LA Primary June 8

Voting here drives me nuts because you don't get anywhere near a comprehensive voter's guide as you do in Oregon or Washington state. For example, in the 43rd District Assembly you have to choose 7 of 16 people for the Democratic Party Central Committee. Neither of the two voter's guides / instructions or the Dem info guide contain info on the candidates, and googling them turns up next to nothing.

Why would you run for office and not have a basic webpage or blog up? Hmmmm.

However I did find this, which lists all the candidates' addresses for this and other races.

What it reveals is that of the 16 candidates, four are incumbents, from Glendale, Van Nuys, and Burbank. One incumbent is Ardena Clark, from Glendale. She lives at the same address as two challengers, Nicole P. James and Creigton Cody Jones (she and Jones share an apartment, James is in a different unit in the same building). Two other challengers from Glendale share an address and are married, Michael Steger and My-Hoa Steger. Hmmmm.

Like I said, there's little info to go on, so I'm voting against all the shared addresses. It sound like too much of a power grab. Having a broad mix of people on a committee -- not married couples and neighbors -- seems like a better thing.

Here's the exact info...43rd Assembly District
CARO AVANESSIAN JOHN T. BUTCHKO
Systems Analyst Retired Attorney
1713 Chevy Knoll Dr 1208 Bruce Av
Glendale, CA 91206 3/06/08 Glendale, CA 91202 2/25/08
PHONE - (818) 956-7103 DAYTIME - (818) 243-1288
E-MAIL - caroava@aol.com

* ARDENA CLARK LAURIE C. COLLINS
Music Teacher Environmental Law Attorney
1108 E Plamer 23 914 Geneva St
Glendale, CA 91205 3/04/08 Glendale, CA 91207 3/07/08
DAYTIME - (323) 828-5327 DAYTIME - (818) 572-5507
FAX - (818) 545-3698
E-MAIL - ardenajoy3@hotmail.com E-MAIL - laurie.collins@worldnet.att.net

NICOLE P. JAMES CREIGTON CODY JONES
Teacher Youth Instructor
1108 E Palmer 18 1108 E Plamer Av 23
Glendale, CA 91205 3/04/08 Glendale, CA 91205 3/04/08
DAYTIME - (323) 259-1860 EVENING - (323) 828-5327 DAYTIME - (323) 828-5327
E-MAIL - creighton.cody@gmail.com

PAUL MITCHELL ADRIN NAZARIAN
Education Non-Profit Director Chief Legislative Deputy
3616 Las Palmas 827 N Hollywood Wy PBM 105
Glendale, CA 91208 3/07/08 Burbank, CA 91505 3/07/08
DAYTIME - (818) 306-5087 PHONE - (818) 999-9999
E-MAIL - paul@edvoice.org E-MAIL - aanazarian@gmail.com

* THOMAS PATRICK O'SHAUGNESSY * A. "LILA" RAMIREZ
County Disaster Communicator Retired Business Executive
716 S 5th St H 1000E Mountain St
Burbank, CA 91501 3/06/08 Glendale, CA 91207 3/06/08
EVENING - (818) 848-8639 DAYTIME - (818) 246-9633
E-MAIL - iwwthom@yahoo.com E-MAIL - rlram@pacbell.net

HEATHER MARIE REPENNING ROBERT B. SILVER
Community Development Director Union Actor
1707 Micheltorena St 310 3400 Ben Lomand Pl
Los Angeles, CA 90026 3/07/08 Los Angeles, CA 90027 3/07/08
DAYTIME - (323) 660-6543 DAYTIME - (323) 666-5321
FAX - (323) 666-5321
E-MAIL - hrepenni@aol.com E-MAIL - r_silver@sbcglobal.net
MICHAEL STEGER MY-HOA STEGER
Teacher Teacher
1216 E Harvard St 3 1216 E Harvard St 3
Glendale, CA 91205 3/04/08 Glendale, CA 91205 3/04/08
PHONE - (323) 259-1860 DAYTIME - (323) 259-1860
E-MAIL - michael.g.steger@gmail.com E-MAIL - mhsteger@gmail.com
CONTEST CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE
* DENOTES INCUMBENT

* ROZ TELLER KARAPET KARO TOROSSIAN
Educator Environmental Design Student
13220 Aetna St 13325 1/2 Erwin St
Van Nuys, CA 91401 3/04/08 Valley Glen, CA 91401 3/07/08
PHONE - (818) 908-9004 DAYTIME - (818) 395-8575
FAX - (818) 510-3180
E-MAIL - roz_teller@yahoo.com
TOTAL NUMBER OF CANDIDATES 16 Read more!

