While working on the rez, at one point a Native American elder said of the information highway: “any road can get you somewhere.” Unfortunately, many programs that embrace digital media tools are too enamored with the technology to think more critically about the “somewhere” we are moving towards. It was during the period when I worked on the rez that I realized the importance of appropriate applications of technology and the ethnocentrism embedded in the idea of “progress.” More importantly, I was forced to think more carefully about who or what I was ultimately serving in my work.

As a fellow media geek it might surprise you, then, to suggest that my approach since then has been to serve  the planet: humans and nonhuman alike. In particular I feel a strong calling to speak to the best of my abilities on behalf of our silent partner: nature. These days in my current role as a professor of media studies at an American university in Rome, I find myself in the unlikely position of having to argue for a greener approach to media. I have taken to heart the task of incorporating lessons I learned beyond the walled garden of academia to green the field of media studies. What follows, then, is a field report from my most recent effort, which was to green a digital media culture course.

The Root of the Problem

Last Spring, about halfway through the semester of my undergrad Digital Media Culture class I asked students to raise their hand if they expected the course to be about ecology. None did, which didn’t surprise me. But I did in fact incorporate ecology as a major element of the course material. Was I forcing an unrelated issue on an unsuspecting class? Is there a legitimate connection between environmental issues and digital media culture?

Absolutely! The impact of electronics on the biosphere is staggering. The entire production chain of our media gadgets damages the environment in several ways. Issues include:

• the toxins used to make gadgets and their impact on the health of workers and their communities;

• the CO2 emissions of fossil fuels needed to run our electronic networks (which is now equal to the global aviation industry);

• the ecological “mindprint” on our perception of time, space and our sense of “place”;

• the enabling of a destructive globalized growth economy; and

• the e-waste generated from over-consumption.

It’s not all negative. There are many positive aspects to digital media culture that may also help us prevent an impending global ecological catastrophe, in particular the emergent culture of sharing, connecting and self-organizing prevalent on the Web. I also hope that the kinds of social revolutions occurring in the Arab world and Occupied movements will translate to the environmental movement.

A holistic digital media course should make connections between cultural practice and the environment. Even if we are teaching technical skills and aptitude, reducing these skills to an isolated digital literacy encloses them within a mental bubble that is likely to repeat the mistakes of our techno-scientific revolution that have brought on our ecological crisis. Moreover, no matter how neutral our educational model is, technology always has embedded cultural attitudes that impact our pedagogical approach and are ingrained within the tools.

So, if the environment is intimately linked with digital media, why is it so rare to see the two issues connected?

One of the misconceptions concerning environmental education is that it is a topic that is outside all subjects except those pertaining to “nature” (such as the biological sciences). Even though the primary cause of our ecological crisis is cultural, few who teach culture-related courses incorporate sustainability into their material. This is not to place blame. The cause for this goes back to the origins of modern academia, and even the creation of the term “ecology.” Based on the Greek oikos, which means household, “eco” also is the root of economics. Consequently, the combined meaning of ecology and economics is “household management,” which is an appropriate and holistic approach to thinking about humans and the natural world. We need to remind ourselves that the world is our home, and that we need to treat it with as much care as the places that we inhabit on a daily basis.

Yet, due to the prejudice of the techno-industrial-scientific revolution, material and immaterial issues were divided up between the different disciplines and we are left with the famous split in Western culture between mind and body. Earth, in this case, falls under the category of “body,” albeit abstracted by mechanistic science. Culture, being a subject of the mind, is usually not taught in conjunction with environmental issues. Curiously, though, the term “culture” originates from agriculture, and has to do with the act of cultivation: we cultivate food and beliefs (food for thought!).

Finally, environmental educator David Orr has made the point that all education is environmental education. What he means is that whether acknowledged or not what we teach has a bearing on how we view the environment, especially when it is omitted altogether. When we don’t talk about it, the lesson becomes, “The environment is not relevant to what we do. This is someone else’s problem.” Or, in the example of economics, we are taught that the ecological impact of growth and consumption is irrelevant to an economy’s bottom line. Given the state of our biosphere, we cannot continue like this, nor should we assume some technological fix is awaiting on the horizon. What we need is a human fix.

Conceptual Strategy: Open and Closed Systems

So how does a digital media culture class look when ecology is incorporated into its curriculum?

