cmi openweb - sustainable media ecosystems

1.

Densmore knew white trash when he saw it. He'd spent quite a bit of time around people like this—especially in the western regions of the United States—in the campgrounds and motels that lined nearly all of the highways and secondary roads from his home in Baltimore, Maryland to the Pacific coast, 2705 miles west. Densmore hadn't seen his sister since he left Baltimore for L.A. nearly two years ago. Shortly after he moved away, his sister left home as well, with a girlfriend of hers from high school.

The girls said they too were headed for sunny California, for adventure and fresh new starts of their own. However, they never made it past St. Louis. The girl, Densmore's sister's friend, had an uncle who owned an apartment complex in Glenwood, a neighborhood near the city limits, and told the two girls they could stay in one of the two-bedroom units for next to nothing as long as they did some work around the building once in a while. So for the next ten months, Densmore's sister and her friend mingled around in the St. Louis night life, and during the day rolled green and white rubber garden hoses on the cracked concrete parking lots, watered potted plants, mowed what little lawn the complex sat surrounded by, repainted yellow parking strips on the blacktop, and vacuumed the hallways and around the bank of mailboxes sunk into the imitation faux marble walls, twice a week, and dusted the lobby coffee tables no one had sat next to in years. 

At the end of ten months Densmore's sister had a somewhat regular boyfriend. His name was Raymond. Raymond would come around the apartment complex usually two or three times a week. Always bouncing into the parking lot from southbound traffic on Lisle Avenue in his 1985 Chevy Cavalier, smoking a cigarette, listening loudly to whatever KDRK's Top 40 was sending out. The rest of the week Densmore's sister would hear from Raymond over the phone maybe, but he never really could—or would—account for his whereabouts on the days and times of his absence.

So, Densmore's sister usually just wondered about things—things like if Raymond was really being faithful to her as he protested he was, and if so, where was he? Why doesn't he come around more often? He didn't work but once a week at his father's garage rotating good tires and patching leaks in bald ones. She'd met some of Raymond's friends once, but didn't know much about them. Densmore's sister went through her days then, sometimes feeling happy, but sometimes not. The thought to move on never crossed her mind. She just sort of accepted things as they were and let them be.

Besides, she thought, we're not married, I'm an independent twenty-seven year old woman, I can see other men if I want. But she never did. In fact, upon Raymond's request, she stopped going out with friends to the clubs and bars of the city all together.

Around this same time, her friend from Baltimore, who she'd moved into the two-bedroom apartment with, started running around with some people Densmore's sister didn't really care for and consequently wasn't home much anymore. Densmore's sister didn't mind though, she thought her friend's new friends were somewhat trashy and below her own standards. She didn't like that all they seemed to do was smoke cigarettes, watch television all day and drink. They drove badly damaged cars or rode the greasy buses. They didn't have real jobs that Densmore's sister knew of. She was happy, at least, they didn't hang out around her apartment, even though, she sensed from time to time, the large two-bedroom could get a little bit too quiet, especially in the evenings when she didn't have to work and the three television channels she got weren't airing anything she cared to see.

Densmore's sister got a second job waiting tables at a diner at the far end of Newbird Street, eleven blocks from the apartment complex where she lived. She started smoking cigarettes too. Her friend—who she didn't see much anymore—said one day she hated St. Louis and moved out two weeks later, talking a lot about Miami. She took some clothes, a chair and her electric hair dryer and drove off in an old sedan Densmore's sister had never seen before. Densmore's sister watched from their apartment window as the red brakelights flashed on for a split second and the depressed old car paused briefly before darting out into the rainy evening traffic on Lisle Avenue. Densmore's sister received only an occasional, and fleeting, postcard from around southern Florida after that.

 2.

L.A. hadn't worked out for Densmore. After nearly two years on the coast, he was headed home, back to Baltimore, and, quite frankly, he couldn't wait to get there. His family was there—minus his sister in St. Louis; his old friends were there, though some of them would have changed quite a bit; he imagined his dog, Lucia, would be sleeping on the porch as always, or growling at squirrels in the steep and wooded back yard. Lucia must be twelve years old by now.