Totally Gay Fridays: Marriage

I don't blog much about my partner, or write much about my personal life these days. Part of this is to respect his privacy, but also I'm probably making up for being such an exhibitionist in my previous LTR. My poor ex got to have our private life bandied about in Harper's, This American Life, and numerous galleries and performance spaces. Nothing bad came of it, but I guess I just got over my exhibitionist streak this go 'round.

Anyway, my current partner and I are planning on taking advantage of the new California gay marriage ruling as soon as the dust settles. Bureaucracy confuses me (uh, like with things like travel documents) so here's some links on gettin' hitched...

L.A. County Clerk's office (with statement on 'mo marriage)
Concise summary at ChinaBridal.com.
More detailed overview at L.A. Marriage License.
Do it with Officiant Guy, who married Scott Baio! Read more!

This 'Mo No Go To Mo.

When I was in high school, I was trying to ask our drama teacher something in a confused, roundabout way, and our snap-queen pianist interrupted me, saying, "You know, he is so smart, but so stupid sometimes."

I wrote a paper that got accepted to my field's international conference. I passed quals. I won an award for the paper. I prepped for the trip to Montreal reviewing my French, planned to meet people, mapped out the hotel and every ATM and coffeeshop in a five-mile radius ... but checking that my passport was still valid? Whoops um.... ...forgot to do that. And you can't fly to Canada without one these days. I had no idea mine had expired a year ago. Time flies when you're getting a PhD. Plus I've been going to Canada for 15 years and never used a passport -- because I was always driving across the border, not flying. Sigh.

I'm bummed to be missing the conference, esp. the preconference, "The Long History of new Media." Lotsa academic-geek celebs there. But what can you do besides zen out with the ole' radical acceptance? Read more!

Montreal 'Mos

Hey there, I'm heading up to Montreal tomorrow for the International Communication Association 2008 conference. I'm presenting a paper titled "Contested Kicks: Sneakers and Gay Masculinity, 1964-2007," which won one of two awards for Top Student Paper from the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered Studies Interest Group.... If you're attending, my paper is on the Masculinities panel Saturday the 24th at 9:00 in the Dickens Room at the Le Centre Sheraton. Immediately after the panel is the GLBT business meeting, at which they'll give out the awards. Read more!

Thinking at the Interface Proceedings for Download

Groovy HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) has the proceedings from their first conference available for free download. Snag the details on Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface, Proceedings of the First International HASTAC Conference, Duke University, North Carolina, April 19-21, 2007. Read more!

C-O-O-L

Our old pal from back-in-Seattle-days, bobbyblue, is in Vanity Fair for his spelling bee action out in Gotham. Yay bobby! Read more!

Totally Gay Friday: New Books

Two new novels are out by really fine gay writers and swell fellows, both of whom I had the pleasure of recently seeing read.

Alistair McCartney's debut The End of the World Book is an encyclopedia of dark goodness. Check out the video trailer.

Scott Heim's We Disappear is his long awaited third novel, also full of darkness. Check out his trailer, asswell. Read more!

New Blogger Chapter Out Now

Megan Boler's new collection from MIT Press, Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, is on sale now. It has a chapter of mine in it that takes a critical look at hyperbolic media narratives around political blogging and the CBS News "Memogate" controversy during the 240 US presidential election. In it I suggest ways that narratives can be more effective and discuss what I call "suprarational" perspectives for producers and scholars of tactical media. Jodi Dean also contributes a great chapter on her theory of "communicative capitalism" that I read in manuscript and have been citing and recommending a lot. Looking forward to reading the rest! Read more!

Geek Vacation!

Where do we go? Read more!

New Wave Wednesday: New Romantic Harris

 

Replicant001 combined Calvin Harris with videos and images of '80s New Romantic and New Wave bands as a class project for school.

Read more!

