art illustration illustrator communication information order disorder chaos struggle man human theory time representation graphic data visualisation chart
✖ Via Mondorama 2000: “L’Homme lutte contre le désordre croissant du monde” (Man struggles against the growing chaos of the world). L’ère atomique - Encyclopédie des sciences modernes - Tome VII : information et communications constitution et diffusion des messages, Abraham A. Moles, éd René Kister, Genève, 1960. Unknown illustrator.

Used copies of this book can still be find online (e.g. AbeBooks).


↳Share Sep 02  link  notes art  illustration  illustrator  communication  information  order  disorder  chaos  struggle  man  human  theory  time  representation  graphic  data  visualisation  chart 

For the epistemologist, the notion of ‘application’ in an expression such as ‘applied psychoanalysis’ is simply flabby. It would seem to imply that a body of theory, more or less rigorously formulated, can be applied without modification to a set of data or to a field of study (in this case, works of art) different from that for which it was constructed (the set of psycho-neurotic symptoms and abnormal psychic phenomena). If this were so, the two domains would be indistinguishable; if they are not, then the attempt at application requires modifications that, however trivial, make that body of theory different from what it was in its first ‘state’.
✖ Via “Beyond Representation” by Jean-François Lyotard, tr. by Jonathan Culler, reproduced in The Lyotard Reader, edited by Andrew E. Benjamin, Wiley-Blackwell, 1989, p. 155

About The Lyotard Reader:

“Jean-Francois Lyotard was one of the founding members of the College Internationale de philosophie. Ha has taught at Vincennes, Saint Denis and is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Irvine. Several of his books have appeared in English, notable The Postmodern Condition, Just Gaming and The Dirrerend.The Lyotard Reader is a collection of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s most important and significant papers to date. While they are all written from within philosophy, they seek to address subjects as wide-ranging as film, painting (Adami, Francken, Newman), psychoanalysis, Judaism and politics. The originality of Lyotard’s work means that it can not be readily situated within any one philosophical tradition. Instead he returns philosophy itself to debates across a range of areas and, in so doing, redefines the philosophical enterprise.A number of chapters in The Lyotard Reader appear for the first time in English. This is the most comprehensive collection available of Lyotard’s work, work has profoundly influenced debates on the Enlightenment, on modernity, on postmodernity, on the transmission f information, on literary theory and on philosophy.” (more)


↳Share May 27  link  notes art  representation  application  epistemology  domain  knowledge  world  data  theory  model  word  thing  Lyotard 

Ethical issues aside, the banks also did poorly at their core job, which is managing risk. And, while there are plenty of honest, capable people in finance, the ease with which investors looked past Wall Street’s failings seems like a classic case of what the social psychologist Leon Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Festinger argued that when beliefs come into conflict with reality we think up explanations that shape reality to our beliefs, rather than vice versa. He used the example of the Millerites, a millenarian religious sect that came to believe that Jesus Christ would return to earth on October 22, 1844. He didn’t. But not all the Millerites abandoned their faith. Many set about constructing elaborate rationalizations to justify their belief, arguing that Christ had returned spiritually, or that the event had occurred in Heaven, if not on earth. Similarly, when people’s faith in Wall Street as an honest broker, a smart allocator of capital, and a path to personal wealth was disappointed, they managed to explain things away.
✖ Via The New Yorker: “Déjà Vu” by James Surowiecki, May 3rd, 2010, p. 25

About James Surowiecki:

“James Surowiecki has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2000. He writes The Financial Page. Surowiecki came to The New Yorker from Slate, where he wrote the Moneybox column. He has also been a contributing editor at Fortune and a staff writer at Talk. Previously, he was the business columnist for New York magazine. He has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, Wired, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and Lingua Franca, and has written on subjects ranging from Silicon Valley to college basketball.” (more)

More importantly, James Surowiecki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds (2004)



↳Share May 03  link  notes communication  bank  finance  greed  cognition  faith  reality  economy  theory  crowd  capitalism  fraud  lost  loser 

