So this is basically the scariest thing i’ve ever seen relating to copyright laws and their abuse.
Happy Monday!
http://www.bestofartists.com/creative-sculpture/2008/7/7/you-could-lose-your-rights.html
I realize that this probably will miss the mark with some of you kids, but none-the-less, here’s a link to my latest creative ideology. Please note: the image at bottom of page is the philosophy, not the image at top.
http://tcritic.com/archives/design-wont-save-the-world-you-pretentious-fuck/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y5eBRWQerY
That dapper band in the background is “Pulp.” Shatner covered this song (Common Peoples) on his 2004 album “Has Been.”
This has been your VH1 popup video moment of the blog.
There is no doubt that the internets have entangled themselves into our lives. NPR has a fascinating interview with Jeremy Bailenson of Standford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab about how a person’s virtual persona (ala Second Life type virtual realities) affects their everyday life from gaining confidence to losing weight.
NPR’s Learning from the virtual you audio clip
I don’t have experience with Second Life version of me other than my Nintendo Wii mii, which looks a lot like Mr. Garrison crossed with Elton John crossed with David Cross - let me tell you, that is great for my self esteem :} I do think the internet has affected me in other ways, some for the better, some for the worse. The most apparent thing that sticks out to me is that I don’t read the same as I did 10 years ago. I tend to skim looking for bullet points and quick understanding rather than ruminating on points and trying to really understand the nut of a passage. Obviously, this is not a good thing. On the positive side, the internet has truly influence my position on intellectual property by observing remarkable people share their hard work for free. That truly amazes me in many, many ways, but I’ll digress from that for now.
My question to all of you is how has the internet changed/enriched/affected you?
Sociology is the study of patterns of social relationships. The other sciences seem to be the study of other sorts of relationships. H. Krebs, a lurker on this Coop, wonders why in the hell won’t anyone write a book about grand concepts that sweep across disciplines (philosophy, physics, law, biology, economics, religion, psychology, chemistry, anthropology, linguistics). She suggested we start with duality and brainstorm a list. So, I thought I’d start the list with duality, list some other things on my own, and the open it up for said storm of brains. Turns out, my list didn’t get any longer. I know this post is ridiculous, but as Tony Soprano would say with a shrug, whaddaya gonna do.
Duality. Examples: (wave/particle as in quantum mechanics) (mind/body as in Decartes) (signs/signifiers as in semiotics) (yin/yang) (id/superego as in psychoanlaysis) (mass/energy as in Einstein) (structuralism/poststructuralism) (modernity/postmodernity) (base/superstructure)
Note that many of these divide up the world into two, yet really describe them as one system in which opposing forces are at work to shape diachronic change–i.e., the unity of opposites, or more precisely and interestingly, dialectics, though it’s prob very passe to talk dialectics these days…but in case you think it’s only Marx and Hagel, note that it’s sort of an organizing concept in Taoism, too.
Okay, and I tried to think of some other things that can’t get lumped in the above taxonomy. Spirals/circular stuff…nope, that’s all wrapped up in an explanation of dialectics. Okay… entropy! There you go–thermodynamics, fragmentation, nyce. Except the more I think about that, the more I think that it’s just another way of thinking about the workings of the above concept. Stick with me, I’m an amateur at this:
So, within a system there is a continuum of forces generally divisible into two categories–e.g., the light and the dark side, in the Star Wars formulation, or the solid and the scattered, etc. There are two possible ways (probably both) that these two components of the binary articulate. 1) Synthesis: They build and play off each other (see, again, dialectics). 2) Entropy: They’re conflicting and increasingly falling to pieces.
It’s not bullet-proof, but it’s cool-sounding in my head right now. And the only other category of sweeping concepts that I can think of is power. Power is about how things (like those things above) interact, are subject to one another, relate to one another. There is power in both synthesis and in entropy. So it’s like the seran wrap concept that stretches across all the other concepts I came up with, and holds them together with its awesome explanatory power.
So power is the Occam’s razor of all theories (keeping in mind that within power, there are competing theories in the structuralist/post-structuralist vein, as in coercion/consent, Machiavelli/Foucault)? I’ll buy it. You?
if mirror neuron theorists are right, the advantages of directly understanding others may be so great that it blows the evolutionary cost of occasional self-sacrifice out of the water. What’s selected for might be the ability to imitate others, and to understand and feel what they are feeling. Self-sacrifice and altruism might be mere byproducts of mirroring and not themselves adaptive in a way selected for by evolution
More Candidates: A Send Up of that Vanity Fair Cover
These links are to exceptional posts on two very interesting blogs. If you’re in to that sort of thing, browse further.
I haven’t read it all, but I love it from this, From neuroscience to Nietzsche. A sobering look at how man may perceive himself in the future, particularly as ideas about genetic predeterminism takes the place of dying Darwinism.
wondering if there were updates, thoughts?
I have had an amazing couple of weeks. I have been doing evaluations for the OAs and have been having wonderful conversations.
This is also the time of the semester that everyone has settled in and my students come in to chat with me, dropping by for ‘no reason’ until we suddenly find the crisis. The high-powered meteorologist struggling between pure science and broadcasting, the affected artist finally smiling b/c thereis a photomedia major now. These two appts. were back-to-back. Ava needs to be drawn from the roof’s edge, while Hally and I talk in hushed tones about art and manual labor. Molly still trying to figure out if she is majoring in anything else other than Ultimate and SUA and Bridey near graduation and freaking out.
And today I spend 4 hours with computer programmers trying to figure out how the hell they think about the same project I thought I had a handle on.
And in my geography class grad. students were giving presentations, and one of them really got it and all I could think is that I wanted to sit in a room with him and use big words. These impulses to go back to school were as strong as they have been in months, if not years, yet I had one of the most fulfilling weeks advising I can remember.
I know, no choice is definite, but they feel so present.
Indeed.