Twister: Wild, Beautiful Love Poetry, 'Fabric of Life,' Opening to Loving Bliss

"Mama Mia" ~ Wild, beautiful, love poetry spoken by heart in the Harbin Temple yesterday evening by Dreaming-Bear {from his book "Wild Love: ~Kissed into Consciousness~" [http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Love-~Kissed-into-Consciousness~/dp/0595426131]}. Dreaming Bear is clear, and his poetry is opening. His oral recitation of his poetry is dreamy, even trippy. :) And the Harbin 'experience' is in this poetry, intimately so. His poetry is therapeutic, loving, visionary and more, ~ all in one.

people.tribe.net/dreaming-bear


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Harbin's 'fabric of life' opens fascinating possibilities, ... and is mind-expanding in unusual ways ...


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The Harbin waters come from about 4 miles underground. Is this Harbin Hot Springs as 'place,' in an ethnographic sense?


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Opening to Harbin and finding loving bliss together can be ... What's the language which sings? ....


Harbin pools ... now

Land Contours: 'Consumption of Ideas,' "Always Coming Home," Agrarian Lifestyle to Reverse Global Climate Change

How to substitute the consumption of ideas for the consumption of pollution producing human action (such as driving fossil fuel burning cars that produce CO2) in the context of potentially a kind of decade-long orientation to move toward a more agrarian society, while not throwing away the material benefits of the industrial and information technology revolutions? And how might we do this as expressions of developments in ideals of the Enlightenment, the 1960s and 1970s, {as well as Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu's thinking}?

I'm thinking here of Ursula Le Guin's book "Always Coming Home," (1985) where people live basically a very comfortable and beautiful, agrarian lifestyle {as well as a rich, cultural~symbolic life}, in northern California, 400 years in the future (this is ethnographic, science fiction), while still accessing and sharing information via the internet. The most 'advanced' technology these people have, besides computing, is a lovely, wooden steam engine.

How will World University and School contribute to making consumption of ideas and an agrarian lifestyle much more desirable, enjoyable and fascinating than consumption of material, polluting processes?


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How can each of us reduce our carbon output by 80% (see climatologist Jim Hansen ~ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen), to slow and possibly reverse global climate change? He suggests that the tipping point will be 2016, if we don't change soon. Toyota Priuses reduce drivers' output of carbon 50%, from 1990s' levels. How to reduce carbon output by another 30%?

Here's the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's web site ~ ipcc.ch. They won the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in 2007, and develop policy and make accessible the science about global climate change. (I rode a bicycle exclusively - no autos - for around 22 years out of a Quakerly-led concern about global climate change).

And here's a MIT Open Course Ware online class on global climate change: ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/15-023JSpring-2008/CourseHome.


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Sometimes Harbin Hot Springs reminds me of the life in the valley, without hot springs, which Ursula Le Guin describes so lyrically and luminously in "Always Coming Home" {California fiction}.

Into the Harbin pools soon ...

Lignum Vitae: Learning "Free to All," Enlightenment Ideals, Free Loving Bliss For All ~ Naturally

It was an Enlightenment ideal to make learning "free to all" {Harvard professor and head of Harvard's library system Robert Darnton's "Google and the Future of Books": nybooks.com/articles/22281?email}. The Enlightenment influenced this country's founding in very far-reaching ways.

World University and School's orientation to open, free education dovetails with this way of thinking.

worlduniversity.wikia.com

How will the developing world engage World University and School's Wiki?


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Free loving bliss for all ~ scottmacleod.com/#LovingBlissLetters ~ as an ongoing expression of Enlightenment ideals? Yes.

In places like Harbin Hot Springs? ~ Especially.

And at home? Yes
.
And in virtual worlds?

... MMmmm ... :)

Salmon-Grizzly: Design, Regenerating Multimedia Generation, Harbin

Design ahead for the discipline of anthropology? See Paul Rabinow's, George Marcus' and Tobias Rees' "Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary."

One conceptual, digital approach to design in the academic discipline of anthropology is "regenerating multimedia generation, " (a term Paul, a teacher of mine, suggested I trademark the other day).


Wiki technologies are one example, where the regeneration comes from ongoing developing edits, that make possible a group knowledge generation process.


Regenerating:
Active wikis are always changing, forming, constructing, and creating anew, especially in an improved state.


