jk70-arin

A Reflection on Anne Frances Wysock’s English 202

2009-05-08T22:01:00.000-07:00

Current archeological theory puts the origins of writing in Mesopotamia over six thousand years age. It is hypothesized that the first symbols where clay tokens used to account for products used in agricultural trade. Somewhere along the line an entrepreneur started using a reed stylus to mark inventory down on a piece of clay. From these mundane origins as a primitive spreadsheet, cuneiform writing evolved.

A surprising number of cuneiform writings have transition themselves to the digital age. The Internet is a hungry information beast, devouring Cuneiform, Sanskrit, Aramaic, Hebrew, Mayan, Latin, Greek, Demonic … any text from any era, be it on clay tablets, stone, papyrus, bamboo, frescos, or paper. An insatiable cavernous void in mind of humanity demands to be filled with knowledge. Reading transforms writing into knowledge that fills the void.

What is writing?

Writing is a noun that is a verb. Writing is an act of transmitting thought through an intermediate media.

What parts do communication technologies play in writing?

Technology is the application of scientific knowledge for a practical purpose. The technology of bricks makes possible clay tablets. The technology of a knife makes possible the shaping of a reed for use as a stylus. The technology of bronze casting makes it possible to chisel hieroglyphs into stone. Reeds can be pressed into papyrus; the stylus can be dipped in ink and be used as a pen. Paper can be crafted from cellulose.

Cut symbols in stone or wood and cover it with ink, then capture the image by pressing against a piece of paper onto which to transfer the ink. Printing allows writing to be read by many.

Printing begets lithography. Putting traces on silicon to make integrated circuits is basically a lithographic process. So the whole computer revolution shares its origin with printing. How powerful your chip is determined by how many transistors you can “draw” on it. It all comes down to a fine line.

Then came the Internet. The clay tablets can be digitized and made available to any schoolboy or schoolgirl in any nation any place on earth. That is for any schoolboy or schoolgirl who may be interested in reading Cuneiform.

How are you likely to think differently about writing after this class?

The Internet fundamentally changes how we form relationships, how we express ourselves, how we reveal ourselves. We are laid bare before the planet. Let loose those forbidden thoughts and you are forever castigated as a . I think writing in the digital age is both liberating and extremely dangerous.

What more do you want to learn about writing in a digital age?

I would like to know if corporate or government control of new media takes all the freedom away?

What other technologies or media do you wish we had been able to address in class?

The Internet and new media is a candy shop for information exchange. I think we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to interactive media. Technologies like Flash and Java make information fluid and multidimensional. You could expand the class into a series of in depth sub-courses. I think given the time what was done was sufficient.

A whole science exists that is devoted to displaying information in graphic form. Some of the most interesting examples I know of are Internet related, coming from the work of CAIDA and NLANR in visualizing Internet network topologies.

If you are planning on being a teacher, how might you use in your teaching what we have discussed in this class?

There are so many applications for new media. The tradition paper with citations is such a single dimensioned means of presenting information. I see endless possibilities in all directions. The problem is taking small bites and achieving the goals in a proper time frame.

What responsibilities do you hold toward your future students, vis-a-vis writing and digital technologies?

We have the whole problem of copyright and sharing appropriate data. Our freedom is constrained in many ways, by many people. I don't ever want to snoop into my children's e-mails or Internet access logs. I find the whole way society is reacting to digital information sharing to be intellectually and emotionally upsetting. I see my responsibility to those I teach (to my own children at least) is to be open and honest about how little privacy they have. To warn them about the thought police, the book burners, the Master of the Revels.

What projects gave you the most satisfaction and useful challenge in this class?

The game, even though I only grazed the surface.

Which were most frustrating to you?

Again, the same project. I can be such such a bloody slow writer. I am not good at writting on demand. The only cure, I know, is to write more.

In both cases, why?

I always seem to need more time. I can see that a whole new world of analysis is available through computer modeling, gaming, and mathematical analysis. The possibilities make it hard to get my arms around.

If I were to teach this class again, what would you keep?

I think you did an excellent job with some very challenging material.

What would you change?

I don't know.

Why?

Because I find it hard to critique what was done in the class.

What are you most likely to carry from this class into your future work?

I would like to find a way to pull historical research projects into the digital era. We can model so many things with computers. I am particularly fascinated with digital modeling of cities. Take, for example, Rome Reborn.

Why?

This can be a whole new way to look at the humanities. It is a thrilling concept, to take a dead piece of paper or a pile of historical research and turn it into a fully interactive and multidimensional virtual object. The possibilities are endless.