L.A. was fun for Densmore, but not much else. He'd met a girl he liked, but she turned out to be a lesbian. This would not have been such a big deal to Densmore, he simply would have accepted the idea that she was gay, and further considered the girl a friend.  But she never was honest with him, she led him on, in fact, in a somewhat confused and unclear state, as if she were considering going heterosexual. Densmore eventually, months after their first encounter, resorted hesitantly to peeking around trendy coffee shop corners and hanging out many nights in the dark end of a long bar, watching the girl carry on and sometimes even make out with other girls. The whole situation left Densmore sick in his stomach, not really heart broken, more just pissed at the growing number of people, he thought, who aren't honest in the world.

"The list of cool people," Densmore's friends would say to him, "continues to shrink."

He had a job for a while during his sojourn in Los Angeles at a movie rental outlet. The few friends Densmore had all were self-proclaimed aspiring actors and Densmore joked as they all sat around in a non-smoking bar some nights that he too was a professional in the movie and multi-trillion dollar entertainment industry, but, simply, of a different division.

The money he made as a clerk at the movie store was barely enough to pay his share of a three bedroom bungalow that sat within sight of the crooked and capitalized Hollywood sign. He rarely had enough money to go out, he ate less than he had in Baltimore, he wondered how to meet a girl without having money to take her out on their first date. He spent most of his free time at the beach looking around the little shops and sitting in the fine, warm sand. This, at least, gave him comfort and a little peace. Sitting there in the sand, he kept telling himself he was going to learn to surf, save up some of each paycheck, and buy his own board—but he never did.

 3.

So, that's pretty much how L.A. went for Densmore. And now, sitting in his sister's St. Louis apartment on Lisle Avenue, a stop-off visit on his way back to Baltimore, he began to see things about his sister that he never had before.

After six more months of Raymond running around mysteriously and showing up randomly to her apartment week after week, Densmore's sister somewhat blankly and rather numbly accepted his ridiculous wedding proposal one Friday night in May. She knew something special either had or was about to happen when he barged through the thin front door of her two-bedroom apartment with a six pack of bottles this time, not cans. Raymond always said the cost difference between a six pack of cans and a six pack of bottles was at least one pack of smokes, and he added, when you're drunk they all taste the same anyhow. To comments like these Densmore's sister usually just shrugged, and looked away, bored.

On the night of the big question, though, according to Densmore's sister, Raymond had stumbled in the door, drunk and nervous, got down on one knee on the kitchen linoleum, and pulled a ring from his jean jacket pocket. Densmore's sister was floored. She felt swept away by love, and stared, amazed at her knight, shaking like a leaf, smelling of a brewery.

'The ring,' she later admitted, 'is cheap and not really my style. It looks as if he got it at Carmine's,' she said, rolling her eyes. But with Raymond on his knee in the old kitchen of her two-bedroom apartment, Densmore's sister didn't know what to say, so she said yes.

Densmore didn't think much of his new brother-in-law, sitting there on a Formica chair in the same dank little kitchen where he had proposed to Densmore's sister. Up until the time of the wedding, he always imagined his sister being married in a grand old church, she in a long, white beautiful dress, a handsome and well-maintained groom in a black tuxedo. Densmore thought he could see himself maybe as the best man, in a matching black tuxedo of his own. He'd never worn a tuxedo. He wondered how he might have felt, standing there at the top of the narrow isle, watching his beautiful sister approaching, one step at a time, under the towering arched vaults and booming antique pipe-organ psalms. He wondered just to what extent the disappointment was that his parents were feeling as a result of his sister and Raymond taking their vows, alone for the most part, in the eight p.m. time slot in the Hall of Justice in Glenwood, Missouri the Saturday night following the proposal in May.

They didn't even get professional pictures taken, or wait for their families to fly in, his mother said over a crackling phone line from Baltimore to L.A two days after the ceremony. His parents were upset and Densmore understood. Raymond, they said, doesn't even have a job.

Densmore assured and tried to console his mother by promising he would make a stop in St. Louis to see his newly wed sister, and, in a general way, check things out. He'd bring back a report of sorts upon his arrival in Baltimore.

On his first night in his sister's and sister's new husband's two-bedroom apartment he sat playing with two small children, a boy of about five and a girl of about three. The childrens' parents were neighbors of some sort and seemed to come around often by the way they brought beer and cigarettes, and walked around Densmore's sister's apartment as if they lived there too. This situation, it seemed to Densmore, appeared to be quite routine.

There was a screen door in the kitchen that opened out to a run-down, weedy courtyard that many of the apartments sat adjacent to. It also seemed to Densmore, as he sat watching the lame activity going on out there, that this courtyard had become the tenant's common place. His new brother-in-law stood at the bottom of the three concrete steps, talking quietly to the childrens' father.