Multimedia:
brings media elements, including words and text together. Here are some characteristics of it:

Integration, Interactivity, Hypermedia, Immersion and Narrativity

Packer and Jordan (see Randall Packer and Ken Jordan's "Multimedia" 2001: xxx) argue that integration, interactivity, hypermedia, immersion and narrativity characterize novel communication processes resulting from the development of information technologies.

Integration refers to “the combining of artistic forms and technology into a hybrid form of expression” (Packer and Jordan 2001: xxx).

Interactivity refers to “the ability of the user to manipulate and affect [his and] her experience of media directly, and to communicate with others through media” (Packer and Jordan 2001: xxx).

Hypermedia refers to “the linking of separate media elements to one another to create a trail of personal association” (Packer and Jordan 2001: xxx).

Immersion refers to “the experience of entering into the simulation of a three-dimensional environment” (Packer and Jordan 2001: xxxi).

Narrativity refers to “aesthetic and formal strategies that derive from the above concepts, and which result in nonlinear story forms and media presentation” (Packer and Jordan 2001: xxxi).

These technologies shape narratives, incorporating the above processes, which have the effect of creating hypertextual (nonlinear) story lines and multimedia shows.



Generativity:
Openness ~ this process gives rise to ongoing idea production, and information technology production, where innovation is continues.

The ability to create new wikis freely for any area of inquiry is an example. Programming languages creating programming languages are like this, too. See MIT Professor and Director of the Center for Bits and Atoms Neil Gershenfeld in this Library of Congress video: http://www.c-span.org/congress/digitalfuture.asp {March 28, 2005}.


{Paul Rabinow's "Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment" (Princeton 2003) and Bruno Latour's "We Have Never Been Modern," (Harvard 1993: 76-77), are particularly relevant here anthropologically, but digital technologies are new}.


Ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy {I trademark this name, too:} is one, good example which these authors have not yet explored, {because I'm creating and developing this method}.

Webnographers.org is another.

What are others?


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To the Harbin pools soon, in the rain, as a guest ... :)

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_run

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_bear

...

Bonobos Together: Apes, Jokes, Interspecies-Wiki-Virtual-World-Graphy

I was wondering today about Bonobo chimpanzee jokes. What are some? Please write them in the comment section below if you know any.


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Here's primatologist and Bonobo-researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaugh in a TED Talk entitled "Apes that write, start fires and play Pac-Man" - ted.com/index.php/talks/susan_savage_rumbaugh_on_apes_that_write.html. She does joke here that Bonobo are much like humans in their great interest in sex. This talk is funny, inspiring, balanced, edifying and compassionate.


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I'd like to examine how Bonobo chimpanzees in the Congo might engage in forms of INTERSPECIES-WIKI-VIRTUAL-WORLD-GRAPHY. {Here are thoughts about ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy ~ http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2009/01/eliciting-resting-neurochemistry.html}. Just as Koko, the mountain gorilla in Woodside, California, has learned more than 1,000 signs and can understand more than 2,000 words in English, might Bonobo begin to wiki {edit web pages of (ape-graph to?) [practice apography?] a Congo-Bonobo-Wiki-Virtual-World}, using a similar logographic-sign-language approach to Koko's, as well as wiki-virtual-world-build the world they live in, in a virtual world?

I would also like to find people interested in co-creating specific Bonobo habitat, as place, in a virtual world, with Bonobo.

Interspecies wiki-ing will open fascinating new avenues in ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy.

Breath: Releasing Open Around the Touch of Your Breath

To release open around your breath, start by lying on your back, and begin to elicit the relaxation response for 5 or 10 minutes. :)

After some time easing, begin to feel and observe where your breath touches in your nostrils. With each inhale, release your nostril skin away wherever it touches, as if to create more space and freedom for your breath to flow throw your nostrils and into your body.

As you begin to do this, again and again, follow your breath deeper into your body, across your back throat ~ and release your skin open around your breath, wherever it touches. As your breathing deepens and your nostril skin and back throat skin ease away from the touch of your breath, your relaxation response will deepen, as well. Release into this. As you observe your breath flowing deeper through your throat, release away your windpipe from the touch of your breath.

With this opening process - in your nostrils, you throat, your windpipe - continue to create space, by releasing away from the touch of your breath, wherever it touches.

Still on your back {perhaps someone is talking you through this, or reading this to you}, observe your breath's movement deeper into your body. Begin to allow your breath to pour into your back, upper, inner chest cavity, like a river flowing into the ocean. Feel your breath pour and seep into the your inner, upper back rib cage, and receive your breath's movement here.

