The Fractious Facebook Feed

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 10 November 2015.

Orestes Pursued by the Furies by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

As far as the fractious Facebook feed, I personally feel this is the last gasps of print literacy and individualism trying to assert itself before it is dragged down into the tribal world of the ear, of the chorus, of the chthonic, of chaos, of chanting, of moira, of ritual, of dithyrambic dance.

When you really look, those exchanges and the resultant fragmentation are still due to the paradigm of print. The fact that this fragmentation is accelerating is due to the extreme anxiety produced by retribalization and the end of 400 years of print literacy. When I ask my students about Snapchat, they have a hard time explaining their enthusiasm for it. But they are largely uninterested in Facebook and increasingly uninterested in Twitter.

If McLuhan was right, we should see new types of social media with an even greater emphasis on the ear. Snapchat has deemphasized print literacy, but it's still visual. The movie Her seems to imagines that social media will go in this direction.

Then again, maybe the fragmentation and fighting is our reacclimating to the levels of conflict present in the tribe.

But Henry Ford would not partake in this tribalizing impulse. This is the full flower of mechanization, specialization, isolation, fragmentation. Tribalizing is the opposite impulse: stay in the same community or village and experience the conflict!

Anyone Can Fire Our Neurons

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art and the group on 10 November 2015.



Have you read McLuhan's War and Peace in the Global Village?

He's pretty insistent in that and in several interviews that renewed tribalism brings more war, not less. He says the cost of electronic culture is civilization. It would be lovely if stretching our consciousnesses all over the world resulted in one village, but it doesn't. Stretching our nerves everywhere means anyone can fire our neurons. Our tribes are just not as geographically organized as they were before, that's all.

Two seconds scrolling through a Facebook feed shows that we aren't all in one tribe, and that the enmity between tribes is accelerating. Also, the way people reduce tribal conflict on Facebook is to defriend anyone who create conflict, which paradoxically reinforces tribalism, since one limits one's interactions to those with people of the same tribe. 

It makes sense to address the issue of tribalism, as the 70's begin with the end of the 60's dream of one tribe, we get the age of cults, then we end with the digital age trying to absorb the power of The Lodestone. 

I see Arthur as tribal, too. He's torn by the family tribe and the universal tribe of man, as well as a personal relationship with God.

The Hyacinth Girl (Part 3 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of a Facebook message sent from Liza to Will on 25 February 2015.

Who: The one with the flashing eyes, the floating hair!
What: A fragment(ed reply). Or, a vision in a dream.
When: Time simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all bugs in amber.
Where: That dome in air, that sunny dome! Those caves of ice!
Why: There is no why.

This is Just to Say

I have organized
the thoughts
that are in
my brain-box

and which
I was probably
craving
to have sent already.

Forgive me (for their delay)
they are seditious
so Geat
and so bold.

As soon as I finish writing a paper, grading some papers, lesson-planning, and matting my students' artwork for Friday's exhibition, I'll make sense of my thoughts and send 'em your way. I, too, move in geological time.

Patience is a virtue or whatever.

In a vision once you saw,
A damsel with a dulcimer