"What do you mean?!" The childrens' father belted out with a burning cigarette in his right fingers, "You're landlord is on this stuff half the time."

"Keep it down, man." Densmore's brother-in-law replied, looking down at the ground and then back over his shoulder.

Densmore's brother-in-law seemed nervous to Densmore as he watched him through the screen door. He knew they were about to do some drugs, and that his sister probably would too, or at the very least, that surely she had in the past. Looking out the back screen door, down past the concrete steps, he saw thick white smoke emitting from a glass tube in the childrens' father's left hand. Densmore, slightly uncomfortable at this point, and very unimpressed, wished he were at home in Baltimore. He wondered what he could tell his mother about this.

Coughing, Densmore's brother-in-law held the pipe out towards Densmore as if Densmore should be willing and eager to take it in his hands, put it to his lips, and draw the toxic smoke into his lungs. The smell was penetrating and stout. It brought Densmore immediately back to the Baltimore Summer City Festival their parents had brought him and his sister to when they were very young, maybe eight and nine years old—and never gone back since. Even as an eight-year-old, Densmore had noticed two black girls walking on the sidewalk a few steps in front of him and his family, handing back and forth something small and white, giving off long drifts of dense, gray smoke. The smell was what stuck mostly in Densmore's mind. It was a guttural stench; pungent, sweet and heavy, and he knew, without knowing what it was, that is was bad. His parents never said a word.

Densmore got up from the kitchen chair he was sitting in, bent down, and picked up a malleable, brown substance, about the size of a pea, from the kitchen floor. His sister and his sister's friends seemed happy that he'd found it—whatever it was. Again, Densmore wasn't sure exactly what it was, but when his sister's friend took it from Densmore's fingers and pushed it carefully into one of the ends of the glass tube, the evil grin that came across his sister's friend's face concluded for Densmore that it was most likely something his own parents would be highly disappointed he was involved with. More drugs, thought Densmore, and wanted nothing further to do with the situation unfolding in front of him.

An hour and a half of sitting in the dim, off-white kitchen watching visitors come and go, each passing around the glass pipe, drinking canned beer, smoking cigarettes and being forced to listen to many stoned and pointless conversations, Densmore was ready to leave. Without any further immediate concern for his sisters state, he stood up, shoved his hands in his pockets, and walked out the front door—hustling past the rows of metal inlaid mailboxes in the faux marble wall, and out through the lobby entrance. It was cooler now, and dusk fell in the streets.

Densmore made it around the back side of the west end of the complex before he realized the childrens' father from back in the apartment was following him, apparently unconcerned about the welfare of his own two kids.

"Walk with me." He offered Densmore, "I'll show you around the neighborhood."

"Doesn't look there's much to it." Densmore said back, turning all the way around.

"Ah, this is St. Louie, man, there's always more to it."

"Hmm." Densmore said. And turned back around to walk, somewhat reluctantly, side by side with the childrens' father who hadn't broken stride.

"There's a street two blocks away," He continued, "We call it The Row. It's crazy, man, it's an old steel factory that closed down in the nineteen-seventies. That's when this neighborhood was only, like, twenty years old or something. Over the years since it closed, the factory has basically become a shopping mall of freaks, man. For a while it was only used by stupid teenage kids breaking windows and drinking beers and shit..." The childrens' father paused and dragged on his cigarette, letting out a long trail of white smoke that curled out behind him and Densmore as they wormed through a narrow and wet gangway.

It must have rained while I was inside the apartment, Densmore thought to himself, noticing the darkened blacktop and puddles for the first time since leaving his sister's building. Then the post-hard-rain smell hit him and, like always, set into motion a cleansing and calming effect that started in his nose, ran through his brain, and worked its way steadily down to his feet.

"...Then the bums moved in and took over." The childrens' father's voice faded back into Densmore's consciousness. "It smelled so bad like piss and shit by then no one wanted to go near it. People complained, but the city doesn't give a fuckin' shit, man. What the fuck do they care? Then the fuckin' gangs kicked out all the bums, and killed a couple old guys while they were at it. I saw it in the newspaper when I was in high school or some shit. Then people actually used to come here to break dance when that was cool. Ha Ha! Everyone thought the hard core breakers were in gangs like in the fuckin' movies. Now people always say it's going to be turned into a dance club, you know, like the warehouse clubs in Chicago and shit. I think they're all just fuckin' rumors, nobody wants this dump. It would cost a fuckin' fortune to fix up. It's a fuckin' dump, but it has some of the best and most awesome graffiti art in the city. You gotta check it out, but if you see anyone...well, just don't talk to no one."