Let this process of easing and opening around the touch of your breath guide your explorations sometimes, ~ of movement, of coming inside, of releasing and easing.

Rhododendron: Harbin, Countercultural Healing Center, Patterns

Harbin is a countercultural healing center, with hot springs. And it's pretty alternative, ~ and healing occurs there. They're experienced and have created and observed patterns whereby healing occurs, having to do with freedom ...

Air: [Air-L] Virtual ethnography and online fieldwork

Here's Tom Boellstorff's carefully crafted, recent posting to the Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) email list. He's the author of "Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human" (Princeton 2007), the first anthropology of a virtual world, and a professor at the University of California, Irvine:



This is my first post to this list, so hopefully I won’t mess it up!

As an utter newbie to this list, it’s interesting to see so many discussions of “virtual ethnography,” “cyber anthropology,” whatever you want to call it. I share Christine’s sense of being snowed under (I am enjoying very much being Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, but the workload is quite extraordinary, particularly when teaching three courses, as I am at the present!). However, I did want to take a couple minutes to respond to the postings about “virtual ethnography and online fieldwork,” particularly the recent posting from Don Slater. As is the case with Christine, I’ve never yet had the honor of meeting Don, though his work has influenced mine greatly and I teach with it often. Don’s impassioned posting is, as always, insightful, but there’s a bit of the baby getting thrown out with the bathwater so to speak, and I want to make a case for not closing the door on certain kinds of ethnographic research topics and methods.

Don is absolutely right when stating that:

> 'virtuality', like the off-line/online distinction, is the variable social
> accomplishments of particular actors, which might be performed differently in
> different settings, or be largely absent and irrelevant (as in the Miller and Slater
> Trinidad book).

Online we encounter a range of social formations that vary in the ways they are linked up to actual-world contexts. Sometimes the link is quite direct, as in the case examined in the Trinidad book, or in my colleague Victoria Bernal’s work on Eritreans online, and so on. One of my graduate students, Robert Phillips, has just completed a fascinating dissertation on gay Singaporeans’ use of the Internet that fits into this rough genre of work as well. There are all kinds of social formations “in between” (though it’s too multidimensional for “in between” to really make sense).

And then another genre or type of social formation that we can study ethnographically is online games or virtual worlds whose connection to the actual world is much more indirect in terms of reference or community. The majority of persons who participate in Eritrean diasporic websites are themselves Eritrean (though we don’t know 100% for sure of course, and there are migrants, children of migrants, etc., that complexify designations like “Eritrean”). In a virtual world like Second Life, where I’ve conducted a lot of ethnographic fieldwork, the connection to the actual world is more indirect. There are things like avatars with humanlike bodies, grass and water, social norms of facing someone you talk to, and a thousand other examples of indirect linkage, and some cases of residents who know each other in the actual world prior to involvement in Second Life (siblings, friends, spouses, etc.) or who meet in the actual world after becoming close in Second Life. But the majority of social interaction and meaning-making that takes place “inworld” is not directly predicated on actual-world sociality. If I and my friend Joe in Sydney have a conversation in Second Life one day, that conversation is predicated on us both having physical bodies, Internet access, and so on, but it’s not true that the content and meaning of the conversation (and our social actions inworld, etc.) is only comprehensible to a researcher if that researcher books flights to Los Angeles and Sydney so as to talk to us in the physical world.

This has really interesting and I think significant implications for method as well as theory. As I discuss in Coming of Age in Second Life, having written two books on gay Indonesians I’ve been fascinated to see both similarities and differences in how I’ve had to conduct ethnographic research in physical-world and online contexts. The political dimensions to all of this are important, but I do think they are more complex than Don presents them (although we are basically in agreement):

>I'd only add a political dimension to this: the northern academic presumption that
>virtuality is an intrinsic property of some new machines acts to frame all research
>within this analytic so that we are incited to study virtuality, or within the agenda
>of virtuality, rather than to ethnographically discover how actors frame and
>perform their use of these new machines (and rejecting the notion of virtuality is
>just as ethnographically and analytically senseless). Having worked over the last
>ten years in non-northern settings, and in development contexts, it became very
>clear to me how politically important - and potentially neo-colonial - are the
>framings and concerns that we might impose on other people and the technologies
>we export to them: virtuality, and cognates such as cyberculture, are so clearly a
>projection of internal northern debates about identity, community, connection,
>reality, etc, articulated through specficially northern intellectual traditions such as >poststructuralism and performativity. Time to stop projecting our dramas onto
>everyone else and start looking at what they are doing and saying. And we need to
>do this not only in order to do better research but also in order to ensure that
>alternative uses and understandings of new technologies are actually allowed to
>emerge and be valorized. There are clearly issues of power involved here.

