CRDM 701

Week 11 - Nick

I am a bomb!  This is most certainly news to me, but it is not surprising.  Why, when I was going to SSCA this past spring, I was surprised by the fact that I had to take my shoes off in the airport.  Also, it was mildly annoying to me as it was early in the morning and I am not terribly coherant early in the morning.  "Wha?  Bomb in muh shoo?  Huh?  But now my feet're cold.  Bastard."  I think that was the extent of what ran through my mind.  Then I had to put my shoes back on and...yeah.  Kelly can attest to how NOT a morning person I am; she was there.

In that instance, until I was processed by the system I was seen as a potential 'bomb'.  Naturally, I define this term loosely as well as literally as Packer likely meant it.  A bomb is a threat to the system.  In a control society, as he stated, you are either the cog that makes the system run more safely and smoothly or the cog that has the potential of sproinging and ruining the whole thing.  (Well, he used different words, but you get the idea.)  Safety or Security.  That's what it comes down to.  Which do we prefer?  Which do we get?  According to Packer, we get both and become schizophrenic for it.  We are told to be good little cogs and cogettes in order to make things flow more smoothly, but at the same time we are told to take our shoes off in airports to make sure we don't have Weapons of Mass Destruction hidden away acquiring a nice foot odor.  And you know what?  I go along with it.  Why?  Because a control society runs on fear - the fear of the unknown, the fear of potential threats to my safety, etc.  I let them cause me a bit of inconvenience and a few cold feet so that if the guy behind me is a crazy SOB that wants to take the plane down with a stinky shoe bomb, they'll catch him and I'll be safe.  (Also, if I don't, they won't let me get on the plane.  And I've got a paper to present!)  I could fight back by avoiding surveillance technologies and practices like Packer says, and in many areas I do.  But at the same time, sometimes you've got to play by the rules of the system to get something accomplished.  It is very hard to fight a control society, which is part of why it works so well.  And you have to ask yourself...should we fight it?  Why?  If it keeps us safe...  Well, good old Ben Franklin has a great answer for that, my friend: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."

The rest of the readings have their roots in the Innis reading.  Once again, we are presented with a comprehensive view of communication through the ages exposing the bias inherent in communication technology.  However, this is by the great granddaddy of them all who started it, Innis.  Carey picks up Innis's work and runs with it, citing him as the pre-eminate communication history scholar.  I find it interesting that the 'thinking with him' theme pops up a lot (well, twice, but still)  Many texts are things to think with, and yet this is a high compliment as many other texts are things that we just read.  That Carey achieved the same compliment that he paid to Innis shows how great both are in their illumination of communication technology history.  Carey pulled out the interesting tension between time and spatial organization and how the US became organized spatially in large part due to its geography.  Also, the Northeast cooridor became the most highly trafficed information highway.  Such primacy defined the US, it seems, and one has to wonder if things would have been different had it gone some other way.  Of course, now with the internet the information cooridor is online and traverses the wired world.  The playing field has been somewhat leveled and 'the world is flat' as Friedman would say.  Now we just have to worry about that pesky technological divide.

I would relate the readings to my topic, but at the moment I am drawing a blank.  I have narrowed my focus a bit to something known as 'Google Bombing' and how this has implications for how people take charge of structuring their knowledge through search engine algorythms, but the only real way that connects is through the fact that I am discussing yet another 'bomb'.  It is a disruptive influence, to be sure, and yet one outside the realm of a control society.  Indeed, it is a deviant act perhaps making a parody of a control system, and as such Google has explicitly shut down a few such bombs already.  The question is, of course, what are the implications of THAT? 

Posted at 02:26PM Nov 07, 2007 by nmtemple in Nick  |  Comments[0]