Densmore was walking faster than he normally would want to only to keep up with the childrens' father who was not only walking fast and smoking a cigarette, but talking a mile a minute as well. Densmore didn't know the childrens' father in the least, and, of course, didn't know how he normally walked and talked, but he figured his behavior was a direct result of the smoke from the pipe they'd all just been passing around in his sister and brother-in-law's apartment. Densmore had seen a lot of people crouched in corners on the streets, under the boardwalks, in their cars, all over the place in L.A. down by the beaches doing the same things his sister, her friends, and of course, this guy, were doing. Densmore never really paid much attention to them. No one, it seemed when he thought about it, did.

In the alley now, Densmore watched a ragged orange cat dart upwards out of a dented metal garbage can and pause for a split second on the can's rim, to their left, as he and the childrens' father passed by. The can ended up on its side with a piercing and echoing bang, rolling around on the wet pavement in front of a two car garage door badly in need of paint. The cat sprinted through the weeds.

Leonard Treadway had been a traveling salesman at Borris, Inc. for exactly two years when his sales manager one day up and announced to Leonard that a new batch of prospective clients had surfaced in Rockford, Illinois. The new clients, he encouraged Leonard, were in the market for exactly one-hundred thousand rubber stoppers, just like the ones Borris, Inc. had been manufacturing for the past twelve years. These people, Leonard's boss continued, were currently sending out for bids to fill their client's needs, and needed to be hit as soon as possible to secure some sort of a contract, any contract, but one-hundred thousand rubber stoppers would be best.

Leonard grew excited at this news, as he always did when his boss would announce fresh potential. After all, Leonard mused from time to time, new clients meant new money, and for Leonard living alone in Swan Heights, the lower-rent mobile home neighborhood of Cromwell, Montana, a little extra money was always welcomed.

Leonard got especially anticipatory on this particular day because, although he'd never even heard of Rockford, he knew Illinois was quite a ways from where he now sat. The excitement came as Leonard had never been on an airplane, save for the one time when he was three, his parents told him, and they'd all flown together from Coeur D'Alene, Idaho to San Francisco, California to visit his grandparents for Labor Day.

Leonard didn't remember the family trip to California, although in his old bedroom at his parents' house across town, there still hung on the wall a faded orange and black Giants pennant that since returning from the family trip all those years ago, he'd always associated with an enormous and very loud and crowded place. As a child, for years after his father hung the pennant, Leonard would realize a very slight feeling of uneasiness every time he looked up at it, , lying on his back in bed with his arms crossed behind his head waiting for sleep to overwhelm him. His grandfather had taken Leonard to Candlestick Park that year and even though Leonard was too small to care at the time (and didn't go much for sports now as an adult) the pennant still hung, the same three brass thumb tacks, in the exact spot of his childhood bedroom walls.

Leonard's sales manager walked out of the room briefly to take a phone call and left Leonard sitting there in the conference room sipping tea from a poly-styrene cup.  Save for the squeaky cup on table, there was absolutely no sound in the room.

"Sweet." Leonard thought to himself, "I'll probably get a meal and a movie on the flight. I'll have to check a few bags, I guess. I'll need to take a new suit with me. I'll make a grand impression on these Rockford folks; they'll know I took a plane in to see them. Big, important Leonard the sales man from Montana, flying in to meet the people..." And on and on he daydreamed until his boss came back, his button-down shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, shaking the Venetian blinds with the slam of the conference room door behind him.

"So what do you think on this thing, Treadway?" Leonard's boss growled, the ever-present sweat drip running down his temple.

"It sounds promising, Doug."

"I mean do you think you can pull these guys in, Leonard, that's what I'm askin'."

"Well, Doug, I think so."

"You think so, Leonard? Or you know so?"

"Well, Doug, both."

"It's certainly good to see you so fired up about this one, Treadway. This isn't your usual circumstance, we all know. Surely you're the man for this job, though."

"Sure sounds like it, Doug. Two years isn't something to take lightly. Everyone around here knows that."

"Sure, Treadway."

"Sure, Doug."

"OK, then Treadway. Go see accounting for gas vouchers, hotel vouchers, all that you'll need, man, that's one hell of a drive. God damn, no offense, Treadway, but I'm sure glad it's not me doing it."

