The Ad Wars and the Classical Age

Nomad: The classical time of tribulation was marked by the great ad wars known as the war against truth. Advertising became a weapon and the school of true adverstising competed with the school of advertising that claimed no truths only beliefs. No one knew for sure which one was right.

Nomad it is good that you are here with me at the house of the avatars. Your story of the old world is indispensible to know how to help me unravel my own.

The Imaginary Real at the House of the Avatars

Prophet: The analog world produced a world of the private imagination.

There are some things that people know to be true that are collective beliefs. The old world knows these as myths.There are no private myths.

Yes, but Prophet is it possible for what I imagined to be real and real to others. The imaginary real.

Prophet: There is something called the objective imaginary.You defeat this when you speak of a writer's block. That is gone now and you must never speak of it again here in the memory palace or you can never return. You will defeat your purpose and lose your mission. You should remain in the house of wisdom where you can sort out knowledge from beliefs and truths to know what is real and what isn't.

Digital and Analog- The Great Divide

"We have no future because the present is too volatile"

I think is was deconstructionist philosopher Derrida who said we can't get outside the text.Popular Culture defines insanity as doing things the same way over and over again but expecting different results. Well the digital world does give us some choice we do do things differently.Whereas the analog world doesn't. Digital is a choice between a new world and the old world of the analog.

Had I entered the matrix through a portal or had I merely awakened from a thirty year long writer's block; the result of a fifty year long bombardment by electronic media? If I had crossed through the matrix and returned to the analog old world or even returned in time to a place along the digital divide how could I make people believe me. How could I compare the two worlds? Would there even be any people left there to listen?

Is life a truly an analog experience?

Analog refers to any phenomena that is continuous in time.Some wonderfull examples of analog devices... trains...mercury thermometers...blood pressure gauges....watches with dials or hands. Except for trains and blood pressure gauges the rest of these examples are obsolete today.Perhaps it is a central tendency of all analogs to become obsolete or discontinuous over time which alternately is the definition of the digital.

I was briefly entertaining the notion that I might be chanelling the dead here in cyberspace and that I had not actually stumbled into the matrix. There is however growing belief in the old world divided by the analog and the digital that there is such a thing as the matrix. Cyberpunk authors such as William Gibson took us there in our imaginations long ago in such novels as Count Zero and Neuromancer.

"Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media." - John Von Neumann

There is no evidence that anyone has ever gone through the matrix and returned to the old world to tell the tale.Especially so because there appears to be no narrative time or space in the matrix.The film titled "The Matrix" is a romantic take on what it would be like for those from the old world; who experience reality through narrative if they did experience a non-narrrative world such as the matrix. How would information be structured there? Does life exists in a world beyond our understanding? Beyond Quantuum physics. Beyond life itself?

Humble Beginnings

You know, Nomad the impetus for my explorations of the metaverse were not wholely selfish. Like McLuhan did I have trouble understanding the needs of my students. Only my methods differ. Also I am keenly aware that they are digital natives in a world of rapidly disappearing primary oracy and literacy. A world where I am merely an immigrant. One thing I wanted to ask the prophets at the house of the Avatars was whether the metaverse might be a way to bridge a gap between us, but the chicken man was after me. I had to get Hero to guide me back to the real world before I had a chance to ask them.

Nomad: I know that your intentions are good teach and you might wander here in the metaverse for a long time without knowing it at all. Our values are not the same as yours. The prophets are wise but remember it is the artist's vision that allows you to see the fourfold path. It was the prophets who awoke you on the fourfold path but the artist happened to be there at the time of your awakening.

You did decipher the artist's cryptic communication or you would not have found your way back here after you left the memory palace at the house of the Avatars. You would not have found hero either and your way back to the world of the real. Do you remember the artist's vision? Maybe it contains fresh information to reset you on your journey's mission path again.

Yes. Nomad, the Artist spoke in the semantically compressed language of media poetics. The prophets helped me decipher her vision thusly:

That "There can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies. Therefore the artist must have many visions to create information literacy in a multimedia age.", said the artist avatar.