For starters, as a framework we discuss open versus closed systems. In agricultural terms, a monocultural crop of genetically engineered corn is a closed system. It is governed by numerous control mechanisms and a form of science that doesn’t allow for the open ended integration of natural systems. Open systems are like permaculture gardens, which are structured in such a way as to work with the given conditions of the local environment. It is not controlled with pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizer or laboratory engineered seeds. It is open to the conditions of its local ecology and interacts with unpredictable elements, such as weather, insects and native plants. And since agriculture is humans acting upon the environment, the kind of approach one makes entails a worldview. Societies that engage in monoculture are far different in outlook than those that use permaculture.

How does this translate in the digital media world? Numerous scholars are concerned with the difference between open and closed systems, be they gadgets or the Internet. Jonathan Zittrain talks about the iPhone (“iBrick”) versus Google’s Android. Tim Wu looks into the rise and fall of media empires, examining how monopolies are essentially closed systems. James Boyle believes there is an information ecology that is threatened by enclosure. And Lawrence Lessig talks about the difference between Read-Only and Read-Write information economies.

A keystone essay I use is Benjamin Barber‘s “Pangloss, Pandora and Jefferson: Three scenarios for the future of technology and strong democracy” (published in Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age) In it he argues about potential scenarios facing the future of the Internet. Pangloss is the status quo, and has a do-nothing stance in which the Internet evolves according to the needs of governments, corporations and consumers. If this scenario continues according to its internal momentum towards closed monopolies, we end up with the Pandora scenario. Pandora is represented by two-tired Internet, DRM, Great Fire Wall of China, increased repression and surveillance, and the use of anti-piracy measures to shut off dissent and peer-to-peer sharing (as is the case with Wikileaks and ACTA). The Jeffersonian model represents hope, and would entail the active participation of users to continue developing and utilizing the Internet for opening up democratic participation.

The status quo (Pangloss) has elements of both a cautionary and hopeful future, but we are at a crossroads and it remains to be seen how open or closed the future Internet will be. In terms of the environment there are similar parallels. Closed, monopolized media systems further the interests of those powers that refuse to solve the ecological crisis. Climate change has to be resolved through democratic processes, and sustainable culture has to be cultivated through sharing and connecting. The Jeffersonian scenario goes hand-in-hand with transitioning from the centralized and closed energy system of petroleum, natural gas and nuclear power, to the decentralized and democratic potential of clean energy. One is corporate powered, the other is people powered. There also is middle ground where some corporations are choosing open systems as their primary operational model (such as many of the Web 2.0 start-ups), but it’s still not a guarantee that the climate crisis will tackled by technology users.

It’s important to not be overly Utopian or dystopian. Ultimately the key is to think systemically. Ultimately my goal is to encourage a shift from the standpoint of mere consumerism to a kind of practice based on cultural citizenship. Or, more importantly, green cultural citizenship. What follows is my experiment to move in this direction.

Design Strategy: The Four Perspectives

My design strategy is based on a four-pronged approach inspired by cultural studies’ circuit of culture model and sustainability design. The circuit of culture looks at media phenomena from as a set of iterative, interacting forces that include identity, regulation, representation, culture and consumption. It sees the development of consumer gadgets, like the Sony Walkman, as not an isolated economic practice, but coming from an interactive feedback loop between culture and economics. But it also reflects the bias described earlier: where is the environment in this matrix? Surely it needs to be part of the mix.

Enter sustainability design which is holistic and approaches problems from multiple angles. Gaia Education has developed an Ecovillage Design initiative that approaches human experience according to four dimensions: lifeworld, ecology, economics and society. I hybridized both the circuit of culture and ecovillage design approaches to divide up the course according to the following disciplinary lenses:

Worldview: the phenomenology of time and space. This section covers topics like technological determinism, the history of media technologies, and the impact of digital media gadgets on the user’s perception of time, space and place. Assignments include keeping diaries of gadget usage and to get lost in Rome (which is where I teach) without any media devices, including pens, paper or maps. Students then write and share their experiences in a class blog.

Environment: the material reality of digital media, including extraction, production, e-waste, energy and emissions. To get a picture of the environmental impact of gadget production, we watch the documentary Manufactured Landscapes. We also view the Story of Stuff and the Story of Electronics. There are a ton of videos on YouTube about e-waste. We also look at material relating to “cradle-to-cradle” design and Green IT. Additionally, we read and discuss the various reports on ecological impact created by critics such as GreenPeace, and internal communications from parent company Web sites of gadget makers.

