The Internet is changing the way we read and the way we think. A fascinating essay by Caleb Crain describes the different reasoning patterns of people in literate cultures and oral story-telling cultures. Even the languages and characters that make up our alphabet can affect the ways we think.

Crain and other scholars refer to the pre-literate societies, societies in which only the elite were literate, as "primary oralities." This is how they process information:

It's difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently; orality, Havelock observed, doesn't "fossilize" except through its nemesis, writing. But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a "graphic-functional" way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said "dark blue" or "light yellow," but illiterates used metaphorical names like "liver," "peach," "decayed teeth," and "cotton in bloom." Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn't. Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had grouped the three tools together, discarding the log, replied, "Whoever told you that must have been crazy," and another suggested, "Probably he's got a lot of firewood." One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and declared, "Now, clearly the child doesn't belong in this group," only to have a peasant answer:

Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they'll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them.

Illiterates also resisted giving definitions of words and refused to make logical inferences about hypothetical situations. Asked by Luria's staff about polar bears, a peasant grew testy: "What the cock knows how to do, he does. What I know, I say, and nothing beyond that!" The illiterates did not talk about themselves except in terms of their tangible possessions. "What can I say about my own heart?" one asked.

[snip]

Soon after this study, Ong synthesized existing research into a vivid picture of the oral mind-set. Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to "think memorable thoughts," whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There's no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in "enthusiastic description of physical violence." Since there's no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past's inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

I'm writing this diary to explain to you what initially drew me to Barack Obama's campaign. It was a year ago, when I heard about Project Readon, a site that captions internet videos for free. I'm deaf, and the internet has left me behind when it comes to accessibility in internet media. I can't watch CNN videos, MSNBC videos, download media from network shows and movies onto my iPod or laptop that has captioning, and I didn't have that access until I found Project Readon.

And there was a video on that site. It was an outline of Barack Obama's plan to empower Americans with disabilities. Project Readon said that Barack Obama's campaign was the first website to sign up to caption their videos. Hillary Clinton's campaign was the second to join in along with Senator Tom Harkin's Senate campaign. The Republicans said no to Project Readon (with the exception of Ron Paul), which shows the lack of care that the Republican party has shown to Americans with disabilities.

Barack Obama provides that link to closed-captioned videos at Project Readon, which you can find here with the green button that says "Closed Captioning."

You click on that link, and you see a whole line of videos with closed captioning in them. That really meant a lot to me as a deaf American, who relies on captioning to get information about the outside world.

I also read Barack Obama's plan for Americans with disabilities. They also provided a link to sign up in a Disability Discussion group to talk about policies that can help disabled Americans. His efforts to expand the dialogue to deaf and hard-of-hearing people like me tells me what kind of a leader he'd be in this area.

To say that Americans have had a love affair with technology is the most humdrum of cliches. The idea that new technologies will not only make life easier for us, but will help bring us together as a people, is not new theme in American folklore. Long before there was the Web, or the radio, or even a developed telephone network, American philosophers and social critics dreamed of how new technologies might transform us, make us into a community in all of our diversity. In 1892, as a relatively young man, George Herbert Mead, a pragmatic philosopher in the American grain, wrote a letter to his wife's parents. It's worth quoting.

"But it seems to me clearer every day that the telegraph and locomotive are the great spiritualizers of society because they bind man and man so close together that the interest of the individual must be more completely the interest of all day by day. And America in pushing this spiritualizing of nature is doing more than all in bringing the day when every man will be my neighbor and all life shall be saturated with the divine life." (See, Gary A. Cook, George Herbert Mead, The Making of a Social Pragmatist, p. 31)

This relatively youthful Mead thought that the locomotive and the telegraph would bring us closer together. And so they did in their own ways. Now the Internet appears to be doing so in a qualitatively different fashion. But before moving on to discuss the Internet's place in the current election, it's worth reminding ourselves about the dark side of our commitment to technology. For example, we have recently been promised nearly bloodless wars in which burnished flying machines, decked out with starship instrumentation, will seek out and destroy our enemies. The Iraq nightmare began with the promise that high tech would produce "Shock and Awe," and a quick end to war.

But in this election, the prospect of utilizing technology to make Americans feel as if they are part of a national political community, is no longer merely a fantasy of the early devotees of Apple computers. Although it has been said many times and in many ways, and in ways that were suspect, it does seem that the Internet has finally come of age. No doubt Obama would not be where he is today without his campaign's creative use of Internet technologies and software. (See, Joshua Green's piece, "The Amazing Money Machine" <http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/obama-finance> and Marc Ambinder's "His Space" in The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/am binder-obama

Yet technology by itself is blind. Obama's experience as a community organizer has let him frame how the technology could be used. He and his people have pioneered paths for merging the virtual and the real worlds, for moving from on-line communities to real world communities and back. What happens on the Web doesn't just stay on the Web. However, it's worth keeping in mind that Obama is part of an older American tradition, one that supported the development of technology without worshiping it. And one that spoke a great deal about community and social responsibility. Mead was part of this camp. And so was his good friend John Dewey. They were called progressives in the early 20th century. They were on the non-Marxist Left. (Yes, we once had a vital non-Marxist Left.) Sometimes we forget that this tradition preceded New Deal Liberalism.

