Menticulture

MARP Radio & Interactivity 2008 - Part 1

joe — Thu, 15 May 2008 11:12:51 +0000

Here's a recording of the first session on Radio and Interactivity from the MA Radio Production at Bournemouth Media School, and some links to things we talked about:

Some key points for those who couldn't attend:

We'll meet on Tuesdays, and save the time from the Thursday sessions for later
Next Tuesday, we'll discuss examples of interactive radio / audio that you've found that you enjoy. It would be great if you could post links in the comments below before the session!
Part of the purpose of the next two sessions is to thrash out ideas about what you'd like to do with interactivity - something for your showreel? a collaborative project? individual work? tutorials or workshops? etc.

Direct Download for MARP Radio and Interactivity Seminar podcast part 1
Duration: 1:15:45; Size: 27MB

Journal fiction

joe — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:26:08 +0000

She says he found the journal by google. "I want to fucking kill myself" plus "I'm feeling lucky". He went to the root, and found the phone number. Called the phone number - this sort of thing doesn't happen every day, she notes drily.

The last thing she says - she may go to Paris. 6 months ago. So I call the number, because I think she's dead. We'll talk about the hole you fill with junk food and TV, and the way you cover the mirrors. We will, sooner or later, stand together under the shelter, in the rain, and watch the stray drops collect over the iron ornamentation and whorl into a bare stream of hopelessness at our feet.

The phone rings onto voicemail, and the crackle of transatlantic distance deters me. Layering complications onto someone's unsuspecting answer-phone. I try again, some hours later. Her voice is there, faint, surprised (even though this has happened before) - I googled, found the journal, went to the root, and called the number. I wanted to triangulate, as though if I knew she was there, and that he - the first one - was also somewhere, then we'd be three points, marking summits, we could take sightings, and locate ourselves. In the absence of a mirror, I needed to see myself reflected by other means, in the words of someone on the end of a google search. I'm pleased she's alive.

She thanks me. We make valedictions. But we have always made valedictions.

Epiphany

joe — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:32:51 +0000

Today is my father's birthday. He would have been 57. I miss, amongst a myriad other things, his way of pricking overblown seriousness with scurrilous absurdities. And buried in his poems I find this moment of pathos, which made me chuckle in light of my recent grappling with philosophical horse-bollocks:

I found out!

For one moment I knew.
Then it passed from me
In a drunken stupor
In the Market Place Gents

Andrew Herbert Flintham (1951 - 2001)

Broken university

joe — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:49:17 +0000

I have a lot of other stuff to write about, and I will get around to it. In the meantime, I just want to note an observation which occurred to me recently. A moment of realisation.

I've been delving into writing code for collective intelligence, and as I worked through some of the intellectual ideas behind the various algorithms and principles, it occurred to me that universities are exactly the sorts of place where collective intelligence does not emerge.

Despite the fact that universities form a hub and focus for people who value intelligence, and sometimes, even creative thinking, actually the entire tertiary education system is set up to discourage collectivity, and incentivise secrecy and competition.

Universities do not exist for the benefit of learners, they exist for the benefit of researchers. Reward systems recognise research and publication, exercises which demand 'originality' and 'novelty' - which discourage people from sharing their ideas - and scarcely notice pedagogy. Researchers talk more about whose ideas are whose rather than what those ideas are.

The minor army of people who are there because they want to help people to learn are invisible, unrecognised, overlooked, ignored, tolerated. How have we managed to have such broken universities?

Placebo prozac

joe — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:29:17 +0000

SSRIs are no better than placebo at treating depression in the majority of cases. It's been a couple of weeks since this story broke, but it was infinitely fascinating, and for a while I was amazed that no-one seemed to be examining the weird reflexive problem that breaking the story itself seemed to present. Placebo (in my limited understanding) works because patients believe they are being treated - and presumably the improvement in the psychological state of the patient has physiological benefits. But then if the national media tells everyone that even though the pills they take are actual 'medicines' as defined by NICE and the pharma-industry (rather than sugar-pills), actually the benefit they're getting is really only a placebo, doesn't that mean that you remove the efficacy of even the placebo (because now everyone knows their benefits are 'only' psychological)?

As the author of the report, (and by the way, isn't the PLOS open access peer-review journal an awesome thing), Irving Kirsch, stated on the Channel 4 News coverage:

one of the core characteristics of depression is a sense of hopelessness, and anything that combats that, and instils a sense of hope is going to help people feel better.