Humanity makes the best decisions when fully informed and having within our collective conciseness a clear model of what was, what is, and what can be.

"What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"
-- Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke.

NC3D Transportation Demo Reel 2008 (updated!)

2009-05-05T06:14:00.000-07:00

Tuscon Streetcar

2009-05-05T06:08:00.000-07:00

High Speed Rail

2009-05-05T06:05:00.001-07:00

Visions of Transit

2009-04-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

Imagine KC from Arnold Imaging on Vimeo.

Jane McGonigal - I love Bees

2009-04-28T06:44:00.000-07:00

What was surprising, new, or unexpected was the conceptual framework of collective intelligence. Hence Bees. The idea of the hive, but then this is also the same concept mixed into a neural network concept.

The potential outcomes CI (Collective Intelligence) games, could be a whole new collaborative framework. In some ways this is happening now. The Internet is slowly tearing down the linear and regularly scheduled world of the industrial era. Twitter is immediacy that supersedes the time frame of news at 11:00. Perhaps it is vanity and hubris also. The electronic social networks become self promoting MEs, screaming into the network.

How are stories worked into this new CI world? In an abstract since stories are models for behavioral interaction. Stories are snippets of social code.

CI ... creating virtual collective models of the world, or alternate world ... these can be fantastic tool of analysis. Games and modeling are bedfellows. The attempt to make predictive models of the world goes back years. MIT in the early '70s did the modeling that became the Club of Rome Report. It was a rather apocalyptic model of the world because it foresaw global disruption caused by the decline in global resources and the increase in ecological disruption due to pollution.

In my prior post I discussed how the Internet is used to develop standards. The network ... the Internet provides a tool for social interaction that can include work, play, and modeling. These collective endeavors can take on their own reality, yet they reflect our reality.

The untapped potential for modeling or gaming ... IMHO ... needs to be tried out on societal modeling, ecology, and urban planning. Collectively building models of what can be, is in effect using the creative power of human minds as a vast parallel computer/design tool.

thoughts on network play

2009-04-23T06:25:00.000-07:00

I remember years ago working with Northwestern Mutual Life on their first web page deployment. They developed a simple "game" which would lead the play through a set of question and then determine the players life expectancy. It was a perfect game for a life insurance company, since it was driven by actuarial tables.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Internet is the capability to create ad hoc collectives in order to create computer programs, literature and art. The very underlying structure of the Internet, that is the protocols that make it all work, are the product of collaborative work perform by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Take the IETF as an example of a collective endeavor. The IETF develops standards through working groups. The working groups do most of their discussion via e-mail discussion groups. The IETF befuddled traditional standards organizations such as the venerable IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and the ISO (International Organization for Standards) because it was open and required no credentials other than the intellectual strength of each individual's work. As the "Tao of IETF" points out: A WG is really just a mailing list with a bit of adult supervision. You "join" the WG by subscribing to the mailing list; all mailing lists are open to anyone. Anyone can post to a WG (Working Group) mailing list, although most lists require non-subscribers to have their postings moderated. Each Working Group has one or two chairs.

Open source programs and the concept that you could build usable computer programs with a collective group of network strangers, was an early product of the Internet. The standards used by the IETF where often tested using open source programs. An old saw used in the IETF standards process was "Rough consensus and working code."

Without digressing much further, the point of bringing up these "traditional" Internet collaborative processes is to show that on the Internet; collective intelligence has been at work for almost 20 years.

Network games build on this tradition. In some ways you can think of network projects, like IETF standards, as a vast intellectual game.

Video Project -- Copyrighted science serves to obscure truth.

2009-04-21T05:33:00.000-07:00

Peer reviewed journals are harder to access than free studies produced by political slanted "think tanks." Citizens in democratic-republics are making globally significant decisions based incomplete information.

The world is faced with an escalating crises fueled by growth. We all live on a single planet, and what we do has an incremental effect on our fellow inhabitants. Of all the nations of the world, it is Americans who leave the largest footprint on this planet. Per capita we consume more resources than any other peoples on earth. If we as a species are to enjoy a prosperous future, we must alter our behavior in order to make civilization sustainable. For consumption addicted Americans a shift to sustainability is challenging.

Massive wealth has been made by individuals and corporations as a result of America's consumer appetite. Many peoples' short-term self interest stand in conflict with long term-self interest of the species.