New Wave Wednesday: Severed Heads

I've never been in a band. But on the fantasy roster of bands I wish I could've been in, Severed Heads (1979-2008) is way up there. They were synth based, did dance pop as well as weird sound stuff, and, while they had the electroindustrial apocalypto vibe I love so well -- unlike Cabaret Voltaire or Front 242 they had a more explicit sense of humor. So did Revolting Cocks but I never thought their songs were anywhere near as good. Thrill Kill Kult was funny in a campy way but Severed Heads -- they were just wacko funny. I like that. Plus they're Ozzies! I lived in Chicago during the Wax Trax/Nettwerk heyday and have many fond memories of dancing to this ditty. "All the way to the bottom Maggie! You made it!"

They officially are dead now, but main man Tom Ellard is still up to various tricks. Read more!

Random Thoughts on Qualifying (Comprehensive) Exams

So, for those of you not in grad school, quals (aka comps) are the stage in a PhD program between taking classes and working on your dissertation. It's like the thesis of the master's-degree-within-your-PhD (in addition to the exams, you often do a working paper and/or dissertation prospectus). I've been working on it for I guess a year or so: putting together my committee, drafting and revising reading lists, reading, annotating, and studying, then writing essay answers to 4 questions and having a 2-hour oral examination with my committee. Anyway, now it's done and here's a few thoughts on the process, looking back...

- The process is about the canon, but it's also about you. My biggest surprise was how much it was reflective, and served to help me develop a much stronger sense of myself, my interests, and my methods as a researcher.
- The oral defense is not just about the lit review. I spent too much time studying every book like flashcards so I could speak to everything on my list. I didn't prepare enough for the broader philosophical questions I was asked about my own beliefs and positions as a scholar. Think about discipline, politics, intervention, epistemology, ontology.
- The oral defense CAN BE a lit review. All it takes is one question on something you aren't prepared for to trip you up. Like the first question asked by the first of my committee member to speak, about a reference I'd put in an answer as a general supporting point. I glossed it over in the essay and didn't review it before orals (It was from a book I'd read a little over a year ago.) I handled it OK, but it was funny that, of all the references (from my lists and outside my lists) that I had reviewed and re-read, he asked me about one of the few that I hadn't.
- Stress: Daily megadoses of all B vitamins plus 500 mg or so of magnesium daily. A good multiple on top won't hurt.
- Anxiety: I turned my oral defense into Top Chef by cooking rather elaborate snacks. (I don't know if other schools do this, at Annenberg you're expected to provide light refreshments for the committee.) It was kind of ridiculous, but cooking the morning of the defense and serving at the beginning of it gave me something to do with my nervous energy, like bartending at a party.
- Stress: Make time to work out, walk, etc. Clear your head.
- I tried to cram too much into my lists. It resulted in too many cursory rather than in-depth reads. It was helpful in that I feel really secure on those areas, now, and have a lot of material for my diss, but I should've heeded my advisor's advice and cut the lists more, saved some of those books for later, especially since now I'll be going back and reading most of them in their entirety.
- I bought an Iris Scanner pen for notetaking. Could never get the damn thing to work, waste of money.
- I often flatbed-scanned introductions and summaries from books, then used optical character recognition to convert to text to put into Endnote, my references database. While this wasn't as good for memorization, it saved my hands and wrists a lot of keyboard stress, and saved time.
- My History of Communication Technologies list and Science & Technology Studies list had too much overlap. I should've combined them into an Approaches to the Study of Communication Technology, with subsets on things like Philosophies of Technology, Cultural Studies of Tech, etc.
- Time spent early in the process discussing your lists with advisors is never wasted.
- I wish I'd had a more systematic approach to triage: figuring out which books were higher and lower relevance/priority, so I could've devoted more and less time to them, respectively. I did this roughly and ad hoc, but there were several books I never cited or discussed -- I wish I could've anticipated that more beforehand.
- I love Endnote. Being able to search for every reference on, for example, genomics, was a huge help.
- I hate Microsoft Word. My version has become really buggy and unstable, which was dangerous while writing. I need to find a better word processing app to work with Endnote.
- Writing the initial drafts took less time than expected. Finalizing them and doing citations (even with Endnote) took much longer than expected.
- Burnout: I had 10 days to write. I used all of them, but was exhausted. I can see the appeal of doing it in 7, even the appeal of the much faster closed-book process where you just go to school and write an answer in 3 hours each day for 4 days.
- I started reading and notetaking last summer, but not in earnest until January. By late March I was pretty burned out on the process.
- I did nothing else this semester, except a research assistantship. No TAing, no classes. I'm glad.
- Backup constantly!
- You can do a lot online: USC had electronic copies of a few books online, I also used Amazon, Google Books, and Questia to do (sometimes limited) keyword searches when I couldn't find what I was looking for.
- I ended up buying about 75% of my books, almost all used. Of the ones I checked out from the library, about half I would consider buying now. Expensive. Wish I had a better strategy for reducing costs.
- Well known and canonical books tend to have outlines and summaries posted online already, as well as reviews. I found these often quite useful.
- The oral defense is a weird mix of conversation and interrogation. I'm sure everyone's experiences are different, but I found it a bit dizzying to be jumping back and forth between defensive and conversational postures so much. Read more!