Doesn't the coverage of this report tell those patients that their hope is illusory? I know that about 10 years ago I enquired about a stop-smoking trial. The researcher taking applications said that the trial would use a placebo, and that half of the participants would be given a glucose sweet, while the other half would be given a 'placebo'. I mentioned that I had heard that glucose sweets helped to combat the physical symptoms of nicotine withdrawal because they mitigated the drop in blood sugar levels, and had tried it before (with obviously limited success). At this point, of course, the researcher said I couldn't take part because, since I had used glucose sweets before, I would be able to tell whether I was being given the sweets or the placebo, rendering my participation in the trial meaningless.

In fact, this is precisely the point of double-blind trials which use placebos: the researchers don't know who is getting the medicine and who the placebo; and equally, the patients don't know either. Ethically-speaking, they have to know there is a chance, because I think the procedural codes of these trials require that participants are told that some of them will receive placebo.

Of course, all of this acknowledges the fact that a patient's psychological state, their expectation, hope and optimism, has an important and measurable effect on the likelihood that their prognosis improves.

So it was interesting to see Ben Goldacre look at the topic in his unfailingly interesting column Bad Science:

Do drugs stop working if you know they are little better than a sugar pill? And do cultural factors, like our collective faith in a treatment, have a measurable effect on the benefits? On this, there has been a only tiny amount of highly tenuous research.

And in the little research that has been done on the subject, while some reports might imply that declining 'belief' in a medicine reduces its efficacy, there is also evidence that even when patients are told explicitly that they are being given a placebo, nevertheless, the treatment has a beneficial effect.

This, I suppose, gets the media off the hook for telling millions of people that their medicine is no better than sugar pills, and perhaps we'll see more in the coming years as to whether the use and efficacy of these SSRIs change. And of course, exposing the the cravenness of the pharma-industry can never be a bad thing. But it does still leave the question, what exactly is it about the change in expectation that using a placebo encourages, that works therapeutically, even when people know it is just a placebo? And, indeed, why can't I just heal my head, by believing it will be healed?

Bollocks might be true, but it is still bollocks

joe — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:33:29 +0000

I've had something of a realisation over the last few weeks. I managed to relieve some of the pressure in my work that had built up due to absence and illness, which gave me the chance to step back and think about things.

I used to write posts on this blog about how the elitism and jargon that is associated with academic work and cultural and media studies just mystifies the subjects, works as a barrier to newbies, and generally disappears up its own postmodern arse.

Then I registered for a PhD.

So, looking back on the post I wrote 3 weeks ago about Habermas and Gadamer makes me realise that I've been rimming the sphincter of elitism as much as anyone I've ever criticised. I consider this a direct consequence of registering for a PhD: before, intellectual work was all about pleasure and discovery, and doing it for its own sake; after, it's been about validity and legitmacy, what is true and how we know it is true. Of course those things matter, but fuck me, it doesn't matter if something is true if it is also bollocks. I need to remember this: bollocks might be true, but it is still bollocks.

So I'll try and rewrite the truth and method thing some time so that it makes sense to a human. In the meantime, I also need to figure out how to do a PhD without it decaying into a level of tedium that will make all living things wither. Otherwise, it's just bollocks, isn't it?

Apoplectic frenzy of self-congratulation

joe — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 22:52:29 +0000

So, that Prince Harry bloke. He's suddenly everywhere, denying he's a hero, while the media works itself into a mixture of an apoplectic frenzy of self-congratulation for being able to keep a secret, and a hedonistic binge of royalty-boggling now the cover's blown. Is anyone in this story not a wanker? The media: gobbling up the chance to appear sanctimonious and prurient at the same time. Harry: is he the rebel prince, or the noble soldier? Or maybe he's a hero? Or not a hero, just a soldier doing his job? Actually he's none of these things and less. He's a tedious fuckwit, just like every other braying ass the aristocracy of this country prides itself on producing. I imagine there was once a golden age when the population maintained a dignified silence in the face of the idiocy on exhibit here. Now, here I am making a pointless observation about an insignificant pillock prompted by a vacuous and pompous media vulturemachine. Please someone kill me.

What is particularly warped and distressing about the whole episode is the fact that Harry sees going to war as an opportunity to be a 'normal' person, while the rest of normal humanity wonders why anyone thinks going to a foreign country to kill people is a desirable activity.

With apologies to Charlie Brooker, whose book I have been reading all day.

Three things

joe — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 10:44:19 +0000

Three things

Firstly: having pack removed from nose redefined pain in ways I had not anticipated. Since I seem to be doomed to an eternity of pain in the head, I should at least give my head a reason to hurt. Therefore reading Heidegger, Gadamer and Habermas.