A Conspiracy of Convenience

"Some people are so ideologically locked to their beliefs that they simply cannot (more likely will not) see contradictory evidence. They simply deny or explain away any anomalies." -- Steven Dutch, Why is there Anti-Intellectualism?

The conservative movement in the United States during the Bush Administration became heavily entangled with oil and gas interests. Their opposition in both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential races, Al Gore and John Kerry, envisioned themselves as ecological leaders.

The evidence of interlocking self interests

In March 2009 the Cato Institute produced ads dismissing concerns about climate change.

Both the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation are often cited by talk radio commentators when advocating for deregulation or against mass transit and environmental laws.

It is worth while to look at the sources for funding for these and other conservative think tanks.

Source Watch provides an easy way to explore these relationships.

Examples:

Cato
Reason

Another interesting site is Muckety, where you can explore relationships between corporations, people and foundations.

Example:

Reason and Cato

Reviewing other vids

2009-04-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

The English 202 class was required to put together two minute videos regarding copyright and media. A survey of the class show a propensity for concern over downloading and favoritism toward the Scrabulous story.

My observations of the videos is somewhat obscured by my own desire to compare content and style. Of videos I reviewed, Mike Stiel's video seemed the most polished and had the most impact on me.

Fast paced does not make clarity.

Wordiness does not make content clear or cogent.

Clarity is illusive.

I learned today that making a video takes thought and planning. New media creates challenges the sometimes impair or obstruct the creative process.

What made me proud of my own work is that people got it.

A short video project.

2009-04-07T05:11:00.000-07:00

The topic - how copyright empirical decision making in a democratic-republic.

In a democratic-republic it is essential that the population is well informed and capable of debating technological and social issues. Often the best and most well informed source materials for a technological and social debate comes from academic research. Academic research is distributed in peered reviewed journals and publications. Most of the peer-reviewed studies encumber research papers with copyrights and charge for the redistribution of their content.

Political organizations, most dramatically on the conservative and libertarian end of the American political spectrum, have organized corporate and special interest funded think tanks to produce pseudo academic works to influence and manipulate political opinion. The "market of ideas" is being flooded with free information produced by politicized think tanks; while the most rigorously researched and empirically reasoned works are locked away in journals requiring paid access. As a result, United States copyright laws often have an unintended consequence of limiting the widespread discrimination of scholarly information in favor of biases information, thus dramatically altering the political discourse to favor of the corporate and special interests that fund the modern political think tanks.

Why it matters – Our future depends of the political decisions we make

The United States as the richest nation in the world, and the greatest consumer of global resources, has the heaviest footprint on the planet. We consume more oil, coal and gas per capita than any other nations. We produce the most pollution and greenhouse gases. If the developing nations of the world follow in our footsteps, humanity will deplete the planet earth to an existent that will endanger the lives of future generations.

The main point

Great wealth and industry has become dependent on our exploitation of natural resources. Some would rather change the data then to change the way they live. They believe that their liberty is defined by their consumptive way of life. Some believe that the struggle to right in excessive consumption of natural resources, the production of greenhouse gasses and the right to alter private property as tyranny. Because the environmental concerns have been the result of scholarly academic research, those who feel threatened have begun to suppress the institutions and methodology of academic research. Copyright holders of peer-reviewed works have become an unwitting ally of corporate and special interests.

Emotional tone

A streak of anti-intellectual behavior exists in the American body politic. Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Anti-intellectualism in American Life discussed many of the same forces that fuel the contemporary neo-conservative rejection of intellectuals, ecologists, and urbanists. Corporate interest have harnessed anti-intellectualism as a means to ward off changes in consumptive behavior by the populace that affect their profitability. Empiricism is being attacked by an ad hoc coalition of people who fear the social and economic changes that are logically derived from our observations. All citizens should be concerned people who put their own short-term interest above the life, liberty and happiness of our posterity are manipulating that body politic.

The video

The video will explore the subject with as much depth as one can do in a few minutes. We will take a look at one controversial subject and examine the popular presentation v. the academic presentations. We will look at the funding of think tanks and who is behind the curtain pulling the levers.

Memory Page

2009-03-31T07:15:00.001-07:00

Reflections of Memory and Web Page Design

Memory, is it only the retention of data? We are not machines.

I recently saw an episode of Scientific American Frontiers that explored memory. An experimenter found that memory was enhanced when pain followed an experience. This would make sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Remembering the actions just before a traumatic incident can help prevent a repetition of the traumatic event. If in a few cases that memory is the difference between survival and death and the survivors later reproduce, then the ability to remember things just before a trauma becomes reinforced by natural selection.