"Drive? What do you mean drive, Doug?"

"Hell, Treadway, this company's nearly gone under seventeen times in its twelve year history, every one of those near misses has been fundamentally financial. You didn't think we could afford to fly you to all the way to the East Coast and back did you?"

The next several minutes passed. Leonard got hot in the face and felt sweat building up on his back under his shirt, and in his arm pits. His heart started to pound and his head was spinning in confusion.

"Ah, Doug?" Leonard's boss was holding the door to the conference room open for Leonard's exit, very obviously finished with his lame attempt at boosting Leonard's company moral.

"What is it, Treadway?"

"How far is Rockford from Cromwell exactly?"

"Far? Hell, Treadway, what do I look like a God damn walking thesaurus? You're in control of this one, Treadway. Now, just go on out there and get 'em, Soldier, and bring these guys back home."

Leonard realized he hadn't been called a name like that for many years since he was a child. And the combination of his boss blindly tossing him into this cross-country trek, and calling him Soldier at the same time gave Leonard a sick and nervous feeling in his stomach and he wished he'd never agreed to go.

So by Friday Leonard had an envelope of motel and gasoline vouchers like the ones Borris, Inc. had been supplying him with for the past five years. They were good for all of the seedy cockroach motels and major petroleum stops along most of the highways throughout the Northwest United States. No one in Leonard's company had every ventured out farther than that.

"If you run out of vouchers," the accounting clerk told him, "or if you get somewhere where the vouchers aren't valid, you'll have to pay out of your own pocket. We can reimburse you when you get back."

"Alright." was all Leonard could respond with. His mind was still racing; he was still confused at how far he actually needed to go to get to this place called Rockford. He was still shaken at the idea of his boss just sort-of tossing him into this crazy scenario, when he himself had no details about any of it, other than the rumor that there were some needy rubber stopper suppliers somewhere out there, clear across the country, unfathomably far from Borris, Inc. headquarters in Cromwell, Montana. It was the mindless assignment on his boss's part that bothered Leonard the most. Every time he thought about it, Leonard grew nervous and his hands started to sweat. The ink on the vouchers began to bleed into his palms so he shoved them into his front pockets and pushed open the door, squinting into the late afternoon sun. The parking lot was nearly empty, uncharacteristically quiet and subdued. With his hands still in his pockets Leonard glanced from side to side, checking for oncoming cars, a slight breeze blew his hair down into his face and the heavy glass door behind him clicked shut.

 **

Leonard spent his weekend readying himself for what he believed would become an epic journey to the Midwestern United States. He called his parents across town and told them his intended route of travel in case, he said, something went terribly wrong, they'd know where to come find him.

"Oh, don't be so worried," Leonard's father told him. "You'll do just fine, it's great you'll get out and see some of the country-side. What are you so worried about, son, what could possibly go wrong?"

The conversation with his parents didn't last long because when his father asked him point-blank what he was really worried about, Leonard had no answer. He really didn't know.

"Take some of these apples from the fridge," his Mother said twice to him over the phone, "they'll keep you awake." Leonard agreed to take the fruit, but his mind kept reverting back to his father's question.

Later Leonard sat at the kitchen table of his rented mobile home in Swan Heights vaguely listening to Friday Night Videos blinking and banging in the next room, the television set sending out the lonely blue glow from around the wall divider separating the tiny kitchen that his mother always called "cozy" from the rest of the house. Hunched over, Leonard studied the American political atlas that he'd borrowed from the Cromwell Public Library on his way home from work earlier that night. He learned very quickly that if he stayed on Interstate 90 the whole way he'd need to enter, cut across, or pass through completely six states in order to make it into Illinois, sixteen-hundred and ten miles to the east of where he now sat.

As he followed the thin, crooked blue line with his finger across the map, reading off the endless list of mileage markers, exit points, secondary roads and small towns along the way, the tense feelings of sickness and nervousness began to dissipate inside of him. A moth flickering around the ceiling lamp sent a giant fleeting shadow bouncing across the map of a country Leonard had no idea was anywhere near this immense. A new feeling arose in his gut, one he hadn't felt maybe since he was picked to represent his high school, the Cromwell Redbirds, at the Montana State spelling contest nearly twelve years ago. This—Leonard thought, as his finger slid eastward into Minnesota—is going to be nothing short of the single greatest adventure I've ever had. This, Leonard thought, is going to be wild.