Passed Exams

Whew.

Yesterday I passed my qualifying exams. Today, on my first day as an All-But-Dissertation PhD Candidate, I got up to do morning email and my laptop promptly died. It's over 4 years old, and I've been expecting this for some time (it's an old iBook with a crappy logic board that's been replaced like 4 times). Still, it was ironic (or a blessing) that it went kaput the day after all my months of technology studies. Read more!

Exams Question #4

Et finalement! The question I went with for my History of Communication Technologies area. In addition to my interest in sound, I went with this one because it had some specificity to it. Even though it was broad, it gave me a specific handle to grapple with such a large subject area, which made it more interesting to write:

The study of visual technologies, like the study of vision and visuality themselves, have dominated Western scholarship. What has been the role of audio technologies in the shaping of Western culture, knowledge, and society? What have been some of the key technological innovations and key scholarly studies that have contributed to our increasing understanding of just how vital the audio/aural dimension of culture and society have been? How have communication technologies impacted and altered the relationship between script and sound, between the printed word and the spoken word? How do audio technologies construct subjects through both production and reception? Why do audio technologies matter? Read more!

Exams Question #3

Here's the question I chose to answer for my Science & Technology Studies reading list. Did I mention choosing questions was hard? They were all interesting, nothing totally left-field, and this area in particular I struggled over which one to answer. I ending up choosing this one because the power-knowledge aspect let me get closer to some of the Foucauldean concepts I'd been interested in.

Science and technology can be seen from (at least) two different vantage points. On one hand, they can be considered instrumental, a process of discovery which leads to the unveiling of truth (even if those truths are tentative or temporary). On the other hand, they can be seen as productive, revealing sets of practices which result in the social or discursive production of truth. How might each of these perspectives influence our critical understanding of the relationships between power and knowledge as they are constructed institutionally are things such as biomedical research, medical perception, and gender? Read more!

Totally Gay Fridays: David Eckard

My ex is pretty damn gay. He put up with me for 9 years.

Dave's a great sculptor/performance/video artist who recently got a teaching gig in France; you can see video and pics of his work, not to mention cute sailors, at his new blog detailing his expat-homo-avant experience. Read more!

Exams Question #2

So here's what I had to answer for my Gender & Sexuality subject area:

One of the key issues within feminist theory over the past few decades has been the relationship between identity politics and visibility. What role do these concepts continue to play within feminist and queer theory, if any? Trace the history of these concepts, as they have been articulated and theorized in different areas of gender and sexuality, and make an argument about their relevance or not today. Read more!

New Wave Wednesday: All I Ever Wanted

Best song The Human League ever recorded, seriously. From the criminally neglected album Secrets (2001). Read more!

Exam Question #1

Update on my qualifying exams: Done writing; oral defense a week from today!

So here's one of the question regarding Qualitative Methods that I chose to answer; I'll post the rest over this week:

The range within qualitative methods is wide. Taking a few methods you see as appropriate for your research questions, discuss the relationship within these methods. How are they in conversation with each other? How do you position yourself as a scholar of communication who practices these methods? As a way to answer this question, take the themes of your other lists (i.e. communication technology, science studies, gender and sexuality), and discuss how you would approach these topics methodologically. Read more!

