Just as sovereignty no longer functions as absolute value for national identity, so too has individual privacy become a relative value in the global market. Intervention through data analysis is becoming the rule for personal identity. No larger database exists on the planet today than the US National Security Agency database of telephone calls made by Americans in the United States. The value of such a database exceeds any particular country’s currency including the United States. Such databases are becoming a future market of their own. <read more>
Global Consumer
American Media
In Los Angeles traffic today, the distracting handset is rare as more people use in-ear listening devices that are worn like clothing. Media is a style accessory like sunglasses or designer shoes. But the beautiful lifestyle does not obliterate media criticism. Podcasts and blogs make anybody an instant journalist or media critic. <read more>
Digital Power
Digital power derives not from the latest display technology but from the ability to customize networked sounds, words, and human associations, starting with the inquiring “user,” and involving the social matrix of human interests and engagements facilitated by digital linkage. Power pours into the system from the individual’s point of view and then linkage squares that power. <read more>
Security
After the “Age of Anxiety” we’re living now in the 21st century’s “Age of Terror.” The threat to security comes not from inherent finitude but from the threat of actual destruction. The political intent of terrorism targets public imagination. Electronic media replay what traumatizes the imagination. Terrorism undermines the presumed safety of everyday surroundings so that “home” itself – the matrix of security – no longer reassures. Therefore mystic teachers emerge to calm our terrorized nerves. They offer personal awakening from the terrorized imagination.. <read more>
The first public cell phone call was made on April 3, 1973. From 1985 to 2003, the number of cellular telephone subscribers in the United States grew from under 350,000 to nearly 159 million. And then came the Second Iraqi war. “When media historians look back at the Iraqi War, they will observe that it was then that television first became part of the cell phone revolution,” writes Paul Levinson, chair of Communications at Fordham University. <read more>
Mobil Matters
Health &
Longevity
At the age of 47, the Chinese mathematics professor Jou Tsung Hwa had been stricken with intestinal and heart problems doctors found untreatable, giving him only a few months to live. Five years later, his physicians pronounced him in perfect health. He had learned to master the art of Tai Chi. Hwa believed that Evolution implants a self-destruct mechanism into the human organism so that one generation dies, and makes way for the next generation. The secret implant is the gradual restriction of breathing. <read more>
Opportunity as Value
Popular culture celebrates the futurity of value as “opportunity.” Opportunity is a temporal opening, a movement from present into potential abundance. Value lies in the felt possibility, not in the given static facts. Factual value can threaten the abundance of possibilities. Present success endangers the riches of opportunity. Opportunity may inject value, but the present moment is where we must live. Each of us faces the daily challenge of fine-tuning the opportunity economy. But can such a dynamic economy maintain our credibility for long? <read more>
Workplace Anxiety
The fundamental change in the workplace over the past decade invites us to meditate on workplace anxiety as we ponder the future. Are we heading for a destiny like Willy Loman’s in Death of a Salesman, or do we stand a chance not to feel like misfits in an ever accelerating economy? Do we have to accept the bitter law that everyone will be stripped of dignity and humiliated several times in an ever-changing workplace? Or is there a possibility to regain some dignity by telling our own stories in our own terms to enliven and dramatize the apparently haphazard list found in the typical job resume? <read more>
We live by systems but still perceive through personalities. Our humanity has an infinite quantity of moving parts, but we still smile at the simple pattern of an individual human face. The recognizable human face must nevertheless pay its dues to systems: Recognition today requires media campaigns and many of the outstanding intellectual achievements resign themselves before the power of systems. Anyone who has participated in a well-run program must admit the virtues of teamwork. So in the end there are new hybrids of person and system evolving. <read more>
Persons
Luck, Risk, Happiness