Prophet: Today's students are presented with a confusing perspective on writing that, on the one hand, defines the production of a written text as an act that simply transcribes thoughts and, on the other hand, defines writing as in and of itself an act of knowing. Teachers confound the student writer's schizophrenia by reinforcing the "product" approach to writing.

Furthermore, because today's students are influenced and shaped by oral contexts, the emphasis of a print culture creates incredible stress and tension in the individual composer. Writing remains, however, the primary means of retaining self-conscious control over cognitive processes in a world of secondary orality.

The act of writing is the process that enables inner speech and oral dialogue to synthesize. Writing becomes the means of structuring the spoken word so that it can recapture the authority it once had in primary oral cultures. The contrasts between oral and written media are central to the problems of teaching writing today. Students must be taught to use writing to explore and know about their own ideas and feelings. Students should see the process of revision as part of the writing-talking relationship.

In the process of composing, students must come to realize how their inner speech naturally connects with the culture's general written record. Only then will the habit of private, inner speech, that in a highly literate culture is actually learned in earliest childhood, become a positive and useful way of maintaining individual perspective in a world of often disembodied oral voices.

Nomad I think the prophet has awakened you on the fourfold path again. Remember that the hero was still very young when he helped you last time.

Teach: Yes I do remember.

Nomad: Then you know that both time and space's characteristics are reversible here in the metaverse. Well as a nomadic hunter of information in both space and time I would say that your time has speeded up considerably as you deciphered the artists message. The hero might be considerably older next time you meet. The prophets are the only ones who can tell where and when that will be. Stay on the fourfold path follow the artists vision in order to understand how you must fullfill your mission.

Teach: Thanks Nomad I will. Will I see you again? I would like to know more about your story.

Nomad: I am with the other nomad avatars, we are colonizing the metaverse.It is dificult to say where we are or will be at any given place or time.

Teach: I understand and thanks again.

The Exodus at the Crossroads along the Old Slave Route of Space and Time

The Avatars: Nomad's Story Begins Again

Nomad: Do you remember the dystopian world I described to you that existed during the time of great tribulation?

Teach: Yes I do remember it well. It was your story. It was caused by the infinite crisis right?

Nomad: Yes. But the elders who became known as the digerati disagreed that there was any crisis at all. So some left for the fourfold path and they became the avatars known as the prophets.

We inhabit a Post-Gallilean Moment

Nomad said that I was the first who visited the fourfold path and returned to tell the tale. My story must be the story of the avatars running in reverse. The unravelling. There is no such think as luck or chance only change. I thought to myself. Somehow I was meant to find the crossroads and travel on the fourfold path of the Avatars.

Looking for role models and cultural identities associated with a particular medium I made the seemingly chance discovery. Well actually I was looking at the hoodoo tradition of African origins here in the US and Hatian voodoo when I discovered a cosmogram or crossroads and somehow my mind crossed over into a hitherto unknown realm. A parallel universe where all the laws of nature are reversed called a metaverse.

Instead I found a post mediated world. We have been so accustomed to our technological environment we could not see that one day we would find a way for us to become completely independent of each other. It was Galileo who first said the earth goes around the sun. We inhabit a post Galilean moment a brief interlude on the road to a post mediated world.

The House of the Avatars-The Memory Palace

"Mind to mind. Communication consists of a collective memory instead of maps. That I learned from the Prophet when I first visited the memory palace where I met the Prophet avatar for the first time.There are no maps for these territories either only the avatars and the imaginary real; the fourfold path.

A Reunion with the Nomad Avatar-"Information Wants to be Free"

Nomad: "It was at the crossroads that we first met Teach. I explained to you that we are creating a new culture of nomads, neither physical nor metaphysical hunters of information but mind to mind communicators. the Nomad avatar said.

"As people did hundreds of thousands of years ago along the bounding line of time. The era of the new nomadic tribe believed in the wise council of the elders that information wants to be free."