Totally Gay Fridays: Tracey's Hot Pet

Tracey Thorn from Everything but the Girl doing a cover of Pet Shop Boys remixed by Hot Chip. Nufsed. Read more!

New Wave Wednesday: Cabaret Voltaire

 o cabaret voltaire, your lo-res hypermediated goodness looks even better on youtube. i love you, even when you try to git all fonky. Read more!

Lamtastic

Hey I'm in some books nominated for Lambda Literary Awards this year!

LGBT ANTHOLOGIES:
First Person Queer, Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel (Arsenal Pulp Press)
LGBT EROTICA:
The Mammoth Book of New Gay Erotica, Lawrence Schimel (Carrol & Graf)
Homosex: 60 Years of Gay Erotica, Simon Sheppard (Running Press)

Congrats to the editors and thanks for including me!

Oh and I also have a review of Media Queered, Kevin Barnhurst (Peter Lang Publishing, LGBT ARTS & CULTURE nominee) up at the International Journal of Communication. Read more!

You know you've been holed up writing answers too long when stuff like this starts running through your head & you think it's funny

Some day we'll find it
the Rabinow Connection
Anthropology of the con-tem-por-rar-y...

----

"Several epistemological perspectives are discussed in Sandra Harding's influential essay, "Is There a Feminist Method Acting?" (1987)..." Read more!

In the Thick of Writing

Ah well now I received my questions last Friday and am thick in the middle of writing up my answers. I'm happy to report the questions were all good -- I had a total of 11 from which I had to choose four, and there were no real left-field ones in the bunch. I could've responded to any of them and would've benefited from it. If anything, choosing which questions to answer has been hard -- I was still having second thoughts this morning.

That being said, I'm just a wee bit burned out on the examination process in general. I've been reminding myself that after this and one or two more classes, I'll be pretty much done with this mode of writing forever, and I'll be about ready for that. The mental muscles used in this backflip of regurgitation-with-inflection are getting tired....

Examination soundtrack! B-52s Yelle Magnetic Fields Cut Copy Crystal Castles Emma Bunton Tracey Thorn Pet Shop Boys Patrick Wolf Darren Hayes Goldfrapp Moby (! -- I know, I got so burned out on his ethnomusicological wallpaper but the new album is a sweet bit of melancholic house, reminding me why I first liked him in the first place.) Read more!

It is finished.

Well, not completely finished, but I'm one step closer in preparing for my qualifying exams, which leads to taking the exams, which leads to starting my dissertation, which leads to getting my Ph.D, which leads to getting a job, which leads to tenure, which leads to a nice house with a garden. Yes, this whole process is basically about swiss chard.

Here's a pic of the 127 books on my lists, which I've now completed reading some degree of, annotating, and putting the notes into my citation database and this blog. I've got a week now to read some of the books more completely and review my notes. Then, a week from tomorrow, I receive my exam questions and write answers for ten days, then have an oral exam next month. If all goes well, I will become a Ph.D candidate on Cinco de Mayo. Read more!

de Certeau's History

Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, 1988 [1975].

Publisher: "From the seventeenth-century attempts to formulate a "history of man" to Freud's Moses and Monotheism, de Certeau examines the West's changing conceptions of the role and nature of history." Shift from historical writing as revealing truth to constructing it, from the natural collective memory of a people to an encounter with Other. From the history of us to the story of them.
- "Fiction of a linearity of time." KITTLER demonstrates resisting this
- History should be positioned as a subjective interpretation SPIGEL, GINZBURG.
- Disagrees with MARX, includes symbolic labor as productive
- Extension of FOUCAULT archaeology 14 [as KITTLER incorporates media]
- Present/past, historical subject as Other, repressed, progress
- How does he sit up against GITELMAN's concenerns with media as a historical subject? ACLAND on residual media?
- (Historical) writing as ritual communication CAREY
- As such, history and writing create systems [discourse networks? discursive fields?] supporting [and challenging?] systems of power
- Agency of historian in creating "truth," socially constructing fictions rather than uncovering mimetic facts. As such the past isn't really ever finished or even past but something created in the present. Therefore writing about the past = writing about the present = alternative possibilities, futures = others, marginalized
- So of course given his interest in Freud, relation with Lacan, this all comes back to forming of subjectivity
- Compare theories on historiography to WHITE
Note: most original versions of essays written 69-74