A medium is a medium is a medium. Therefore it cannot be translated. To transfer message from one medium to another always involves reshaping them to conform to new standards and materials. In a discourse network that requires an “awarness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense experience from the other,” transposition necessarily takes the place of translation.
✖ Via Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 by Friedrich A. Kittler, Stanford University Press, [1985]1992, p. 265 [Amazon]
“Friedrich A. Kittler (born 1943 in Rochlitz, Saxony) is a literary scholar and a media theorist. His works relate to media, technology, and the military.” (wikipedia)

Derrida offers a similar analysis in his essay “Freud and the scene of writing” (1966)



↳Share Mar 28  link  notes communication  technology  theory  medium  media  translation  book  author 

An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves. The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition. “The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.” Chemero’s experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts: that people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us.
✖ Via Wired Science: “Your Computer Really Is a Part of You” by Brandon Keim, March 9, 2010

The study “A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand” by Dobromir G. Dotov, Lin Nie, Anthony Chemero is available online (PDF).

The “fondamental concept” to which Chemero is referring is the concept of “readiness-to-hand”. Heidegger explains this concept in section 15 of his book Being and Time : “The Being of the Entities Encountered in the Environment” (see Google Books). To understand this concept, one can get help from Wikipedia, from an online Glossary of Terms in Being and Time (edited by Roderick Munday, last updated in March 2009) and from Dean Heckles’ blog (Heckle “is a social–cognitive scientist and a PhD student at Stanford” and he specifically chose to name his blog… “Ready-to-hand” : great introduction to the concept if you’re into technology or communication or media studies).

For a good overview of what’s at stakes today when it comes to our relationship to technology, one should read the “General Introduction” of the first book of the Technics and Time trilogy by Bernard Stiegler. The book has been translated from French by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. The “General Introduction” which run from page 1 to 18 is available via Google Books.

Previously on Skandalon: cognition and media ecology.



↳Share Mar 10  link  notes reblogged from Christopher Butler technology  communication  medium  media  philosophy  cognition  Heidegger  theory  Stiegler  author  book  ecology 

Although none of it (that I’m aware of) has been done to test media ecological principles, there’ve been a lot of neurological studies using fMRI technologies that supports this dichotomy of propositional versus presentational structures of thought. They’ve been able to track synaptic firings across specific neural pathways for different cognitive activities, and it turns out that we really do “think differently” when we read than we do when we use visual media.
✖ Via In the Dark: The Metaphysics of Media: “The Metaphysics of Media” by Peter K. Fallon, Feb. 17th, 2008.

This is an excerpt from the blog of Peter K. Fallon, author of The Metaphysics of Media (The University of Chicago Press, Amazon) and Associate Professor of Journalism at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

In this specific post, he takes a shot at Mike Wesch’s video A vision of Students. Mike Wensch is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. In 2007, Wensch received The John Culkin Award from the Media Ecology Association for his viral video “The Machine is Us/ing Us” (the “Web 2.0” in just under 5 minutes, so it says).

Mike Wesch actually commented Fallon’s post and an interesting discussion ensued.



↳Share Jan 23  link  notes technology  communication  book  author  media  theory  media ecology  internet  students 
communication technology contagion diffusion social society loneliness network theory book author sociology illustration illustrator visualization data design poster
✖ Via The New York Times: “Mood Rings” by Rumors

“FOR DECADES, SOCIOLOGISTS and philosophers have suspected that behaviors can be “contagious.” In the 1930s, the Austrian sociologist Jacob Moreno began to draw sociograms, little maps of who knew whom in friendship or workplace circles, and he discovered that the shape of social connection varied widely from person to person. Some were sociometric “stars,” picked by many others as a friend, while others were “isolates,” virtually friendless. In the 1940s and 1950s, social scientists began to analyze how the shape of a social network could affect people’s behavior; others examined the way information, gossip and opinion flowed through that network. One pioneer was Paul Lazarsfeld, a sociologist at Columbia University, who analyzed how a commercial product became popular; he argued it was a two-step process, in which highly connected people first absorbed the mass-media ads for a product and then mentioned the product to their many friends. (This concept later bloomed in the 1990s and in this decade with the rage for “buzz marketing” — the attempt to identify thought-leaders who would spread the word about a new product virally.) Lazarsfeld also studied how political opinions flowed through friendship circles; he would ask a group of friends to identify the most influential members of their group, then map out how a political view or support for a candidate spread through and around those individuals. […]