Economy: Drawing on themes from political economy, we look at the ideological structure of the global economics system, paying attention to the reasons why designers design what they do. We compare consumer designed products (Sony’s Walkman, Motorola’s Xoom tablet, Apple gadgets) with computers designed for low-income education, such as the One Laptop Per Child project and the Open Source Ecology project. The goal here is to understand how intention influences the production process of our gadgets. During this section we watch Objectified, a documentary about industrial design.

Culture: Multiple strategies are used in this section, but predominantly it is hermeneutics. Throughout the course we look at promotional videos and advertisements to deconstruct the thinking behind the marketing of gadgetry. This reiterates the point that that though these categories are distinct sections of the course, they spiral around each other. None are completely separate, they are embedded within each other. In the culture section, however, we go more deeply into how digital media usage is impacting by cultural practice. This includes looking at Henry Jenkins‘ model of convergence culture, Lessig’s Read-Only vs. Read-Write model of cultural production, participatory/social media, and the cultural commons (intellectual property, mash-ups, etc.). None of these are isolated from economics, environment and worldview.

These zones are then explored through the perspective of a “boundary object.” For the purpose of this course a boundary object is a media gadget (iPhone, Ipad, Blackberry, laptop, etc.) that has different purposes according to how it is used and how its potential is perceived. So even though a gadget has objective properties in the sense that we all know what an iPhone is, it can also be many different things to different people. It can be a way to call your friends, an instrument of revolution, or a tool for triggering a roadside bomb. To get my students to think in terms of boundary objects, I show clips from the 1980s film The Gods Must be Crazy to demonstrate how a coke bottle, though on the surface is something fairly neutral and innocuous, can do completely different things according to people’s culture.

For their final project students analyze their personal media gadget of choice according to the four zones of experience. I also incorporate a multiliteracy approach. In addition to the content elements of the course, I also want to embed certain skill literacies. So for each section I assign a specific skill-related task. For the first section it is autoethnography and blogging. The ecology section is about tool literacy: what is the “nature” of our gadgets? The third and fourth section are a mix of information and visual literacy, i.e. how to read and deconstruct marketing and information about the gadgets, including how to research the design and production aspects of the gadgets online. Students do mixed activities ranging between collaborative, solo, writing and multimedia. The final project is a paper and a Prezi presentation.

You can only do so much in a 14 week course, and a lot is left out. Ideally this would be a year-long (let alone lifelong) process.

Conclusion

The model I offer here is experimental and not definitive. My main goal is to argue for sustainability as multidimensional, and to integrate ecological issues into a standard digital media course that typically eschews the environment. My vision for the future of education is that “green” subjects are not ghettoized and treated as distinct or off topic from those subjects that are familiar to us. I imagine that all media courses one day will incorporate sustainability, and it will be “natural” to do so.

Barriers to such a project include a lack of familiarity with ecoliteracy (pedagogy and a basic literacy of environmental issues), resistance from academic gatekeepers who don’t acknowledge the connection between the environment and social studies/humanities, and a lack of concern or desire to change cultural practice. I think all these can be overcome, but it will take concerted effort and will be up to the practitioners (i.e. teachers, scholars and learners) to push for more integrative approaches to teaching media.

Please feel free to contact me for more information. I plan to do an online training for educators to learn this model. If you are interested in participating in the training, contact me at info@worldbridgermedia.com

* My book, Mediacology: A Multicultural Approach to Media Literacy in the 21st Century deals with this topic in more detail.

During my media ethics course this week I launched into an epic rant that frightened some students.

The diatribe was inspired by a recent controversy covered by Boing Boing about the (mis)appropriation of a logo belonging to the infamous punk band, Crass (click here for the initial post and here for the follow-up). The backstory is that some fashion designer in London, Hardware, blatantly ripped off the Crass logo to convert it into some apolitical fashion icon (if you compare the current Hardware Website with the logo posted at Boing Boing, you will see that Hardware hastily fixed their plagiarism problem). Concurrently, for our class we watched The Greatest Movie Ever Sold by Morgan Spurlock (maker of Super Size Me), which has the subtitle, “He’s not selling out, he’s buying in.” In a nutshell, Spurlock made a movie about branding and product placement by branding and selling his “doc-buster” to advertisers. The question for my class about the film–and what spurned the epic rant–was, Can a critical film about marketing use branding to make its point?