He thought for a second then about the office and how he'd felt leaving there that afternoon. He thought about the stuffy hallways and fluorescent lights bolted into the foam ceilings. He thought about Doug, his boss, all wired up and fierce, everyday sweating in the same curious manner, unbelievably stressed, Leonard noticed countless times from his desk at the south entrance of the office building, about the fabrication and moldings of millions of black rubber stoppers.

Leonard began to wish he had a small pick-up truck that he could put a camper on the back of, like John Steinbeck. I could get to one of these run-down old motels, he mused, and cash in all these room vouchers. I could keep the money and camp out, like real travelers do, he said to himself. He dug up Travels with Charley and read a couple pages when the author was crossing the Missouri River. That guy was dependent on no one—Leonard said to himself, pouring more sweetened green tea with milk and shooing away a moth from in front of his face—way out there on his own, camping out, sleeping under the stars, talking to strangers all along the way, the way real travelers do.

Leonard decided just then that although he didn't have a camper like Steinbeck, he'd rattle along Highway 90 headed east in his 1994 Buick station wagon and sleep across the back seats with the windows rolled down, under the stars, like real travelers do.

 **

Monday morning came and Leonard was packed and ready to go. He let the engine idle in his driveway as he flipped up and down on the radio dial looking for some music to ease the butterflies in his stomach. He didn't know exactly what there was to be nervous about, other than the fact that he, just like most people he knew in Cromwell including his family and most of his friends and associates, had never been further out than the county line. They'd all ridden the old steam train that carried tourists and visiting relatives up the steep mountain passes around this corner of the state, but, Leonard thought, vibrating there in his maroon corduroy drivers seat, that train ride doesn't really count. Nobody ever had to drive. Nobody was ever really on their own. The locomotive only ever went up and back some sixty miles, and the passengers never had to get up from their twelve-dollar seats.

No, Leonard said to himself in a shaky voice, that trains not real traveling. A plane ride to San Francisco is not real traveling. Steinbeck, that's real traveling, and man, good Lord, I'm with him.

Leonard backed up the Buick, shifted into overdrive, and turned the wheel south, out of town, down MT Highway 73.

It seems more and more these days that knowing one's history is really the most we can ask of people. Maybe an open mind, most of all, and human compassion, but those are hard to define, and more and more seem to be subjective entities, the more I consider them.

It seems the world has a real problem on its hands anymore, this division between Islam and the West, or Islam and Christianity/Judaism. The difficulty seems to be that nobody can define where the problem resides: politics, religion, power mongering, natural resource attainment, etc. The heart of the problem-conflict cannot be efficiently defined, it's far too decentralized, something Lyotard tags as a symptom of our current postmodern condition.

What I try to do these days is look at this conflict as a specific example or symptom of something else. That "something else" is hard to define, but I am working on it. I find myself having to do two things: 1. Keep going back further and further in history to look for patterns of human activity, and 2. sort of keep stepping back to see things from a broader perspective (which may be the same thing as #1, they seem to go hand in hand). I think what it is coming down to, as a topic, is historic human activity (in terms of power or political expansionism because this is the dominant goal of Western human activity) and the role that media has played in terms of how its been used within the power as the power gains influence and eventually looses it. Harold Innis has been on my mind a lot lately. He did a lot of work on this in the early (first half) of the 20th Century at the University of Toronto. He started as an economist mapping out a contemporary history of Canada and how it evolved based on the fur trade, migration of the beaver, etc., the natural landscape, and, as a result, the relations between the indigenous people and the incoming Europeans. He got as far as looking at the manufacture of paper as one of these staples and then went off on a tangent of how the newspaper came about and morphed into what it was at the time. Then he looked for relationships between the effects or role of the newspaper and Canada's position concerning British influence. Empire and Communications examines, among other things, how more permanent media used in the Roman and Byzantine empires like clay and stone aligned with characteristics such as oral communication, and a bias of time; less permanent media, like paper and electronic are aligned with written communication, and a bias of space. What is necessary for a successful political project is a balance of the two. Of course, there is a lot more to it. But that's the YouTube version.

I've come to the conclusion that the world today has more than enough bias toward space, we can reach all around the world by glancing at a page or screen, but not enough of a bias for time, meaning, people generally don't have enough understanding of their historic place. It's conflicting because it is technology that allows us to reach around the world (newspaper, internet, planes, cars all built in factories), but it is technology (factories, newspaper, internet, trains, cars) that broke up the clan, the tribe, the extended family living together which emphasized the embedded history lesson in life. I think this understanding is essential to healthy populations and individuals.