Secondly: so, yesterday, I began by reading about the divisions between Gadamer and Habermas on the co-extensivity of truth and method, and our relationship to 'authority and tradition'. For what it is worth, Gadamer seems to think that there are positive ways to view the inheritance of authority and tradition as a positive way of constituting truth. Meanwhile, Habermas seems to take a harder - 'strong-Enlightenment' line which says that anything 'handed down', as it were, from authority, is necessarily dogmatic and therefore should be rejected. In the maze of epistemology (empiricism over-assumes the ability to produce correspondence-to-reality statements from induction, while hermeneutics asserts the situatedness of any observation) perhaps the performance of the role of 'detached' observer should be rejected and (contrary to intuition) a fuller observational potential can be approached by more participation in the observed situation. Know by 'being-in', not know by 'looking-in' - immanence not transcendence (because the former is simply more honest).

A detour here led to Arthur Danto, who describes "the last historian". Of course the historian constructs a narrative out of the stuff of meaning, and the stuff of meaning is necessarily over-determined by the historian's present. Retelling the past is meta-retelling of the present. So much, so good. But consider what it would require for the adequate telling of 'truth' regarding histories (and here I suppose is where I do need to investigate Heidegger on time): the future will have historicity which is constituted in part by the present I create now from my own historicity. The only way to ensure that I responsibly pass on a historicity to the future which is consistent with the future's ability to act freely is to tell every possible history, or as Scheibler puts it "to give a complete description, historian would have to be able to see into the future, encompassing all possible future perspectives". And it is repeatedly observed by others, I see, that all historians must see themselves as this last historian (otherwise they would not feel any compulsion to write histories, surely?) but I would also add that we all therefore consider ourselves to be the last historians, telling ourselves the versions of the past we need to tell in order to construct the futures we wish to see.

And Danto seems also to help with the co-extensivity of truth and method. On representation, he emphasises what we might call the pre-semantic stage of the 'sign' (useless word). Consider the evolution of semantic codes. Something is given as a representation of something else - an idol represents a god, for instance. Danto dwells on the the fact that this is a two-stage process. Before we recognise the idol as 'representing' the god, we must first interpret the idol as identical to the god - the sign is the meaning. Only later do we bifurcate the sign into metonymy and synecdoche, and allow the possibility that the sign might be a lie - give it a semantic dimension, recognise the difference between sign and referent, and even signifier and signified. Truth is first constituted by the representation. Prohibition of the idolatry of the graven image by a jealous god for good reason, then, if you are a god.

Of course, when I say Danto helps with the co-extensivity of truth and method, I mean helps in the loosest sense of the word.

So anyway, yes I went on a huge detour, and at some point in the future, when I have to write something sensible about my methodology for my PhD thesis, I'll be grateful to myself for having written this loosely connected synopsis of a day's reading, which records in roughly chronological order the digressions I took. I still, of course need a proper bibliography to go with this, so I can retread my steps. So here it is:

Scheibler, I., 2000, Gadamer : Between Heidegger and Habermas, Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham
Ankersmit, F. R., 2003, 'Danto, History, and the Tragedy of Human Existence', in History and Theory, Vol 42, No. 3
Hesse, M., 1978, 'Habermas' Consensus Theory of Truth' in PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Vol 1978, Vol 2
McCarthy, T., 1978, 'History and Evolution: On the Changing Relation of Theory to Practice in the Work of Jurgen Habermas' in PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Vol 1978, Vol 2
Wachterhauser, B. R., 1986, Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, SUNY: Albany
Danto, A. C., 1965, Analytical Philosophy of History, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge
Danto, A. C., 1997, Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy, UCP: Berkeley
Ormiston, G. L., & Schrift, A. D., 1989, Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Riceour, SUNY: Albany
Dallmayr, F. R., & McCarthy, T. A., 1977, Understandinf and Social Inquiry, UNDP: Notre Dame, Ind.

Now, the third and final thing: I want a way to access the information here in different ways. I want to be able to pull it around, and mesh it into other things. Biblipedia was designed to do some of the things I want to be able to do here - notes about books which can be grouped thematically. The use of the folksonomy creates a powerful tool that creates (heuristically and algorithmically, or what I want to call 'bottom-up') connections between notes and books. But I also want some top-down control too. I want to drag things together on the spur of the moment, as though they were index cards in my hands. Biblipedia can be susceptible to such manipulation (you can 'invent' tags for specific purposes, for instance).

But I want something with more power. The account I've given of my readings yesterday is clunky, because it is isolated here, on this web page. Sure I can grab it out via RSS, but that won't retain any of the semantic or chronological connections within it. Sure, I could sketch it on paper, because that could show the progression and map-like structure of the reflection, but it's made of atoms, and I still want the heuristic, crunching power that computerised meta-data provides.

