response to Kaf Ka

Beginnings and Ends and Means

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."--Semisonic

I often think about the way that our media re-create us. M. McLuhan noted that the medium is the message and showed how technology such as the railroads and electric light have modified our social structures and even cognitive processes. Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy demonstrates how oral cultures think differently from written ones and the way that the technology of print alters the way we think, causing us to be capable of a different level and intensity of abstraction. In moving from a visual to a symbolic structure, our perceptions of our world changed drastically and I wonder how moving from a writing based culture to an internet one will further modify our thinking. It seems to me our attention spans and ways of understanding are already shifting as we move to short code communications and quicktime intertctions on Utube and the like. This fits with McLuhan's ideas that technology increases our corporeal reach and speed up our processes. We can now "google" or "Wikapediate" almost any desired information within seconds, make instantaneous decisions based on this data and have the consequencesof our actions affect almost any location on earth. I wonder if we will think quickly and as carefully as before? I hesitate to join the ranks of people (such as Plato) who decry the new technologies and see the foreshadowings of doom. Books, he argued, would make our memories weak and spell the beginning of the end.

To "book end" this query I would like to conclude with another quote. Life after all is not a zero sum game.

"The secret to a rich life is to have more beginnings than endings".--Dave Weinbaum

(Image from www.yeshivakishiniev.org/)

Requiem

Ding, dong, Milty's dead!

Creaky but still around

I haven't given up yet, just haven't been functioning smoothly lately.

No One Else...

And when its twelve O'clock, I climb the stair.

Wall