There are absolutely issues of power here, but they are multivalent and complex. Having worked in non-northern settings for 17 years, I can state quite emphatically that virtuality and cognates like cyberculture are not so clearly a projection of internal northern debates. The potential for neo-colonial thinking runs both ways here. In fact, historically colonial thought worked in essence to preserve “virtuality” as the prerogative of the colonizer, through what Mamdani terms “the spatial containerization of the native.” In particular, a notion of “virtuality” was a threat to colonial power because it could lead to the “imagined community” (in Anderson’s classic phrasing) of nationalism that directly challenged colonial rule. (In this quick example the notion of “virtuality” isn’t the same as in “virtual world,” but there is a shared history, and additionally I could talk about the fascinating ways persons in non-northern settings use online spaces, including creating their own virtual worlds!)

So projecting of dramas can take multiple forms, and Don is certainly right we should be vigilant, but part of that vigilance is to not assume a single form of that “drama,” or that the category of “internal northern” is clearly definable -- particularly if it presumes an analogous “internal non-northern.” I’ve certainly had many conversations over the years where gay Indonesians (that is, Indonesians using what at first glance appears to be the English term “gay”) find it interesting to discuss where the “internal”-ness of their sexual subjectivities begins and ends!

To me the key thing is to keep the theoretical and methodological doors open as we research this broad, broad range of new ethnographic domains. Don’s entirely right that “Asserting 'virtuality' as a methodological or substantive presumption is not only daft and obscurantist, it also misses precisely what is interesting” – so the point is to explore the forms virtuality takes and follow that moving target. Don’t assume it, but also don’t assume it’s fake, a projection of northern academic fashion, etc. Don hits on precisely this point when stating that:

>In my recollection, the only real difference between Christine's book and Danny
>Miller and my book was that she constructively focused on fashioning the tools
>needed if one does follow the actors into more online/bounded spaces; whereas
>our book was more concerned to contest the universal applicability of virtuality as
>a methodological framing, and we therefore (possibly) overstated continuities with
>classical ethnography, as if the online settings (which we also looked at extensively
>- Trinidadian websites and chat) made no difference methodologically. These are
>merely differences of polemical intention and research pragmatics.

In fact, I don’t think Don and Danny overstated continuities with classical ethnography at all: I think their book is very well crafted theoretically and methodologically to respond to what they were looking at. It’s that kind of sensitivity and flexibility that to my mind characterizes the best ethnographic work, whether I encounter it as Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, among the work of my colleagues working in Indonesia studies, or among my colleagues working in the ethnography of virtual worlds or other aspects of Internet culture.

What seems clear to me is that there are many contexts in which researchers must explore various direct interfaces and interchanges between online and offline culture, which in some cases will demand meeting people in the physical world in addition to meeting them online. But it is also clear that there now are (and will continue to be in the future) contexts in which forms of society and culture appear online, in online games, virtual worlds, and other things too. These forms of society and culture are obviously shaped by physical-world societies and cultures in many ways, but the persons interacting within the online societies and cultures in question will in most cases meet few (or even none) of each other offline, and it does an ethnographic injustice to that situation to assume that all ethnographic research on online culture must include meeting one’s interlocutor’s in the physical world. In some cases (and for some research questions) it will make sense, but in other cases it will not. Any approach can be done well or badly, and all have something important to contribute.

All the best, Tom Boellstorff

February 8, 2009
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I'll engage his work directly in my actual and virtual Harbin Hot Springs' ethnographic project.

In making his case for virtuality, I wonder how one might include the neural activity which goes on in our minds symbolically, and particularly, in Harbin's case, vis-a-vis counterculture, especially in-world. I'm particularly interested in examining ways in which the shaping of a virtual world, for example a virtual Harbin in Second Life, and ethnographically, in text, as well, may give rise to, and may complement Tom's examination of virtuality.