I’ll get to Spurlock’s film momentarily. Returning to Crass, the logo controversy led me to YouTube where I found a documentary about the band. Watching it reminded my of how in the early 1980s Crass had been such an ethical influence on me as a young punk rocker. Crass fans were considered “peace punks” that were into the scene not for style, but to participate in oppositional politics and an alternative social movement. As an anarchist collective Crass practiced what they preached. Whenever they performed they donated whatever was left after expenses to local charity. They were truly a not-for-profit endeavor that wanted to live by their principle, “There is no authority but yourself.” In retrospect this phrase is not in-sync with ecology, which eschews such pronounced individualism, but the basic anti-authority stance is still valid.

Our culture should not be dictated by an economic ideology that has taken over virtually all realms of life (see the book Monoculture for a good overview of this point). Relatedly, I asked the class if it were anachronistic to have a strong anti-commercial stance that contradicts the prevailing paradigm that views privatization and the commercialization of public space as gospel. I have found that many students these days seem to accept the blanket marketing of their lives as the price for doing business as usual. Many have internalized the age-old justification for screwing over anyone: it’s just business. Indeed!

At Boing Boing commentators criticized Xeni Jardin (who posted about the Crass controversy) by arguing that it was hypocritical to promote open culture and remixing but then not apply the same standards when a fashion designer does it. My response is that we’re not talking about an absolute ideology that can’t differentiate between an open and closed commons. Crass were about sharing and generosity. Corporate theft from punk rockers is the opposite. It’s evil. There is a difference between fair use and plagiarism, which comes down to intent. What is the purpose of the appropriation technique? You can tell the difference by observing which act is participatory and which one is not. This is the thin red line of dissent versus exploitation, and fair play versus cheating.

Trailer for The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Click here if you can’t see it.

Which brings me to Spurlock’s documentary, a film that I essentially experienced as a major mind fuck. On the one hand, it does exactly what it sets out to do: it makes transparent the entire process of selling out. So in the process of making a film that is potentially a critique of marketing, the filmmaker must sell out. How does one reconcile this contradiction? Is it even possible? Has media criticism devolved into self-mockery?

One way for me to respond to this film is to go back to the problem of “postirony.” The term, coined in Alex Shakar, appears in the book The Savage Girl. It is described as follows:

“…Our culture has become so saturated with ironic doubt that it’s beginning to doubt its own mode of doubting. If everything is false, then by the same token anything can be taken as true, or at least as true enough. Truths are no longer absolute; they’re shifting, temporary, whatever serves the purpose of the moment. Postironists create their own sets of serviceable realities and live in them independent of any facets of the outside world that they choose to ignore….Practitioners of postironic consciousness blur the boundaries between irony and earnestness in ways we traditional ironists can barely understand, creating a state of consciousness wherein critical and uncritical responses are indistinguishable. Postirony seeks not to demystify but to befuddle, not to synthesize opposites but to suspend them, keeping open all possibilities at once. And we marketers, in forging a viable mode of postironic consumerism, must seek to foster in the consumer a mystical relationship with consumption. Through consumption consumers will be gods; outside of consumption they will be nothing: a perpetual oscillation between absolute control and absolute vulnerability, between grandeur and persecution.”

One way this insidious phenomena manifests itself is in the way marketers have appropriated culture jamming into their repertoire of manipulation. The classic example is Sprite’s Obey Your Thirst ad campaign that features celebrities making fun of themselves selling products. In media literacy parlance, these are the “wink, wink” and “flattery” persuasion techniques that essentially argue, “we marketers know we are full of crap, and we know that you know that we are a bunch of bull, so buy our product anyway!” Thankfully many see through this, but these techniques also do a lot of idealogical work. Essentially, this approach turns grassroots media activism and education into market research, undoing and refracting our legitimate critique into a hall of mirrors (for example, watch how this Fed Ex ad uses media literacy deconstruction techniques in its Super Bowl ad). In this way, capitalism has the incredibly capacity to absorb critique and then turn it on its critics (Occupy movement, watch out!).

So where does that leave us with Spurlock? The truth is, I think the film is a great tool for discussion, or what I like to call an “object-to-think-with.” For that, I believe it has educational value. I believe he is sincere and treats the subject with a lot of respect. (Check out Spurlock’s TED talk for more insight into his thinking about the film.)

