, as well as the backwash of this trend back into communal media.
Marshall McLuhan said that electronic media will destroy plot and narrative. Will it also destroy the fictional character, the people who are not that we turn to for wisdom
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