So here's the kernel of my next project: a way of aggregating content like that in Biblipedia, (or any other webservice, for that matter) which, on top of the 'bottom-up' ability to analyse meta-data such as tags and produce expected and unexpected connections and groupings, also has a 'top-down' ability to sketch relationships in terms of time, theme, order, digression, space... a way to easily denote relatedness explicitly, rather than merely implicitly.

So that's summer 2008 sorted then. Hopefully my head will have stopped hurting then.

Health fiction

joe — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:45:37 +0000

I considered going to the hospital carrying a copy of 'Narrative Based Medicine' by Greenhalgh and Hurwitz. My experience has become so reflexively, regressively contingent that I thought I might as well go the whole hog, and encourage the consultants and nurses, by noticing the book, to become radically self-aware of the experience they were creating around me.

Earlier in the year I registered for my PhD, which I intend to focus on the therapeutic uses of creative activity. There is evidence that people who keep journals during their treatment for serious illnesses such as cancer have a statistically significantly improved prognosis. Why might this be? Is it the case that our experiences of serious illness are such chaotic, disempowering transactions with the machine of healthcare, that the productive act of creating our own purposeful, narrativised story out of the bare, brute facts of therapy and treatment actually improves our bodies' ability to survive?

My father was diagnosed with cancer 7 years ago and died six months later. He said the process of pin-balling between consultants and treatments was frustrating precisely because doctors want to tell you as little as possible. Perhaps for good reason. Perhaps euphemism ('growths' rather than 'tumours') helps to minimise the psychological trauma. Perhaps a gradual induction into the language of primary and secondary, benign and malignant, potassium levels, morphine and death spray is a therapeutically beneficial approach, and ignorance is convalescent bliss. Perhaps knowing little, and trusting in the authority of the medicinal apparatus improves the prognosis.

"How is your hearing?" one nurse asked him. "Pardon?" he replied.

And so, as I have had constant headaches since February of this year, which usually recede only after the self-medication of Nurofen, I have been witnessing at first hand the efficiencies of the British healthcare system. And rather like a media studies student who is suddenly noticing how adverts are constructed, I can't not examine the story of illness (or lack of narrative) the actors in my performance are creating. My consultant informed first, not me, but his dictaphone, of my almost certainly necessary surgery. What surgery, I am still only able to speculate. It is sinusitis, an infection, pus in the ethmoid. Today's MRI scan of my head was olympically efficient - I arrived 15 mins early and had left the hospital by the time my appointment was supposed to take place. I, rather unnecessarily, slowed things down by asking the nurse what happened next. "Your scans go to the consultant now, and then he will contact you soon. Just turn left out of the doors."

Of course I have the problem of Einstein's observer, watching trains travelling in different directions at the speed of light. I'm in the train, and can't get out of it to look. I can't experience medicine without thinking about the experience of medicine, and I can't think about the experience without picking out the moments that are self-selected to illustrate the competing narratives that constitute the phenomenon of medical treatment.

I also can't help but think there is a certain kind of guilt associated with querying the treatment that our noble welfare-state doctors and nurses provide. One is supposed to say "mustn't grumble...", adopt the Blitz spirit, "there are people worse off than me..", "oh it's just a touch of sinusitis..." How self-indulgent to expect a consultant to spend an extra few minutes explaining the diagnosis and how the treatment will pan out, when he must dash off to start someone's heart any second now. "Remember that the appointment that you cannot attend is very valuable to someone in pain or distress" the leaflet says. Unusual, fatal, healing, fictions.

Acid Nausea

joe — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 03:52:06 +0000

Acid is known for its hallucinatory qualities; less for its anti-hallucinatory qualities. Several hours in, my friend James asked me if it made me, like him, feel hollow. We sat there in his student digs 13 years ago, and I finally understood Hawkwind. "What like hungry?" I replied. "No" - his glorious long kinks of brown mane falling around his temples - "like you're empty".

Click on the strip-light in the bathroom after stumbling there in the darkness, barely awake, and the pupils contract. The scene is under-exposed, livid, and as the eyes adjust, the instant and utter strangeness of the synthetic world fades back into familiarity. The mat is recognisable again, the friendly sink and familiar fittings slot back into order. But in that first instant a deeper relationship between you and your world is revealed, where meaning is stripped away, the brain unready to veil the harshness of reality with its knack of confabulation.

In Sartre's Nausea the table, the wall, the pebble, even the hand and the grey thing in the mirror that is your face, are the malevolent sources of queasy sickness, their anthropomorphic intent placed there by a mind striving to avoid panic.

"... for the most commonplace event to become an adventure, you must - and this is all that is necessary - start recounting it... But you have to choose: to live or recount... When you are living, nothing happens".

James shaved away the cruft of recounting and found nothing.

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2000, Nausea, London: Penguin, p61