I finally got around to reading this today. A friend of mine and I had a discussion about politics today -- my pressing point was that the internet is going to be far more important in the 2008 elections that traditional "hand-pressing". I know Edwards tried that, but "that was then, this is now." Reactions? Would you be more likely to cast a vote based on a face-to-face with the candidate or with a website about/by them? Julie Krueger ========Original Message======== Subj: [lit-ideas] Feeling Cloudy? Date: 1/31/2007 2:08:15 A.M. Central Standard Time From: _john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxxx (mailto:john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx) To: _lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) , _ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) Sent on: Clarity, focus, rationality, occasional bouts of neurosis or hysteria葉hat's what the modern self is all about. But what about the postmodern self? Anthropologist/marketing guru Grant McCracken offers the following provocation. ----------- Feeling a little cloudy? Of course you are. Because, I mean, to be fair, and let's be honest, you are a cloud. You are an aggregation of interests, connections, and contacts, tagged in several ways, linked in all directions, changing in real time. I mean your mental world. It's all hints and hunches, guesses and glimpses, shifting perspectives, tumbling assumptions. You take on clarity for clients. Then you're all "let's get on with it" pragmatism. But normally, and for most purposes, you're as cloudy as can be. How do I know this? Call me your consulting anthropologist. (No, don't call me. Try a blog aggregator and call me in the morning.) Anthropologists have an old question: how does a culture define the self and the group. And now they have a new question: what difference does it make to the self and the group that they are now mediated by electronic connections (email, internet, SMS, IM, MMS, blogs, aggregators, shared search engines, social networks, p2p file sharing, online game play, etc.) I think cloudiness might be an answer to the first question and especially to the second. My guess is that new selves and groups are richly heterogeneous, loosely and variously boundaried, capable of expansion, contraction and sudden reorganization, not very well governed, but still quite navigable and quite mobile, and, in still other respects, dynamic in content, form and operation. I think cloudiness was an emerging property of selves and groups in the late 20th century, but that cloudiness has been intensified by the new electronic technologies of the last 10 years. So the third anthropological question is now, "Where does cloudiness come from and how does it intensify?" Or to put this in a more pressing form: how'd ja get so cloudy? For sake of argument, we need a working model of the self. Let's posit the one proposed by Clifford Geertz who described the Western concept of a person as a "bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background." Wave goodbye. That was you before you bought a computer and signed up for an email account. Those were the good old days, when people could still complain about anomie and being locked in the lonely confines of their selfhood...because they still had a selfhood, something impermeable that kept the world out and the precious self in. That was then. This is now. We are no longer "bounded," "integrated," "centered," "organized" or "contrasted." We are now blurred, decentered, disorganized, and, well, a little vague. We are, I prefer to say, cloud-like. (It's just so much more flattering. I mean otherwise we are the proverbial dog's breakfast.) -------------------------- Sounds like me. How about you? -- John McCreery The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN Tel. +81-45-314-9324 http://www.wordworks.jp/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html