Introduction: Writings and Histories
Part 1: Productions of Places
1. Making History: Problems of Method and Problems of Meaning
2. The Historiographical Operation
Part II. Productions of Time: A Religious Archeology
Introduction: Questions of Method
3. The Inversion of What Can Be Thought: Religious History in the Seventeenth Century
4. The Formality of Practices: From Religious Systems to the Ethics of the Enlightenment ( the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries)
Part III: Systems of Meaning: Speech and Writing
5. Ethno-Graphy: Speech, or the Space of the Other, by Jean de Léry
6. Language Altered: The Sorcerer's Speech
7. A Variant: Hagio-Graphical Edification
Part IV. Freudian Writing
8. What Freud Makes of History: "A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis"
9. The Fiction of History: The Writing of Moses and Monotheism

History Bump
Unimaginable Inscape
American Historical Review
Church History

Read more!

Czitrom's American Mind

Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan, 1982.

Publisher: "In a fascinating and comprehensive intellectual history of modern communication in America, Daniel Czitrom examines the continuing contradictions between the progressive possibilities that new communications technologies offer and their use as instruments of domination and exploitation."

- Importance of incorporating media in historical sociological research CERTEAU, KITTLER
- Aligns with WINNER, ROBINS on tech preserving those in power, utopic responses
- Critique of media effects behavioral tradition 132, 145-6
- Propaganda, military KITTLER ROBINS MATTELART DOUGLAS
- Determinism, McLuhan INNIS -- doesn't cite but relate to ONG
- ADORNO 142 184 144-5
- SIMON and electricity, Beard LUTZ
- Newness - does he critique the concept enough? GITELMAN
- Most if not all electronic, no print EISENSTEIN, DAVIDSON

- American Historical Review
- Pooley connects him to CAREY, GEERTZ, and Chicago interpretative sociology (Dewey, Mead, Park), contra H. SCHILLER, Could also relate INTERPRETATION to several other methodological discussions and examples
Chapter one online:
Search ar Questia

-- In the 1890s, a trio of American thinkers began the first comprehensive reckoning with modern communication in toto as a force in the social process. Charles Horton Cooley, John Dewey, and Robert Park each ascribed enormous significance to the sum of recent advances in media technology, and each placed the implications he saw at the center of his larger social thought. Together, they construed modern communication essentially as an agent for restoring a broad moral and political consensus to America, a consensus they believed to have been threatened by the wrenching disruptions of the nineteenth century ... (p. 91). [Relate this to public sphere WINNER DEAN WARNER CHARLAND WHITE etc.]
- Telegraph network: “It would not be long, ere the whole surface of this country would be channeled for those nerves which are to diffuse, with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land; in fact, one neighborhood of the whole country.” 123 STANDAGE
- “Although separated from us by thousands of miles of distance, they will be again restored to us in feeling, and still present to our affection, through the help of communications.” 125

PART ONE Contemporary Reactions to Three New Media
1. "Lightning Lines" and the Birth of Modern Communication, 1838-19003 http://www.phil-inst.hu/uniworld/egyetem/polfiz/irodalom/cikk25.htm
2. American Motion Pictures and the New Popular Culture, 1893-1918 30
3. The Ethereal Hearth: American Radio from Wireless through Broadcasting, 1892-1940 60
PART TWO
4. Toward a New Community? Modern Communication in the Social Thought of Charles Horton Cooley, John Dewey, and Robert E. Park 91
5. The Rise of Empirical Media Study: Communications Research as Behavioral Science, 1930-1960 122
6. Metahistory, Mythology, and the Media: The American Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan 147
Epilogue: Dialectical Tensions in the American Media, Past and Future 183
Notes 197
Bibliography 227
Index 247 Read more!

Winner's Whale & the Reactor

Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, 1986.