But I still remain incredibly uncomfortable with its “truth in advertising” approach. My discomfort is grounded in an old school punk mentality–as outdated as it may seem–that there are lines that should not be crossed. One cannot “market” the revolution, as one major label A & R guy once promised Crass (they politely refused). What is at stake is the cultural commons, which is “all that we share.” As long as there is a commercial barrier between us and the access point to that shared space, then buying in really means fencing off. I still believe that there should be noncommercial spaces that are free from the nefarious influence of corporate power. The more we succumb to the temptation to allow corporations to mediate our methods of critique and engagement, the more we erode our capacity for culture to grow, learn and evolve. No one but a corrupt legal system bequeathed these corporations the right to take over our cultural life. Why do we continue enabling them?

OK, rant over. Thanks for listening!

Local news coverage by CBS (click here if you can’t see the video embed)

As a native Angeleno, one of my annual rituals is to watch the New Year’s Day Rose Parade. Though I have never witnessed it in person, I have checked out the scene in Pasadena the night before and know many artisans who design and build floats for the annual parade. This year was no different, with the exception that I wanted to share the nostalgia with my kids. However, now that I’m a bit of an ex-pat, I see things that were part of my past with a slightly defamiliarized perspective.

As the parents of former students have told me, media literacy ruins TV watching for the family. Though I wanted to convey my enthusiasm for the artisanship of Rose Parade floats to my daughter, I couldn’t remove my critical hat. I became highly sensitized to the more troubling aspects of the event’s televised broadcast. Before watching it I was keenly aware that an Occupy group planned to tail the parade with their own anti-corporate message, so I was hoping to see if the network coverage (in this case, NBC) would mention or cover the Occupiers. What transpired should be of little surprise to any seasoned media watcher.

The parade coverage opened with a flyover of a Northrop Grumman’s B-2 stealth bomber, ironically dubbed the Spirit. In a sense, Spirit is an apt name for it represents the “spirit” of a particular mode of thinking (as in zeitgeist, which means “spirit of the age”). At a cost of $1.5 billion each, the B-2 represents the absurdity of our social structure in which our government pays outrageous sums to an elite group of military contractors at the expense of a withering infrastructure. Anthropologists and historians of the future will note how incredibly insane such a social system is. Meanwhile, parade commentators Shaun Robinson and Al Roker fawned over the bomber arguing that for most of the audience it was the main attraction. Such death technology warship should not be surprising given that one of NBC’s primary shareholders is the military contractor General Electric.

The rest of the broadcast represented a seamless integration between the values of the military industrial complex and totalitarian capitalist ideology. The parade’s Grand Marshall, J. R. Martinez, is a bit of a rising media personality whose notoriety comes from his experience of overcoming the psychological damage of getting 40% of his body burned while deployed in Iraq. While I admire his perseverance and resilience, none of the discussion of this man’s tragic circumstances get contextualized by how unnecessary it was in the first place. No doubt, with stealth bombers getting applauded by pop culture punditry and parade organizers, these dirty little details need not be aired publicly. Martinez is a perfect metaphor for the denial of our sick system: get burned and disfigured and then turn it into corporate motivation for how to transcend the adversity of Empire’s reckless global behavior.

Meanwhile, each parade float was a mini-ad for its corporate sponsor. It was obvious that Roker’s canned commentary was essentially ad copy penned by the corporate overlords. Meanwhile, interspersed throughout the coverage was a noticeably higher ratio of advertising that mostly hawked product discounts and financial services for the newly poor. Though subtle (or not if you are media savvy), this was truly a hegemonic spectacle selling the ideology of the 1%. Good thing the Occupiers were there to counterbalance the message. Yet.. if you watched NBC, such a perspective didn’t exist. It was eliminated from the parade’s coverage.

This is a blatant example of how alternatives get excluded by the traditional power structure’s media system. Luckily, we no longer exist in a reality bubble of top-down communications. The complex ecology of our current social media allows for alternative perspectives to be shared horizontally. This is not to say that Occupy Rose Parade was entirely ignored. The LA Times and local news stations mentioned it, and those who were in attendance at the parade certainly had a chance to be exposed for the first time to the Occupy message. Not surprisingly, some critics disparaged the protestors for degrading a family event with politics. But in light of the parade’s default message of corporate and military domination, to not see the entire event as political represents a triumph of ideology.

Let’s hope that those who fail to see the political nature of mainstream media spectacles increasingly become the minority. Transforming and educating for a new perspective means we have lots of work to do. To begin with, its time to occupy the spirit of our age. I keep harping on the Occupy theme, but I believe it represents a concrete alternative to the mode of communication propagated by the hyper-capitalist take-over of the cultural commons.