What is happening is not just about Obama and his campaign. It is about words: their profusion, polyphony, and heartfeltness. People are writing to each other, again and again. And not just to friends (or one's wife's parents), but to strangers. Have Americans ever written so much in such a short space of time? Do all the words in all of the (paper) letters that Americans have written since the Declaration of Independence equal 1/10 of the words on the Web in the last five years? (No doubt, someone, somewhere, has made a calculation.) Commentaries abound from people who never had a voice in the mainstream media. They talk, argue, commiserate, plan, plot, comment, organize, and vent. Yes, a lot of junk, some hate, but also speaking and listening. Will this conversation resolve economic inequalities and racial divides? Of course not. As a matter of fact, we will have to work to make sure that new technologies don't increase class divisions or centralize power in unimagined ways. Yet, all in all, we are engaged in an impressive conversation. It may not be the New England Town Hall, but for a country of 300 million, it's an interesting way to help promote political communities and community.

For more on this and related topics, http://msa4.wordpress.com/

Cross-posted from

What can wine tell us about the world? Plenty, it turns out.  It is one of civilization's oldest products.  At one time it was a necessity, when food was served rotten and water was where you washed and evacuated.  Now it is enjoying a resurgence.  It is an agricultural product, and a unique one.  You see, vineyards have kept records of temperature, yield, and ripeness-dates for centuries, giving us incredibly precise records that tell us reams about the global environment. It is also a luxury item, particularly at the top end.  As such, its sale and purchase can tell us volumes about the global economy.

Today we look at how modern technology is changing the way people sell, and the way people buy.

Joe Trippi recently observed on Twitter that both Obama and Clinton have fairly lame presences there. Both seem to be recycling standard issue campaign schedule material, example from @barackobama:

I planned to write about Politburo tactics, self-annointed patrollers and policers on the dailykos website - I think it has become a terrible problem and has severely limited and lowered the discourse there - and then I thought about the shooting in Illinois.

These shootings are becoming alarmingly and freighteningly frequent - isn't this the second one in about two weeks? While these shooters are obvioulsy deranged, I can't help but think that the shootings are somehow related to the volatile, tense climate in the country right now, and to our increasingly violent culture.

There are so many factors, too many to list. Some, to start: reality shows in which we watch people be denigrated, publicly humilitated, dehumanized, "pimped out;" the celebrity media, which hounds people like dogs on a hunt; the internet, where a mob mentality has taken hold, as Lee Siegel argues in his recent book Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob - and that includes dailykos, where the discourse is no longer about politics at all, but rather about "trolls" and "sockpuppets" and "snark" and the like, and where people are bullied, hounded, ridiculed, and humiliated for offering informed opinion.

Certainly not be be discounted for the sense of latent, but explosive anger and the eruption of extreme violence in America as you read this is the Iraq war itself, which is now coming home in a way no one anticipated, but which was inevitable; the total lack of accountability in government; the gross and repeated abuses of power and the war on civil rights; the denigrating of language on the part of the government, the emptying out of langauge in lies and propaganda; the denigration of language in the media, i.e. the use of pornographic slang as if it were aceptable civil discourse; and uncivil discourse on the internet, where people say whatever they want with no repercussions; the triumph of the corporate ethos over every aspect of everyday life; years of fear-mongering and war-mongering. All play a part.

These recurring shootings are one manifestation of this treacherous atmosphere.

But most people -- still moral, ethical, not deranged -- now use the internet to lash out, to express their anger, fury, rage; they use it to say and do things they would never do in real life. One example is the mother who set up a fake profile on MySpace and taunted a neighbor's daughter until the poor girl killed herself. But most cases are much more subtle, not fatal.

To decry an advancing technology runs the risk of being called reactionary - as Siegel points out in his book. I don't mind being called reactionary if it means taking a stand for decency , for taking a stand against violence of any kind, be it physcial or mental.  

I was personally troubled by many aspects of dailykos- there is a violence there, too, and it is accepted and even celebrated - the entire "kos" vocabulary of trolls and snark and sockpuppets and HR'd and TR'd and mojo and so on - the fact that there is a form of person-to-person censorship - if you don't agree with or like an opinion you just "hide" it - and a mob or crowd mentality where anonymous people group together and decide to taunt or harrange a particular user in order to drive them away. It is the worst form of junior high school antics, and what makes it chilling here is that it is perpetrated by adults.

Siegel says: "The internet is the first social environment to serve the needs of the isolted, elevated, asocial individual."

That is the kind of person who committed those shootings today. But something similar also exists in a much less extreme form on dailykos. Asocial personality types who feel empowered to police and patrol, to "troll" people or "disappear" people for no reason other than that they can, or use obscene language and insult to harrange instead of disagree or engage.