It is a hard to reach out from a computer and inflict pain. Yet someplace in the common consciousness pain and trauma can be invoked.

Memory is reinforced by order and harmony. Repetition also is a means of reinforcing memory.

The size and color of text can be invocative. In our western culture we have come to associate red with fire, fire departments and fire trucks. In China red has a different connotation.

Pictures of cultural icons can be evocative and enforce memory, though cultural icons can be mean many different things to different people. Cultural monuments mean different things because they are embedded in a cultural context.

In attempting to create memorable web pages, I find myself thinking about the deeper context. How can the media be used to make the deepest impression? Are my cultural icons meaningful to others, or are they just abstract icons?

Perhaps I am seeking a more emotive and deeper symbolism than I can express here.

The media expert may define readability in terms of order, consistency, and simplicity.

Yet I find also a deep impact on memory can be invoked by shock. There is a DaDaist film done by young Dali with a scene of an eyeball being cut with a strait edged razor. Everyone who has seen that film has a clear memory of it and can recall it on the mentioning.

Generations, like 9/11, or the day Kennedy was shot, or Pear Harbor bombed, hold some memories.

How can I invoke in a web page a memory as lasting as those?

“The Phaedrus”

2009-03-24T07:36:00.000-07:00

A victim of his passions and the slave of pleasure.

Commentary on “The Phaedrus”

The Phaedrus plops the reader into a dialog between and Phaedrus on the outskirts of Athens. We are thrust into a dialog unaware of the greater context.

At stake is love and rhetoric. How does one express depth of passion, the telling of the idea, the crafting of the concept?

Memory is the key to the craft of rhetoric. Imprecise memory cannot do justice to a complex work. Is memory exercised at the expense of others? Can souls recall the holy things they saw, or have the lost the memory of the holy things. Memory lingers on scenes that have passed away. Can a memory be memory carried to true the true beauty?

Is rhetoric an invocative exercise in finding the sacred truth? Is rhetoric memory? Do we craft form within ourselves a vision of reality, perfect or flawed, and then commit this to words?

The dialog is a commitment to finding truth. Words are expressions of deeper truths. When words touch us, we form deeper bonds to them. Our memory becomes and incorporation of the rhetoric.

We consume words and make the part of or minds. Words are like food, the most truthful elements like proteins, bind to us and fill us with energy. Yet truthfulness is a perception and a flawed one at that.

Love and passion for words and dialog, the sophist pleasure to which they are enslaved. The words that find meaning give a deep and lasting pleasure to being.

Such is the tradition.

Phantasia and emotional color

2009-03-10T08:13:00.000-07:00

The storage of images, and the emotional coloring of images. Color, in and of itself, is an image provoking similes. Creative spins ar altered by subconscious shading of emotions.

The antithesis of order is purely emotive sequences of imagery. Imaging of memory spaces that is emotive, creates a deeper mapping of relationships.

-Jake and Joe

solemnis and rarus - memory

2009-03-10T07:55:00.000-07:00

Categorization is the spacial sorting of contents. This creates order. Establishing individuality of objects. How they are contained or indexed creates the cognitive schema for access. Information is stored in places, how the schema is constructed affects our access and ordering of our memories.

Albertus established the mapping of objects. This structure is imposed upon random memories.
- Jake and Joe

Collective Memory and memoria rerum

2009-03-10T07:18:00.000-07:00

Impressions from reading Chapter 1 of Mary Carruthers’s book, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200.

Memory is a rich and textured placed filled with localities, emotions and tones. Mary Carruthers draws upon the richness of the western historical tradition to give the reader a sense of memory was thought of in the Middle Ages. The text draws heavily from classical references, weaving within it Augustine and Cicero, Latin and Greek. She incorporates a historical framework constructed out of a modern classical education. Though the time frame she writes about had lost much of its knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman works, the functional society of the had created a Christian narrative overlay remapped from the classical forms.

Middle Ages understanding of memory is explored in a variety of forms. Even the written style seems reflective of the ancient rhetorical form. Associative links are made between historical schools of though and definition of Latin terms. Memory is associated with music, and tone, as well as buildings and machines. Moving and building in time, it seems at first to resonate like the shepherds lyre, and then progress eventfully into the construction of Gothic cathedrals.