- Critiques the techno enthusiasm, utopias, progress in sympathy with WILLIAMS MATTELART etc. Specifically criticizes e-democracy as misunderstanding democracy [DEAN] and not acknowledging how technologies maintain hierarchies of power [ROBINS]
- Mythinformation = "the almost religious conviction that a widespread adoption of computers and communications systems along with easy access to electronic information will automatically produce a better world for human living" (105). [See on MOSCO, WHITE on myth ≠ opposite of true, still powerful force]
- Title essay, seeing whale breach near reactor. "Here were two tangible symbols of the power of nature and of human artifice: one an enormous creature swimming gracefully in a timeless ecosystem, the other a gigantic piece of apparatus linked by sheer determination to the complicated mechanisms of the technological society" (p. 168). Compare to LEO MARX pastoral, NYE's sublime. Uncritical acceptance of tech changes without deliberation, or what he calls 'Technological somnambulism" instead of determinism [compare to Hughes' technological momentum in WILLIAMS, affordances in SCIENCE STUDIES, RAYMOND WILLIAMS. Is it really so? Nukes heavily debated. HILMES, DOUGLAS document heavy deliberations in radio.]
- Call for political philosophy of technology resonates with LATOUR, WILLIAMS, FEENBERG and is based on deliberative democratic theory involving public sphere [WARNER, DEAN]. Complaint that there has been no philosophy of technology is no longer true,then. But was it ever? HEIDEGGER, MARX, LUDDITES?
- Problem of focus on risk rather than danger. "A technology recognized as an example of true risk in one context, recombinant DNA research and development, will be badly misconstrued if it is seen as nothing more than a risk question in another emerging context-public policy on genetic engineering" (p. 153). See RABINOW, REARDON BRAMAN on biotech.

- "Writers who venture beyond the most pedestrian, dreary conceptions of tools and uses to investigate ways in which technological forms are implicated in the basic patterns and problems of our culture are often greeted with the charge that they are merely 'antitechnology' or 'blaming technology'" (xi).
- "The basic task for a philosophy of technology is to examine critically the nature and significance of artificial aids to human activity" (4).
- "If the experience of modern society shows us anything, however, it is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning" (6).
- "The construction of a technical system that involves human beings as operating parts brings a reconstruction of social roles and relationships" (11).
- "At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions to efficiency and productivity and their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority" (19).
- "Histories of architecture, city planning, and public works contain many examples of physical arrangements with explicit or implicit political purposes" (23).
- "In many instances, to say that some technologies are inherently political is to say that certain widely accepted reasons of practical necessity--especially the need to maintain crucial technological systems as smoothly working entities--have tended to eclipse other sorts of moral and political reasoning" (36).
- "The prevailing consensus seems to be that people love a life of high consumption, tremble at the thought that it might end, and are displeased about having to clean up the messes that modern technologies sometimes bring" (51). ^i.e. anxiety in technological change.
- "We should try to imagine and seek to build technical regimes compatible with freedom, social justice, and other key political ends" (55).
- "But this eloquence of criticism--and perhaps this is a property of criticism--is matched by a poverty of practice" (67). ^Applies to most/all criticism? Winner's included?
- "[Enthusiasts] employ a metaphor of revolution for one purpose only--to suggest a drastic upheaval, one that people ought to welcome as good news. It never occurs to them to investigate the idea or its meaning any further" (101).
- "Current developments in the information age suggest an increase in power by those who already had a great deal of power, an enhanced centralization of control by those already prepared for control, an augmentation of wealth by the already wealthy" (107).
- "The efficient management of information is revealed as the telos of modern society, its greatest mission" (115).

I. A Philosophy of Technology
1. Technologies as Forms of Life
2. Do Artifacts Have Politics?
3. Techne and Politeia
II. Technology: Reform and Revolution
4. Building the Better Mousetrap
5. Decentralization Clarified
6. Mythinformation
III. Excess and Limit
7. The State of Nature Revisited
8. On Not Hitting the Tar-Baby
9. Brandy, Cigars and Human Values
10. The Whale and the Reactor

Scott London
Disarray
Technology and Culture Read more!

Mattelart's Invention of Communication

Armand Mattelart, The Invention of Communication, 1996 [1994].

