Wisdom From the Bhagavad Gita
So, on the long trip to India, I decided to read the Bhagavad Gita, or Song Celestial, the sacred poetic text of the Hindu religion (the 1885 translation by Sir Edwin Arnold; London:  Watkins Publishing, 2006).  For a little background, here's a link for the wikipedia article on the Gita, which is believed to date from the 1st century (though some estimates put it as far back as the 5th century BCE).  And I thought I would share some passages that I found particularly significant.First of all, this is one that is positively McLuhanesque!  At my workshop in Baroda, I told them that I was go

Swine Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
So, it's been an insanely busy semester, making it very hard to maintain a consistent blogging regimen.  But things are finally starting to settle down, so maybe I can share a few things with you.On the morning of October 25th, I left Ellenville, New York, up in the Catskills, where the New York State Communication Association's annual meeting had been held, after delivering a keynote address for them that Friday, and I drove back home, unpacked and then packed again, and headed over to Newark that evening, to catch a flight to India, via Lufthansa, with a stopover in Frankfurt.  I was asked to lead a workshop on general semantics and media ecology for the new Balvant

Hiphop Holocaust
With the 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht upon us (we have a special commemoration planned for this Friday at Congregation Adas Emuno, for example), the question of how to communicate the Holocaust would be a timely one.  Simply put, the magnitude of the event seems to go beyond our meager abilities to express it, that any attempt to put it into words or any other type of symbol system cannot help but fall short, and thereby trivialize it.  And yet, at the same time, we feel an obligation not to remain silent, and more importantly, an obligation to remember, to keep the memory alive in the hopes that such an event might nev

Television in Time
Here are a couple of videos that friends from the virtual world have brought to my attention.  First is a YouTube remix/mashup video entitled The Golden Age of Video - By Ricardo Autobahn, which is an amazing bit of editing work.  Here it is:The lyrics are listed on the YouTube page, so here they are:1,2,1,2,3,4We accept her, one of us, we accept her, one of us!Gooble gobble gooble gobble!We accept her, we accept her!We accept her, one of us, we accept her, one of us!Gooble gobble gooble gobble!We accept her, we accept her!

Shockingly, The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
The future ain't what it used to be, or so Marshall McLuhan quipped. Traditionally, the future seemed remote, a distant, undiscovered country, be it the afterlife, or a return to Eden, or some utopia or dystopia or time of wonders.Modernity brought the future closer and closer, and we can actually study the history of the future, that is, the history of conceptions of the future, which would include assorted science fiction scenarios.During the sixties, things seemed to be changing so rapidly that there was a sense that the future was collapsing in upon the present.  Alvin Toffler famously wrote about "future shock," which took the concept