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'

Heidegger's Dwelling

In Heidegger’s Building Dwelling Thinking (1951), he sets up a tension between dwelling and technology. Simply, he says, in dwelling we save the earth rather than mastering it. Mastering the earth, on the other hand, as he outlined elsewhere in The Question Concerning Technology (1953), is the domain of technology and the science that serves it.

Heidegger says that to dwell is to safeguard the essential unfolding of the fourfold, or quadrature. This fourfold he describes as consisting of the earth, the sky, the mortals, and the divinities. This is frankly obscure. I think it would not be doing too much violence to the Master’s thinking if I was to substitute ‘that which we know as heavy’ for the earth, ‘that which we know as light’ for the sky, ‘that which we know as being of the human finite condition (both physically and temporally specific)’ for the mortals, and ‘that which we know as unknowable’ for the divinities. To dwell is thus to safeguard the unfolding of these things: to aid this unfolding by thoughtfully living through them. If I was to rephrase Heidegger’s notion of dwelling in terms that are more accessible, I would say that it was equivalent to “living in awareness” – in awareness of the quadrature as I have described it.

Now, Heidegger’s description of dwelling is a lot more confusing than this. He both seems to straight up equate dwelling with the Being of humans, what elsewhere he refers to as Dasein, and also describe dwelling as something to be learned, to be developed or cultivated. Further, while dwelling as an activity can be cultivated, it is also a sort of cultivation itself, a ‘caring’ for the world, and thus a making of the world. Dwelling is thus also that sort of being which is similar to making. I would then like to extend my rephrasing of dwelling to “that sort of living in awareness such as resembles a making of the world.” And there I'll leave it.

More on Google Books

About a month back Google announced a major settlement with publishers and the Authors Guild, in which the representatives of the publishing industry agreed that it was alright for Google to be trying to 'scan' every book ever produced, as long as they offered the copyright holders a percentage of the profits made off of the work, as well as payed them a one-time scanning fee. This is a hackneyed version of the actual 134 page agreement, but not inaccurate I don't think.
Now it appears that not everyone is happy about this. A group of interested persons, including the American Library Association, The Institute for Information Law and Policy at The New York Law School, and a consortium of lawyers are now planning on raising their objections to Google's plan. Just to give you an idea of what their knickers are all twisted about, the key words in the debate appear to be things like monopoly and anti-trust.
In my mind the problem doesn't just involve the books thing, it involves Google's position as the sometime owner of content but more often distributor and 'organizer' of content from maps to news to blogs to images to videos etcetera and etcetera. This blog, for instance, although the content belongs to me, is saved on memory that belongs to Google. My email also is all saved on a server owned by Google and is accessed through a program designed and managed by Google. Stepping back a few decades it is as if my filing cabinet belonged to someone else, and also my bookshelf, and also my photoalbum and my vhs collection!
My own very simple formulation of the problem is like this:

Google's mission statement is 'to organize the world's information'.
Organization is a form of control.
Knowledge is power.
Absolute power corrupts, absolutely.

We can trust Google, right? They're basically a philanthropic organization, right? Well, maybe, and no. I think I would not be amiss if I said that history teaches us that it is abject foolishness to trust anyone that has immense amounts of power. Perhaps the founders and executives of Google are in possession of ideals that I share - this is not reason enough to blindly trust them. First of all I cannot be sure beyond a doubt that my ideals are less likely to cause pain and more likely to cause universal prosperity and suffrage than others' ideals. And second of all, Google neither has these goals as its mandate nor is it a democracy (such as the common goals of the group may be upheld) - it is a frankly profit-driven corporation.
So, I think its great that we have a system in place (or at least the Americans do) that allows us to challenge things like this and also that we have people willing and interested enough to challenge them. I only wish that there was greater concern about it circulating. These are very serious issues that need to be attended to with great thoughtfulness and dexterity. The system of information is becoming dangerously unbalanced - kudos to the librarians and to the lawyers for keeping an eye on it for us.