The Middle Ages academics form their personal view of the world studying the remnants of classical works and memorizing Latin poetry. The build within themselves associative constructs, and edifices. The cathedral of the mind has chants and music, statuary and spatial mappings. Memory is a pilgrimage through the remapping of the Christian story on the smoldering ruins of the classical world. Even Latin and Greek are reworked into ecclesiastical variants. The philosophy of the church sublimates its classical foundations, incorporating pagan constructs with Christian labels. In doing so the collective memory of the age blots out the classical pagan past, which must remain lost until returned via Andalusia to touch off the Renaissance.

Yet these Middle Ages that separate the classical world from the modern, they form the basis of the western dilemma. The kingdom of Goths picking up the pieces of the classical world, they form a new and different place. Perhaps this world in many was is more alien to modernity than ancient Rome of Greece. So much of the modernity is the product of the reconstruction of classicism. Our civilization is the product of a collective memory. We have undone many of the Christian remapping and sought to re-associate the classical philosophies.

Yet we like our Middle Age counterparts make our own remapping. We sublimate the Middle Age philosophies and cast our own interpretations of the past upon our collective memory. Each intellectual wave changes the collective memory of the past. The Middle Ages rise from the ashes of the Roman empire held together by the pillars of the Roman Catholic church. Protestantism an mercantilism destroyed that form and recast the collective view the individuals relationship with God and Church. Then came the Enlightenment, moving God back as the distant deity and putting at the center of the collective social construct, rationality and empiricism. Then came Marx who re-remembered the past as a constant struggle between apposing forces of class-consciousness.

The past is a collective memory, and within it our own individual memories. Our construct of the world, our very memory and learning process is a product of our society. So it was with each society in different times and different places, at whatever coordinates we set our human existence.

Reflections on “Stalking with Stories,” from Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache by Keith A. Basso.

2009-03-05T05:44:00.000-08:00

Keith A. Basso finds embedded in the the language of the Western Plains' Native Americans a memory code of place tied to stories. Human memory is often organized in associative patters. Different cultures have different depths of association based on their interactions with their environment and their means of producing food, shelter, and clothing. The Inuits, who live in the Arctic have many words for snow; modern technical fields have their own complex jargon; language morphs to reflect the underlying complexity of the daily interaction of the individual with his or her environment. Basso illustrates how the traditional hunter gatherers of North America formed a rich linguistic bond between their culture and the spaces they occupied.

What perhaps is most surprising in Basso's telling is the incredible detail and richness of the prescriptive association. His research into the the rich linguistic depths of the Western Apache reveals a form of thought that seems alien to the western mind. Perhaps more alien to the American Suburban mind than to the people of the cultural roots from which western civilization is derived. The modern American Suburban culture is a culture of placelessness, strip malls and McDonald's all looking the same across vast regions of the continent. In contrast to the sameness of sub-urbanity, the uniqueness of place, in many cultures, is illustrated by a rich tapestry of words and woven into precautionary tales that bind the present to the past.

For the Western Apache the oral history of the culture is tied to the richly descriptive place names. Places are associative references to precautionary tales. The stories reinforce the uniqueness of each place, and the uniqueness of each place acts as a mind map to stories. They are reinforcing bonds of association, a congestive linked list of oral history mapped into a spacial realm. Thus the travel down the trail becomes a walk into enculturation. The richness of the place names are but indexes to a vast library of morality tales. I cannot help but to see a parallel question in the founding literature of Western Civilization, whence do we hear the blind Homer recites from memory the stories of places and bind them into one man's Odyssey?

Pictures

2009-02-17T07:35:00.000-08:00

Reflection on “A Plaintiff Speaks,” by Clarissa T. Sligh

2009-02-17T05:55:00.000-08:00

A Plaintiff Speaks” is an autobiographical reflection on the influences of mid 20^th century racial attitudes in the formation of the author’s own creative vision. The story is transports the reader back to Washington DC at a time when the nation is struggling with rectifying a national injustice rooted in Plessy v. Ferguson, and dramatically altered by Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

To Americans living in the era of the Obama Presidency the Washington DC of 1955-1956 must seem like an alien land. Washington DC has always been a city fixed on the border between north and south, a pawn in the struggle of national ideas. Now a predominantly African American city, it had entered the Civil War a city full of slaves. On April 16, 1862, President Lincoln signed an act abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, months before the Emancipation Proclamation issued on January 1, 1863. Not a state, but a Federal District, even today the people of DC are denied the benefits of statehood and self-rule.