On Saturday I was enraptured by Tim Pool‘s USTREAM live cast of Occupy Wall Street’s recent action.* As Occupiers played Red Rover and Frogger with police across Manhattan, all was captured live and uploaded into the planetary Net. Like the live cast of the Occupiers getting kettled and arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge a few months ago, it was a riveting reprieve from the old, predigested form of media we grew up with.

As I watched I couldn’t help but feel that this is a collective, emergent version of Martin Luther’s protest in 1517. Like the 95 theses he posted on the church door that later was reprinted and widely disseminated with the new media technology of that period, likewise we are now seeing an unprecedented diffusion of an alternative paradigm that challenges the power structure. But this time it’s the 99% thesis. Whereas Luther challenged the corrupt authority and abuse of power by the Roman Catholic Church, we are now doing the same against domination and colonization of the planetary commons by corporations.

The fact is, since the 1980s I’ve seen these kinds of actions over and over again, but they never gained traction like they are now. The difference is probably that so many people have been pushed off a cliff that the propaganda system in place can no longer shield people from the truth at hand: that the corporate takeover of the commons can no longer be sustained. We have reached the limit and end of the old system and we are currently in a transition into a liminal state in which all the old thought forms that were codified during the past 500 years are becoming destabilized.

This is made visible in the above clip, which is an archived stream from the Saturday protests. It’s the moment when the protestors, after dodging the NYPD throughout Manhattan, spontaneously organized a General Assembly in Times Square. Using the “people mic,” they “testified” as to why they are part of the Occupation movement, all the while bathed in the surreal glow of corporate propaganda.

Times Square is the quintessential spiritual center of the corporate project. Once the seedy underbelly of New York’s deviant unconsciousness, since Giuliani’s reign as mayor the open space of 42nd St. has been transformed into a kind of dystopic hydra of capitalist enclosure (privatization/fencing off). A mix of surveillance and marketing uber alas, Times Square has become an open air television studio that invites anyone to enter and be mediated by the planetary corporate rulers. This, I would argue, is part of its lure. A hybrid of advertising and reality TV, I know of no other place on Earth where Disneyland, advertising and mass media cohere into a pulsating hum of mediated insanity. Not even Las Vegas can achieve such a distinction. And like moths to a flame, people are attracted by the very thing that could ultimately destroy them. To paraphrase Benjamin, not since the Nazis has our own alienation and self-destruction been made to look so beautiful.**

Yet as police stand by to protect holiday shoppers and business as usual, a handful of Occupiers bear witness to this insanity (thereby labeled by the system as lunatics). Here, as the embodiment of Earth’s spirit, these brave souls momentarily disrupt the pulsating spectacle. Whilst in the past numerous crazies have attempted such sacrilege against this colonizing machine, something has changed.

We are being heard. And it’s resonating.

It’s happening despite the luminous power of Times Square and its tentacled financiers in Wall Street. A people’s mic, which is a spontaneous form of direct democracy and speech, utterly contradicts the communication forms of advertising in which psychologically tested and honed messages are pushed into people’s mindspace. The occupiers wage guerrilla war against that mechanism through the deployment of prefigurative politics that pull people together with a shared senses of responsibility and reciprocity. Their collectivity, community and ritual becomes an alternate form of mediation that deprives the corporate powers of their ability to colonize human energy.

For the moment the system seems invincible, its vast architecture of light and information permeating public space. It can only succeed when no other world can be visualized or imagined beyond it. What you see here is a new kind of collective imagination taking shape. Behold, participate, smile and look around. Raised consciousness is coming to a live stream near you.

* Here is an insightful interview with Tim from Current’s USTREAM channel.

** If you think I’m stretching the analogy too far, I consider the rapid rise of Co2 emissions changing the very chemistry of our atmosphere as a far worse crime against humanity than anything achieved by the worse totalitarians of the 20th century.

Ericsson’s “Networked Society ‘On the Brink’” ignores some big questions. Is a life of more data really a better life? I agree that some of the trends the video describes are appealing, but I also fear that this little propaganda film by one of the world’s largest mobile companies is really encouraging people to view themselves as data gadgets rather than as human beings. For example, its vision of education is that we get to watch more lecture videos on the Internet. And healthcare is a matter of quantifying the body’s functions.