There are complex ideas behind the words “happiness,” “luck,” “fortune,” and “chance.” The English language points to a distinction between happiness and luck. In English, you can be very lucky (fortunate) and still feel miserable. But our society puts increased emphasis taking risks in public and private thinking. Where security may have been the motive behind many social policies of the past, current thinking highlights the need to take risks and invest in the future. The dynamics of economic and social change require nimble flexibility rather than secure certitudes. The appeal of fundamentalism in religion and social philosophy depends on the larger context of chaotic change happening in all areas of life. . . .<read more>
Bodywork
Moshe Feldenkrais, Jigaro Kano, F. M. Alexander, Mantak Chia, and Thomas Hanna are pioneers of contemporary bodywork. Michael Heim discusses their achievements and pins them against the radical body-concept of the Australian artist Stelarc. . . .<read more>
Modern culture tends to capitalize “Freedom,” sanctifying it as our daily bread.We should read big-letter Freedom with an eye to the details in small print. Otherwise we may succumb to the illusion that abstract values, such as Freedom and Democracy, can be packaged, sold, and delivered like corn flakes. . . . <read more>
Freedom
Groove is technically a subdivision of rhythmic time. The jazz musician "twists" standard time into unique grooves. The groove is made of such fine rhythmic subdivisions that it disappears on paper. The spread of jazz from the 1930s to the 1970s relied on bootleg illegal publications that skirted authorized music transcriptions - and promptly ran afoul of copyright laws. This was when the FBI came into the picture....<read more>
Music Groove
The debate between the USA and Europe revolves around the nature of the global culture. This article was one American's contribution to the debate in DotCopy. <read more>
The American 'We'
Networks dissolve the private Cartesian ego and promote the basic assumption that contact is possible, desirable, and ready to happen. The younger generation embraces networks readily, whether in the form of instant messaging or online role-playing, while the academic world is typically considering new media as „history“ to be stored in museums. The younger generation understands that new media is not „history“ but exists today as a call for participation. Online media are essentially interactive. So this leads us to the Digital We. <read more>
The Digital 'We'
The web is gradually re-building itself into a multi-dimensional environment. Cyberspace marries subjective human experience to the vast data of global information. Consider some of the unique qualities of the new medium that contains all other media.....<read more>
Artificial Nature
Michael R. Heim
Lecturer in Humanities
University of California, Irvine
USA
Digital Humanity
Gods in the Machine
Digital powers promise to shape future civilization. We localize these powers by assigning the names of companies like Google or Yahoo. Yet these companies remain mythical, as Joseph Campbell defines mythology: symbols that point beyond themselves. Myths are ways in which the psyche organizes its experiences of change. Mythology provides numinous names to help us grasp the mystery of transformation while we struggle to fit the emerging culture. <read more>
A brief history of the Internet displays an active momentum by human beings whose creative impulses move the Net toward free expression and toward community building. All this has happened within two decades. So, Yes to a coming Renaissance of humanity through the Internet. Unfortunately, after the Yes, there also comes a No. <read more>
Faith & Fantasy
For J.R.R. Tolkien, fantasy was inseparable from faith. In an era when metaphysics and myth are out of fashion, the believer seeks other modes of expression. As a professor of philology at Oxford and author of hugely popular fiction, Tolkien developed profound insights into language. As a devout Catholic, he forged new connections between the languages of faith and fantasy.... <read more>
Blinding Force
Climate
Planetary growth – with the spread of electricity – is causing a new phenomenon: light pollution.
The glow of the sprawl – spreading from cities, suburbs, and subdivisions – is diminishing the
night sky. As a result, the stars and Milky Way are less visible each year, whether seen from our
backyards or through the zoom lenses of the great telescopes..... <read more>
Dealing with climate change means dealing with the climate of public opinion. How else can global warming be diminished unless through a change in public opinion? But when public discourse is polluted by lies and half-truths, credibility leaves the public domain and cynicism grows. After six years of divisive and diversionary rhetoric, the Bush administration now commands the attention of only 28 percent of the U.S. public.... <read more>