There is an enormous amount of chatter across all media platforms right now about Wikileaks, Julian Assange, the DDOS attacks, on and on. The story is intriguing, the characters important, and the Hollywood narratives self-generated by CNN, for example, potentially terrifying (just as they want them to be). It brings James Bond and old spy novels to life, and gives a lot of people another rave current event to speculate on during their daytime activities and evening time leisure. It must be said that this event changes things. And it does. The Internet -- as the fourth major evolutionary step in human communication after the invention of speech, the written word, and the printed word – changed and continues to disrupt almost everything. Wikileaks is really a collection of events or a series of occurrences that can be considered one general event. The individual events are the acquisitions and eventual publications of: the Apache helicopter gunning video, the Afghan War files, the Iraq War files, and, now, the Cables from United States governmental databases. This recent general event of Wikileaks has added a new dimension, a new layer of potential transparency and accessibility that are two of the Internet’s most valuable attributes. 

However, the necessary task of the global citizen interested in democracy, power structure, and social justice is to filter this cloud of dynamic, attractive, seductive material in order to get at a few significant questions and their answers. Not least important are the legal considerations. Historically the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that no legal action can be taken against a publisher that re-disseminates illegally obtained information as long as the publisher was not involved in the initial illegal acts.¹ Of course, the context of this case is much greater than, say, a U.S. governmental employee Xeroxing 7,000 pieces of paper, editing them by hand with some allies, and mailing them in a manila envelope to The New York Times to print. Julian Assange is not a U.S. citizen, Wikileaks is a new media organization in technical as well as legal terms, the Web servers being used to broadcast and download the information are placed all over the world, and nothing is physical, the materials are all intellectual property. It all makes for a very complex, international affair. We have entered a new phase in law, free speech, and human communication history.

NOTES
1. Ashby Jones (26 July 2010). "Pentagon Papers II? On WikiLeaks and the First Amendment". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 6 December 2010. http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/07/26/pentagon-papers-ii-on-wikileaks-and-the-first-amendment/

Some ideas that I've been hashing out lately go something like this:

1. Narratives legitimate (Lyotard, 1980)
2. Legitimation, post legitimation: With Lyotard's eradication of the metanarrative, what happens to legitimation?
3. Connection between narrative knowledge and legitimation? This is important in a growingly Internet-ized world where we have the ability to access so much more original research and direct resource data, but slog through mountains of useless, pushed content in order to get to it, if we are able.
4. Critical filter, legitimation model:
   1. Open consensus on the communication framework of the discussion;
   2. Self managed, critical filter;
   3. Reestablish the lost element of social obligation (that was present and necessary in Smith's idea of capitalism)
5. Comparative EEG interface examinations
6. Change in consciousness, change in societies
7. Spectacle as cultural artifact

Some questions that fit something like cardboard puzzle pieces after they've been left out in the snow for a while and then brought inside to dry out:

1. Does mass media promote stereotypical thinking? (If so, which media do this more so?)
2. How does legitimacy fit in and does this have anything at all to do with accountability in power?
3. What changes have occurred due to the introduction of the active audience?
4. What are the neurological changes brought on by the digital in reading content?
5. Painting, especially fine art painting of the past several centuries was a new medium of expression, documentation, information dissemination, and cultural archive. (what else was it?) Is Digital Media (especially internet development) the same for 21st century?
6. Traditional journalist story : Representative painting :: Multimedia narrative : Cubist painting (The question here is can I write 100 pages on how Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were the first painters in history to work in digital media (principles).)
7. Expressionism is Gonzo.
8. The relationships of late capitalism and the impact of identity construction, what is the role of mass media in this?
9. Is the idea of UFO abductions pure narrative and no scientific?
10. Are happy people really happy? Or are they plugged into a happiness machine called media? If the latter is veritable, Aristotle taught us this is not real happiness.

I am fairly certain that once we absented the television, effectively we went back in time: listening to the spoken word, looking up baseball box scores, and following Chelsea articles in the written format as of late. Have no fear, with the TV gone, the house is much quieter, I am getting done more reading (Jurgen Habermas, not the Philadelphia Inquirer), and those who dare stand up to the Phils in September, well, there is always MLB.tv for that.