Some more thoughts from Seigel: "What kind of idea do we have of the world when, day after day, we sit in front of our screens and enter further and further into the illusion that we ourselves are actually creating our own external reality out of our own internal desires? We become impatient with realities that don't gratify our impulses or satifsy our picture of reality. We find it harder to accept the immutable limitations imposed by identity, talent, personality. We start to behave in public as if were were acting in private, and we begin to fill our private world with gargantuan public appetites. In other words, we find it hard to bear simply being human."

His notion that we "fill our private world with gargantuan public appetities" is fascinating, and applies, I think, not just to the way people shop online these days. On political sites like this one, we attempt to take the whole spread of the country and of the campaign, whole states, mass rallies, into the private space of our homes, our home offices, our bedrooms.  By being here we invite everyone else on the site, everyone who posts a nasty comment, into our homes. And we thus also invite into our homes all the unfulfilled urges, the irrational drives, the negative desires of the masses.

It would be interesting to try to square all this with what is happening in the democratic primaries.

How can the the violence, these recurring mass shootings, be squared with the euphoria and joy people feel watching the Obama campaign?

How much of the misdirected negativity and misogeny floating around the culture is being projected onto Hillary Clinton?

Ecstacy and degredation - the twin poles of our political and popular culture.

The generalized culture of violence will not reverse itself or retreat anytime soon. Not even Obama can stop that.

We need a return to a more civil and enlightened discourse. We need a new enlightenment.

Part of the candidate blogger series for Obama

Obama released a major package of technology initiatives today that Matt Stoller  greeted as "transformative" and "genuinely radical" --- even going so far as to announce that, based on this package and despite his other reservations, Obama is now his first choice.

Prof. Lawrence Lessig, one of the most deeply respected experts on net neutrality,  was led to announce his full endorsement of Obama today:

Obama has committed himself to a technology policy for government that could radically change how government works.

Kos praised the package on the frontpage.  And VentureBeat today called the package "the most comprehensive set of policies for open government I've seen."  Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report notes that Obama's bold new positions on Iran and now on technology have led to some reconsideration of his candidacy among the netroots.  

No one can critique this policy package for a lack of vision, as it lays out an extraordinarily idealistic view of the ability of technology to change the way government works.

Clearly with this package, Obama hit the ball out of the park.

There have been a number of responses already.  I diaried the details of the plan today on DailyKos.  Adam B has an excellent post on the significance of the Lessig endorsement.  Matt Stoller provides a run-down of the proposals on net neutrality and broadband accessibility, while Kos focused on the transparency and open government proposals.

Obama sees the secretive years of the Bush administration and the recent lobbyist scandals as an opportunity to make a case for a radically more transparent government, for a different way of doing business:

Barack Obama will use the most current  technological tools available to make government less beholden to special interest groups and lobbyists and promote citizen participation in government decision-making.  Obama will integrate citizens into the actual  business of government...

The web shouldn't just be merely a new means of disseminating old information.  It is not enough to simply post thousands of pages of budget documents online and to literally throw these volumes into the public realm.  The information needs to be organized in new ways, taking advantage of new technology.

One of Obama's most crucial proposals is to make government information "available online through universally accessible formats."  Or as Lessig describes, these information streams could be put into RSS or Atom format, making them easily searchable and broadly accessible.  These RSS/Atom feeds could include "votes, contributions, Members of Congress's calendars."

Obama envisions this new access to information as empowering citizens to take action in their communities:

Greater access to  environmental data, for example, will help citizens learn about pollution in their communities, provide  information about local conditions back to government and empower people to protect themselves.

But it's also intriguing that Obama, in the end, is aiming at more than just improving transparency and providing information.  He is actively trying to find ways to incorporate broader citizen input into government decision-making:

Establishing pilot programs to open up government decision-making and involve the public in the work  of agencies, not simply by soliciting opinions, but by tapping into the vast and distributed expertise of the American citizenry to help government make more informed decisions.

This is a smart move for a committee that has no money to pay for its own ads.

The National Republican Congressional Committee recently started a new online contest called "Your Direction," where tech-savvy conservatives can air their grievances and maybe even win a $500 Apple gift card. It's another way in which Republicans are trying to get their voters engaged on the Internet.

To win, constestants must create a video no longer than one minute that addresses the question, "Has the Democratic Congress worked for you?"

While the launch video for the contest is actually pretty decent (see it HERE,) The Times' Caucus blog has found some fairly pathetic examples of a couple early submissions, including:

...a low-tech rant from "Enrique the Angry Atheist," who sets up his Web camera to capture only his South Park hat. In a matching cartoon accent, he lambastes universal health care and suggests that the United States is winning the Iraq War. There's bad news for Enrique -- his entry will be disqualified because it's 70 seconds longer than the time limit.

Wouldn't it be a shame if Democrats started submitting their own videos to the contest so that a search for "Has the Democratic Congress Worked For You" or "Your Direction video contest" returned an overwhelming number of videos that, while certainly answering 'No' to the central question, placed most of the blame for our discontent with congress on an intransigent president and an obstructionist minority?

What a shame that would be.

Oh and don't forget these very important guidelines!

* Just choose your own approach

* Think outside the box

* Be creative

* Upload it to YouTube

* And become a star