Nomad: "Crossroads thinking reemerged and with it the idea of the gift economy" during the time of the great tribulation and the scattering of the tribe. There were only a few who escaped through the crossroads.as the route had been forgotten a long time before and then the crossroads was sealed off by the learning corporation. The learning corporation felt that not knowing was the greatest danger of all. That is why they sealed off the crossroads. No one before had ever crossed over and returned to tell the tale. You were the first one Teach".

"Tuned to a Dead Channel"

"So the new constellation is like a new medium on the other side of the bounding line.Urania's four hidden stars are the four unseen operations of the matrix made visible by the four avatars? I asked the artist avatar." Yes she replied.

I was thinking back to when I first discovered the avatars at the crossroads, the portal. It was completely by accident or was it. Perhaps they intended it that way. Everything has it's purpose I guess. Trying to connect Bono's reading of William Gibson's biography "No maps for these territories", thinking about the words "tuned to a dead channel".

There was also the Wired magazine article entitled "Channeling McLuhan. Could I be channeling Marshall McLuhan? Or at least his thought, his metaphysics. How would I know? Maybe the avatars hold the key?

The Avatar Speaks of Myth and the Fourfold Path

Nomad: "Muses in Greek myth are goddesses who preside over the arts and sciences and inspire those who excel at these pursuits. Calliope, the "Fair Voiced" and the eldest Muse, is the muse of epic poetry."

The stories of Greek myth are told through constellations. All things including the birth of the world can be described through the constellations.

Within each lies a tale of heavenly claim. The glory of their songs that light thr night skies are the sole inspirations for all things great.

There was a new constellation discovered by Urania. Urania the "Heavenly" is the muse of astronomy. It was a constellation that even Zeus (Jupiter in Roman) , the God of the heavens did not know the whole story.

Even the God of the heavens hath not all the knowledge of its luster. Four stars of brilliant glow Urania doth find gracing the heavens beyond thy sight, hidden in the skies of Jupiter`s shadow."

The Infinite Crisis and the Metaverse

"What you have to keep in mind is that this is not science. The concept behind this and the related blogs on the side menu is that of an autonomous, auto-didactic, idiosyncratic learning experience based on the imaginary real, I said to the Artist avatar".

"This is done by looking at language as a mosaic, and as a kind of folk remedy for the ills of living along the bounding line of a new medium of communication.It could be considered as a critique that is independent of prevailing science. It would be self delusional to think of it as science since science does not exist in a vacuum and I have no scientific training to back up my claims.

A blog is also not an ideal place to develop a study of language.But viewed as a larger technical problem to be solved the internet might be.No such ideal place has existed before the metaverse emerged. Multimedia has a grammatical form, Facebook and other new new media have more in common with games and their logic than with writing which is a representational form of knowledge.

I had been looking at something quite specific in my facebook posts.Namely narrative, genre and the medium of writing.I am trying to answer the question; what happens to literacy in a post-literate age? What happens to it is that it tends to reverse its primary characteristics.Narrative time runs backwards, narrative space also reverses it's character, the characteristics of a genre are likewise reversed. All are flipped into a set of secondary characteristics; multiples of themselves.

No longer the dominant medium of communication writing's secondary characteristics are pressed into service only to access other media of communication. Now it's primary form has changed counter-balancing as a counter-cultural environment, in the form of the hidden ground of the new dominant medium. Namely the tactile, multi-sensorial medium, constituting the multipe literacies of the multimedia environment.Which is itself not truly a medium. It is perhaps more a sensory modality. These literacies exist at the break-boundary of a new medium of communication that lies in the domain of the sixth or synesthetic (connected) sensory modality. A secondary sensoriality.

Most people use the internet and computers (which are themselves a product of the fusion of language and numbers) like going to the library to retrieve information. I believe in the principle that all knowledge past present and future is contained in these multiple literacies. A little like mining for uranium, it is the raw material but it needs refinement before it releases it's hybrid or creative energy potential through fission or fusion. I use a special technique to explore this paradigm shift in communication theory and to release this hybrid energy through a translation of one sense through another. It is designed mainly based on a film editing technique called the Kuleshov effect. This is based on the principle that the story is in the cuts or edits themselves.It is an awkward technique and I rely on intuition a great deal to guide me since it is an experiment of my own making."