What is made to look so forward thinking and innovative strikes me as repackaged technological totalitarianism. While Ericsson promises to be paradigm-shifting, this is still about good old-fashioned consumerism. The tipoff is the dreamy soundtrack, which is always a cue that media companies are inviting us to uncritically enter into their fantasy world. I would be more optimistic if they talked about the possibility of the networked society as a means for dismantling global capitalism and organizing regional occupations.

To be fair, the company does have an assortment of sustainability and social responsibility commitments (check here for their self-assessment). Nonetheless, are these measures compatible with the deep cultural changes necessary to create a sustainable world? I don’t have the answer, but I remain suspicious.

Sometimes the media gods do us a big favor by giving us a clear example of how corporate media is occupied by Wall Street. In this case we are presented with two different covers of the same issue of Time Magazine that ran domestically and abroad. Reading between the lines it shows how scared the media elites are of pushing the idea of revolution at home. And just as the disconnection between the US State Department’s support for the Arab Spring overseas versus the various crackdowns against the Occupy movement throughout the US is not casual, no doubt the editors at Time are nervous about the idea of revolution in Egypt further inspiring the locals. This makes the alternate title, “Why anxiety is good for you,” that much more interesting. Surely their editorial choice reflects a great deal of anxiety.

H/T to CommonDreams.org for the heads-up.

Click here if you can’t see the video

In a new RSAnimation, psychiatrist Iain McGilchristc revises the great divided brain debate, something I discuss in my book, Mediacology. To recap, in the ’70s the idea that the left and right brain hemispheres serve different cognitive functions entered into popular culture (represented by books such as Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain). In The Global Village, Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers run with this concept, arguing how different kinds of media favor or bias the cognitive processing of our brains. Reading and writing are distinctly left brained, whereas nonlinear media like TV and music are favored by the right hemisphere.

Leonard Shlain presents his main thesis

Many authors posit that writing has turned us into an overly rational and patriarchal culture. In the Alphabet Versus the Goddess, neurosurgeon Leonard Shlain argues that writing mimics the same mental processes of hunting: the pen replaces the spear.

McGilchrist doesn’t contradict these arguments. Rather he points out that it’s not an either or situation. Sight and sound are processed by both sides of the brain, but what happens is that the left hemisphere handles detailed and focused thinking, whereas the right hemisphere deals with field-like vision or hearing. Consider how we differentiate between seeing and watching, and listening and hearing.

What I find intriguing about the animation (a mix of both right and left brain media), is the possibility that sustainable behavior comes from cultivating right brain thinking. This is what I argued for in my book, but this video does a much better job of articulating how that’s possible. My main point was that traditional media literacy was mainly left-brained, because it focuses on reductionist deconstruction techniques, whereas new media involve right brain skills, and therefor should be incorporated into the concept of media literacy.

He points out that the right brain’s job is to inhibit immediate responses to situations so that we can use our wit and empathy to work out solutions. It also helps map and simplify the world so that we can make better sense of it. Metaphor, implicit meaning, body language, embodied experience, and a disposition for living rather than mechanical reality characterize the right brain approach to the world.

The machine model is self consistent because it made itself so. It’s what he calls the “Berlusconi of the brain” because it controls all the “media”– the right hemisphere doesn’t have a voice. The left brain model of the world is like a hall of mirrors, a reality bubble. And this is exactly the kind of problem I see in media theory which rarely challenges the mechanical model of cognition and communication. This is also why I believe media theory has not significantly tackled ecology (not in the “systems” sense, but in the sustainability sense).

Finally, McGilchrist argues knowledge within the left hemisphere is a closed system that demands perfection. By contrast, the right hemisphere’s understanding of the world is an open system.

In the end, it’s not reason versus imagination, he says, but both working together. You can’t have one without the other. The problem with our current world system is that it’s based on a closed, machine-like model of the world built by an unbalanced, and ultimately, insane mind. To restore sanity, we need to re-balance how we perceive the world and ourselves.

Need we say more? Link to related article: An Ethic of the Earth, by The Blue River Quorum

UPDATE: Here’s rundown of current Internet energy usage: Internet Sucks Up 2% of Global Energy, Study Estimates

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Infographic via: Wordstream

Nice little video about Occupy Wall St.’s green power, compost and gray water systems. Could they be auditioning the new post-oil world?

UPDATE: Apparently I’m not the only writer to have this idea: Is Occupy Wall Street a model for the post-apocalyptic future of cities?