Publisher: "Today, it is the Internet. One hundred years ago, it was the telegraph. And before that? Networks of road, rail, and water. It's all "communication." [contra DISS] The Invention of Communication invites us to explore all the multifarious meanings that have made up our age-old attempts to connect [KITTLER]. ... The multiple usages and systems that each historic period puts forth in the name of communication. A veritable history of the idea of the social [SCIENCE STUDIES], Armand Mattelart's genealogy [FOUCAULT] maps the many means by which humans interact—from carefully cataloguing Others [GILMAN], to asserting power over them, to working together with them to build new forms of community [CAREY, WILLIAMS]. Studying a vast array of modern forms of social intercourse and control ... takes up topics such as the elaboration of warfare as a logistic [KITTLER, ROBINS], the rise of professional societies of propaganda and national propagation, the history of universal expositions and world fairs [SIMON, LANZA, CRARY?] the birth of documentary film [HARTOUNI, Chris in BANET-WEISER, DIJCK, CARTWRIGHT, PENLEY] out of physiological investigations in the nineteenth century [KITTLER, O'CONNOR, LAQUEUR], the development of the popular press [SCHUDSON] and the popular novel [DAVIDSON], and the origins of American social science. This history runs from the circuits of exchange to the circulation of goods, people, and messages, from the construction of railroads to the emergence of long-distance communication. Throughout, Mattelart brings a clarifying perspective to the ideologies and theories that accompany these transformations. He shows how Enlightenment and nineteenth century utopian thinking about communication led to the strategic and geopolitical thinking of the twentieth century, and finally to mass and individual psychosociology, mass culture, and marketing. ... A remarkable interpretation of the dizzying complex of systems supporting the social world of modernity."

Enthusiasm, newness, utopias: ROBINS CHUN GITELMAN ACLAND WILLIAMS DEAN
POLITICAL ECONOMY: SHILLERs
MILITARY: ROBINS, KITTLER

Archaeology of knowledge about communication as a concept and field of knowledge, not media technologies, beginning in 17th century. From a review: "A historical pattern of unjustified technological enthusiasm that was indispensable to the initial establishment of media technologies. ... Invites us to think of this pattern as having a broader and deeper history. Against the customary historiographical split between an earlier industrial revolution and a more recent communication media revolution, Mattelart finds that the contemporary rhetoric about a communication revolution was the ideology of the whole of historical capitalism." in Technology and Culture 40.3 (1999) 694-695

Media, Culture & Society review

Bardin blog review.

- Critiques communication studies for being too "mediacentric" p. x [contra KITTLER], notes that communication studies existed long before mass media. "Ther media tropism engenders a reductive vision of the history of communication. worse, it provokes a historical amnesia that prevents us from discerning where the truly important stakes lie in the current and rapid transformation of our contemporary mode of communication. It is this rejection of history that explains why the debates on contemporary communication are so meager, so banal, and so mired in dualistic visions and impossible dilemmas..." p. x
- Acknowledges (but doesn't detail) history of comm utopia / dystopia, "Ever since communication--above and beyond the different meanings each era confers upon it--undertook its trajectory in pursuit of the ideal of reason, the representation tha thas been made of it has been torn between emancipation and control, between transparency [DIJCK] and opacity." p. xvi. Paradox of freedom and liberation yet connection and social control
Uptopic: "With the appearance of the railway, the image of the network served as a guide for the first formulation of a redeptive ideology of communication. Networks of communication were envisaged as creators of a new universal bond." p. 85 LEO MARX, WINNER
- Intro to chapter "The Cult of the Network" arising from followers of Claude Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) French philosopher who, after the revolution, articulated organic metaphor of the state as body with government as administration of systems, leading in his followers for enthusiastic embrace of technological systems for exploiting the planet

Preface to the English Edition
Introduction: Flow, Bond, Space, and Measure
1 The Paths of Reason 3
2 The Economy of Circulation 26
3 The Crossroads of Evolution 54
4 The Cult of the Network 85
5 The Temple of Industry 112
6 The Communitarian City 133
7 The Hierarchization of the World 163
8 Symbolic Propagation 179
9 Strategic Thought 198
10 The Portrayal of Crowds 227
11 The Pace of the Human Motor 260
12 The Market of Target Groups 277
Epilogue: New Organic Totalities? 301
Notes 309
Index 335

Here’s a bit from the Encyclopedie, entry on ‘Newspapers’, probably penned by Diderot “[Newspapers were invented] for the comfort of those who are either too busy or too lazy to read entire books. It is a means of satisfying one’s curiosity, and of becoming a savant on the cheap”. (Mattelart, 34.) Read more!