At the center of Clarissa Sligh’s recollection is the impact of pictures. As a 16-year-old African American she found herself entangled in the struggle for equality in Clarissa Thompson et al. v. The Arlington School Board et al. Her recollections of how she was portrayed in pictures in a Washington Post article about her case illustrate the power of pictures. Her own perception of her own images used in the article, is that they betrayed her cause for equity.

A subtle dance of emotive consequences is portrayed in her reaction to her own portrait. She becomes a photographer as a result of her own transformation by photography. She gives herself a life mission of using images as a means to help the viewer become aware of how photographs are really abstract constructions.

The Media and The Word

2009-02-12T20:34:00.000-08:00

In his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase "The media is the message." One sixth the way through the 20th century, it was beginning to be apparent that content was affected by form.

Form and media affect the formality and strength of words. Ephemeral medias only have lasting significant when captured or embedded in other media. The words I wrote in the frost on a wooden crate in the desert of Kuwait faded with the morning sun, but the image of the letters captured and replicated, digitally transform the ephemeral event. The letters written in frost can now be replicated and transmitted globally. As a series of ones and zeros, their image can be moved beneath oceans, bounced off satellite and transmitted from access points.
The words, digitally encoded and transmitted globally, are still ephemeral, though reproduced and displayed on CRTs, LEDs, and plasma displays, their brief appearance is beholding to the whim of the viewer. Their very coding and transmission media are depended in the technology of the now, and the media of the moment. Placed on a CD or DVD, the image of word is still subject to the shifting sand of technological progress. They will eventfully become like the strips of nitrate film stored in my freezer, so out of sink with the modern world that it is virtually impossible to transfer their content to a new media.
While in Iraq at the ruins of Ur I saw ancient cuneiform letters. Words pressed in clay five thousand years ago. I was told by a guide that the words where written to encourage the young. Obey your mother and father. Study your lessons well. The words formed a thread in my mind. They linked me to the man pressing his stylus into the clay. His thoughts where my thoughts, the hopes an fears of those men and women now turned to dust, touched me.

Our vast technology gives a false sense power and permanence. But it is an illusion. As we move away from stone and clay our words lose permanence. Our army may tread on the same cobblestones that bore the feet of Alexander, but our ideas, and our words ablate against ancient concepts recited in daily prayers. Even these, cultures in opposition, are transformed and distorted by the new media called Internet. The global networks that helped us project our power also allowed a few dedicated zealots to coordinate attacks upon us from caves in the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

From jk70-arin

Words scrawled on an armored door remind the occupant of the ever-present danger. Works give minds numbed by IED blasts the chance to compose a call for help. Personality permanently altered by TBI, the walking wounded, filled with unexplained rage over lost memories. The words remind us of war and death, of long journeys to foreign and hostile lands. But these words have melted away in cauldrons of recycled steel. Armor now transformed into plowshares or Toyotas or the shiny nickle plated backs of iPhones.

While on leave from Kuwait I traveled to St. Louis with my two sons to find America. Hanging from the courthouse columns was a banner. The words on the banner reminded me of great injustice. The beginning of the end of slavery started in that courthouse. The Dread Scott v. Sandford case outraged many and fed a growing abolitionist movement. It fed an anger that eventfully burst forth in civil war. The words that denied citizenship to African Americans where up held by Chief Justice Taney's supreme court. Taney also rendered the oath that put Lincoln into the White House. So Taney's spoken words both broke and bound a nation.

In Springfield I found words cast in bronze. The words in bronze that caught my eye seemed always to echo of death and departure. Some part of me thought of this place as a tragic death trip. Lincoln departed on a train, only to return in a coffin; here was the start of Donner Party; through here past the Pottawatomie Trail of Death; journeys and tragedies. Here was the old capital where Lincoln one served, and where recently Barack Obama announced his candidacy.

From jk70-arin

Full circle to the Internet, information pulsing through fiber optic lines as flashes of infrared light. Pulses transformed from light to electricity to radio waves. Projected up to satellites and down to dishes. In Springfield I was taken back in time. I was in a tent in Kuwait connected to the Internet. There I watched on my Apple laptop the YouTube video of Barack Obama announcing his run for President. I heard the words. The words written down and projected upon a teleprompter, the words and the media transforming the world.

Words transform us and bind us. Words can help us find our common humanity. We are a nation bound by the words in our Constitution. Our peace is bound by treaties, our wars driven by propaganda. We can move words at the speed of light to each and every corner of the world. The paradox of the information age, so many words and so few of meaning.

Carefully chosen words can transform our world for the better. I want to contribute to that transforming dialog.