Toolbox!

What with neologisms, repurposings, redescriptions, etc, it is very hard to keep a standard operating vocabulary to aid us in clear communication. I for one fully believe in the value of vocabulary in opening up, and alternately closing down our capacity for thinking. New words are extremely valuable for thinking about new things. The following is a list of words that I find very useful for thinking, I call it my toolbox. The definitions I offer (the purposes of the tools) are of course controversial and may be unfamiliar to you. For instance, Rorty's use of the words Liberal and Irony are unusual (and especially with Liberal, politically suspect), but because I find them very valuable for thinking I have included his definitions here. If you have dispute with one of my definitions, please voice your alterations and elaborations!

Apollonian View - encompassing, summarative perspective, as if seen from above

Canalization - physical manipulation of human activity by architecture

CPA - continuous partial attention, distracted, pluralized state of awareness

Cybermancy - treating computers and other electronic devices as magic

Cyborg - a cybernetic organism

Demystification - the clearing of an imaginary dimension from the understanding of the world

Digital Derive - surfing link to link on the Internet

To Dwell - to live in awareness in such as way as resembles making

Ecosystem - a complex, responsive system of base material factors, biological factors, and abstract (social, mental, aesthetic, systemic, ethical) characteristics that has flexible boundaries and a structural metabolism

Epistemology - examination of how we know

Geolocative - making use of one’s precise spatial location

Hegemony - power – or more specifically embedded power, and usually representing the dominant ideology

Idea - an abstract construction in the mind that either represents something in the world or attempts to give an explanation of it

Image - a metaphoric representation

Individuation - separation of the individual from the world as an isolatable thing

Informational Shadow - digital representation or counterpart of a physical reality

Interpenetration - the phenomenon of the tight interconnectedness of all things, both materially and causally

Intersubjectivity - collaborative creation of self, other, and world through discourse and agreement

Irony - acceptance of the contingency of one’s versions of truth, that truth is a way of speaking (from Rorty)

Liberal - a person who thinks that causing pain to others is the worst thing that we do (from Rorty)

Logos - understood through logic of language

Mythos - understood through intuition and enactment of ritual

Myth - a loading of experience of world with an imaginary / psychological dimension that seriously changes our perspective of it

Narrative - a sequential, rhythmic way of structuring our understanding of things usually depending upon causal relationships and familiar plot devices

Phenomenology - the rigourous philosophical interrogation of our confrontation with the world / a systematic approach to describing things-in-themselves

Plurality - acceptance of different customs and worldviews, within limits set by humanistic principles

Poesis - bringing forth, poetically

Mixed Reality - the zone between virtuality and physicality, in which they are blended in various proportions

Virtual Reality - the realm of engagement and interaction in which phenomena are simulated

Readiness-to-hand - close relationship with those aspects of world for which we have instrumental use

Absolute Space - that space which is directly measurable and useful for technology

Relative Space - that space which is directly tied to time

Relational Space - that space which contains value; social and mental space

Mind/Body Split - tendency to think of the mind as somehow separate from the other bodily functions

Subject / Object Split - tendency to separate the thinking self from the world as a way of viewing it

Table operations - moving narratives, ideas, myths, images around as if seen from above on a table

Trace - residue of something that has come before

Technis - bringing forth, instrumentally

Webgaze - perspective from 'within the Internet'