Obesity was only the beginning. Over the next year, the sociologist and the political scientist continued to analyze the Framingham data, finding more and more examples of contagious behavior. Smoking, they discovered, also appeared to spread socially — in fact, a friend taking up smoking increased your chance of lighting up by 36 percent, and if you had a three-degrees-removed friend who started smoking, you were 11 percent more likely to do the same. Drinking spread socially, as did happiness and even loneliness. And in each case one’s individual influence stretched out three degrees before it faded out. They termed this the “three degrees of influence” rule about human behavior: We are tied not just to those around us, but to others in a web that stretches farther than we know.” (“Are Your Friends Making You Fat?” by Clive Thomson, September 10, 2009). Surprisingly enough, there isn’t one mention of Everett Rogers nor of Gabriel Tarde in this article.

About Rumors (illustration): “Rumors is a multi-disciplinary, Brooklyn-based design studio founded in 2008 by Holly Gressley, Renda Morton, and Andy Pressman. The studio works closely with clients and collaborators to consider the logic, function, and aesthetic of each project.” (read more).

First discovered this illustration via Stüff Stuff.


↳Share Jan 08  link  notes communication  technology  contagion  diffusion  social  society  loneliness  network  theory  book  author  sociology  illustration  illustrator  visualization  data  design  poster 

Whatever fortunes our activity might have known, it was Potlatch alone that filled the void in the cultural ideas of an era — that gaping hole in the middle of the 1950’s. It is already certain that history will see it not as a witness to the fidelity of the modern spirit during the reign of reactionary parody, but as a document of the experimental research that would be the central concern of the future. But this future is now — it is the game of every one of our lives. The real success that may be attributed to Potlatch is in its serving to unite the situationist movement on a new and greater field of operations.

Potlatch took its name from the North American Indian word for a pre-commercial form of circulation of goods, founded on the reciprocity of sumptuous gifts. The non-salable goods which such a free bulletin could distribute were desires and unedited problems; and it was their profundity for others that constituted a gift in return.

✖ Via DEBORD, Guy (1959). «The Role of Potlatch, Then and Now», Potlatch, no 30, July 15. Translated from the French by Reuben Keehan.

About the site where this translation is hosted: «NOT BORED! is an autonomous, situationist-inspired, low-budget, irregularly published, photocopied journal.»

Potlatch, as a circulation ritual (studied by Marcel Mauss), can be used to offer a different understanding of communication process. See Bataille (1933), Debord (1954) et Baudrillard (1972).



↳Share Nov 30  link  notes communication  author  sacrifice  theory  media  critic  philosophy  game  play  power 
communication technology ad network social diffusion theory innovation marketing author
✖ Via Vaseline – Prescribe The Nation: “Who prescribed whom?”

Ad campaign create by Craig Andrew Smith for Vaseline. It’s an interesting illustration of Everett Rogers’ revised theory about the importance of social network for the diffusion process: that is “the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system” (Diffusion of Innovations, 3rd ed., 1983, p. 5).

Find out more about this ad campaign on Craig Andrew Smith website.


↳Share Aug 22  link  notes communication  technology  ad  network  social  diffusion  theory  innovation  marketing  author 

(…) an idea whose theoretical untruth or incorrectness, and therewith its falsity, is admitted is not for that reason practically valueless and useless; for such an idea, in spite of its theoretical nullity, may have great practical importance.

Une idée dont on reconnaît la […] fausseté théorique n’est pas pour autant inutile et dénuée de valeur pratique.

✖ Via Hans Vaihinger’s preface for his book The Philosophy of ‘As If’: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. by C. K. Ogden, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1968 (First published in England by Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1924, p. viii).

Interesting in regards of the Bouveresse/Debray debate. For an account of the debate, see Thomas Baldwin’s paper : “Jacques Bouveresse: Being UnFrench, Metaphorically” (2007). Full PDF available.



↳Share Jun 19  link  notes philosophy  fiction  Vaihinger  as if  science  theory 

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