Amazon River: Internetworking Practices, Networks, Culture

Philosopher Colin Koopman contrasts his reading of the significance of the internet - partly by problematizing 'internetworking practices' - with Manuel Castells':

cwkoopman.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/castells-seeing-networks-everywhere-he-looks

I think Castells successfully characterizes the emergence of the information technology revolution vis-à-vis previous industrial revolutions, and then extrapolates about the significance of these new developments, and concludes that networks emerge and are very significant to reading socioeconomic processes that are pervasive today.


For Castells, a paradigm shift occurs vis-a-vis the Information Technology Revolution which affects every aspect of socioeconomic life. There are 5 key aspects that give rise to the paradigm shift Castells characterizes:

These include:

1 INFORMATION GENERATION and PROCESSING is what this revolution is about.

2 It's PERVASIVE - it invades and influences every domain of socioeconomic activity.

3 It's characterized by NETWORKING - mentalities, companies, people - all network - and create synergies, based on these IT-related knowledge generation processes.

4 FLEXIBILITY is a key - the system is such that it reorganizes, and reprograms its components without disintegration.

5 It's INTEGRATING - The technological convergence that has occurred is an integrating system, and it's an open system, not closing, and it's bounded only by technological developments and innovations in ...


Here's an example of how a specific internetworking practice emerged:

Tim Berners-Lee almost single-handedly started the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee wrote the protocols for HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol), HTML (hyptertext markup language), URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and posted these to a BBS (bulletin board system) in 1989, which graduate students then disseminated these through various networks. Tim Berners-Lee wrote these protocols partly with Robert Cailliau's help.

Berners-Lee is British, and was living in Geneva, Switzerland at the time. With these protocols and markup language, people could then begin to post information on the web. And HTTP, HTML, and URL then made possible the development of graphical user interface browsers (in the early 1990s).



For Castells, the significant developments giving rise to the internet, in general, occurred in microelectronics, telecommunications, computing, and also in the genetic engineering revolution - which is also about information - the code of life.



To characterize the differences between his and Castells' readings of the internet, Colin writes:

"I see networking as one element of a broader problematization and reconstruction of the existing conditions of possibility of our culture. Castells sees networks as a blueprint for our culture. I see networks as a set of practices which renders problematic our existing blueprints at the same time that it enables new blueprints which we are as yet unprepared to assess. Castells sees in networks the logic of our present such that the networking form already contains all the problems and solutions constitutive of our present. I see these problems and solutions as in need of rigorous inquiry insofar as the network form itself does not fully disclose our situation. Castells seems to see networks everywhere he looks. I am only looking at, or rather into, internetworking.

Concluding Observation: It seems that nearly every time I read a sociologist who is writing about whatever I aim to write about I detect sizable gaps. By contrast when I read historians, anthropologists, and philosophers on my objects of inquiry, I always detect more resonances. In any event, I am perfectly well aware that perhaps I am misinterpreting Castells (and so misrepresenting him here). That, in short, is why I wanted to post this. Corrections welcome and in due time before I entrench my attitude toward the network society thesis."

In my reading of Castells, he doesn't so much focus on questions of culture in his socio-historical characterizations of what were largely a series of technologically-oriented accidents giving rise to the internet. Castells is not examining 'cultural questions,' but rather, starting from a Marxian perspective decades ago, asking what 'structural conditions' the internet give rise to, and observing that networks are very significant in today's world, especially for global information capitalism. Castells doesn't reify ('thingify') networks, but rather explains "The Rise of the Network Society," while not de-emphasizing "The Power of Identity," (a different reading of 'culture' from Colin's), at "The End of the Millenium" (the three titles of Castells' "Rise of the Network Society" trilogy). Now Professor Castells co-edits "The International Journal of Communication" (annenberg.usc.edu/Faculty/Communication/CastellsM.aspx).

To complement Colin's reading of Castells, such conclusions about the internet articulate well with ways in which we might further problematize internetworking practices in terms of culture, as they develop ahead. And like Colin Koopman, I agree that networking allows for "a broader problematization and reconstruction of the existing conditions of possibility of our culture," perhaps encompassing and superseding those that readings of modernity and postmodernity seek to explain (see Scott MacLeod's Gazing at the Box: Tourism in the Context of the Internet and Globalization).

Blue-ish: Harbin Hot Springs

Harbin is real, wonderful, with a lot of naked people around, especially in the pool area {like scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2009/02/harbin.html}.

Here's an image of virtual nudity, which will, I think, become natural and familiar in virtual Harbin Hot Springs.