Reading Postman at a Democratic Town Committee
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/15/2008 - 13:22(Originally posted at Greater Democracy.)
The words of Neil Postman provides a peculiar juxtaposition to the committee reports of the monthly Woodbridge, CT Democratic Town Committee.
Next month, I will be speaking, in Second Life, to a communications class about the relationship between Second Life and other forms of media, blogs, online Second Life News, online traditional news, and so on. The class will be reading essays on Media Ecology at that point in their class and I hope they will have some good questions.
However, I’m not a communications scholar, and certainly not an expert on Media Ecology. So, I thought I’d try to get up to speed a little bit in preparation. The local library doesn’t have much on Media Ecology. The closest I got was two books by Neil Postman. Neither seems to be specifically about Media Ecology, but they are both interesting books that I’ve long been thinking about reading.
One book is The End of Education : Redefining the Value of School. Some of my friends in Woodbridge are encouraging me to run for Board of Education next year. I have lots of thoughts about education, and this book, together with his Teaching as a Subversive Activity are probably good books for me to read, even though I suspect they may not come up in any school board debates.
Setting that book aside, I thought I would start off with Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century. Postman sets the tone for the book with a quote by Randall Jarrell on the dedication page, “Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn’t know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.”
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/15/2008 - 05:45
Exploring IPv6
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 10/14/2008 - 10:44The Internet is running out of addresses and something needs to be done. At least that’s the idea behind IPv6, the next generation of the Internet Protocol. So, as a sort of day off for Columbus Day, I spent the day exploring IPv6 and here’s what I found.
First, let me explain a little bit about how the Internet works. There is this thing called the Internet Protocol. Basically, it is how messages are sent from one computer to another. For example, I might send a message from my laptop up to a Webserver somewhere saying, send me the webpage I’m looking for. Of course to do all of this, you need addresses, and, as will everything else on computers, it boils down to numbers.
Large Groups and the Internet
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 11:22I approach the Large Group in a manner very similar to how I approach the Internet. Let me explain what I mean by this, why I am saying it and why I think it is important.
I should start by explaining what I mean by the “Large Group”. I’m not talking about a crowd at the mall, at a rally, or even at a party. I am referring specifically to a Large Group as understood in the traditions of Group Relations or Group Analysis, particularly as talked about by group psychotherapists.
You see, I’m on a mailing list of group psychotherapists. It seems like most of the group psychotherapists focus on small groups, say between six and twelve people that meet on a regular basis for therapy. Yet other sizes of groups, median groups and large groups are also sometimes used. I’m not sure what size a group must be to be a median group or a large group, nor have I really managed to understand the difference between the Group Relations tradition, growing out of the work of Wilfred Bion or the Group Analytics tradtion growing out of the work of S.H. Foulkes, yet I don’t believe this especially matters for this blog post.
My first experience with the Large Group was at a Group Relations conference in the late nineties in Massachusetts. I had been working at a large European financial institution and was challenged by the matrix-managed politics around the technology for the firm. I often flew to Europe to negotiate IT strategies and then would come back to the United States and try to get the negotiated strategies implemented.
Extreme Democracy, Four Years Later
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 10/12/2008 - 13:13(Originally published at Greater Democracy.)
Friday, I watched the stock markets plunge, yet again, only to rally, dive, rally and dive with the DOW closing down another 128 points. I read more reports of Gov. Palin trying to cast doubt on Sen. Obama because he had served on a board along side a former member of the Weather Underground as well as a former Nixon aide. The project was funded in large part by a former another Nixon administration official. Then later in the day, I read that a legislative investigation found that Gov. Palin had ‘abused her power by violating Statue 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act’.
Saturday, I wrote a blog post about continued efforts by Republicans to suppress voter registration efforts, and then I stepped away from the computer. I spent the day at a Harvest Festival at the YMCA camp that my seven-year-old daughter, Fiona, had attended last summer. We climbed the climbing wall. We shot arrows in the archery range. Fiona participated in a sack race and painted a pumpkin. Then we all went on a hayride underneath the brightly colored leaves of the trees in Naugatuck State Forest set against a deep blue sky. Other than when my wife Kim painted an Obama Logo on a piece of paper at the Arts and Crafts table, with the word HOPE over it, it was a trip mostly devoid of politics and economics.
I set this backdrop, knowing it will bury my lede, but also feeling that it is important to set a context of a greater perspective. Jon Lebkowsky, Zack Exley and others have been talking a lot about "The New Organizers". You can see some of the discussion in Jon’s blog post, Zack Exley on "The New Organizers" where he quote’s Zack’s article on Huffington Post, The New Organizers, Part 1: What's really behind Obama's ground game.
Win or lose, "The New Organizers" have already transformed thousands of communities - and revolutionized the way organizing itself will be understood and practiced for at least the next generation.
