"The Poetic Evolution"
More than ever, people want to express themselves. We often ramble the words "punk is dead." For good reason, too. People like this poser and that sell-out make people believe punk is nothing more than a couple of hot-topic plaid skirts, eyeliner, and a $200 tie. The problem is simply that... punk was never alive! How the Hell can it be dead? There continue to be punk bands that defy the convention of image. I know. I've seen them. Corporate America may try to turn every cultural revolution into a huge money-making scheme, but even with the increasing futility of resisting, there are people who are still defiant.

What does this all have to do with blogs? Simple. Think of the concepts above in terms of the aural culture. Is the aural culture dead? How can it be? It was never alive! There are people that will try to convince you that true music is only for some people. Such people are power-mongering fascists who think they know what "true music" and "real music" is, but have no clue. The visual culture has increasingly privatized music. First, people started playing in small groups or by themselves, then they played indoors, then they made sheet music, then records, then mp3's, then iPods... what next, somebody implanting a microchip in the brain that simulates music and can be heard by no one but yourself?!

Over-individualism is a drug that has - and continues to have - decentralized and intoxicated media of communication. As the visual culture gains dominance, the aural culture disintegrates. You can sell artifacts as a commodity. Its much harder to sell the transient and poetic. If services can be sold, how is this possible? It is important to remember that since the aural meme was never alive, you will not be able to kill it. People crave interaction. We live on responses. It's the basic function of the cosmos... stimulus, response, stimulus, response. We are built on a temporal and changing framework. Our functions will serve the same end.

Privatizing service into the domain of the individual is harder to do. Since service often involves more than one person (Higher education, for example... I'd love to see a college try to have a 1:1 ratio!). Media are reflecting this trend. Although cell phones are a good example of how the aural has remained, they privatize the medium of speech and reduce it to the lowest common denominator: one person talking to one person.

Thus, the trend is edging toward a new paradigm - a paradigm of social networks. Strikingly, with each electronic medium revolution, there came a folk music revolution - (In the 1930's with the vacuum tube radios and in the 1960's with the mass television broadcasts) - except with the age of personal technology (cell phones, computers, iPods). McLuhan felt the trend of the TV connecting people in new ways. With the iPod revolution, we can start to see a trend toward a more aural culture; however, our society (both the producer and the consumer) is trying to contain the transient and move it further into the domain of the visual culture.

The age of the television could be seen as the transition period from the division of the visual culture and the aural counter-culture. On the surface, this seems like a reconcilliation, but in the age of networks, this phenomenon can be viewed as an attempt to contain the aural in the visual box.

Thus, we stand at a critical point as blogs enter the mainstream. Blogs have the ability to turn the tides of this cultural conflict. McLuhan notes in the Medium is the Massage that you simply can't apply the wrong set of expectations/conventions/paradigms to a medium. This also applies to the macrocosm of media. Trying to contain the aural in the domain of the visual takes away the true nature of the aural, and thus takes the richness and fecundity of life along with it.

"Balance"

The quantifiable and the poetic must exist in a yin and yang balance. We should not have knowledge without mystery, reason without passion, space without time. Both create a stable environment. Blogs can help to foster a movement into an age where knowledge is both absolute and relative. An age in which we don't enforce one ideology, but neither do we stand ambivalent to all ideology. When the next technological revolution happens, I pray that it seek to balance the aural with the visual without placing one in the context of another.

This will keep the conversation in balance. This environment will allow for philosophical communication to be more equally distributed among those who participate, without domininance. But, the environment would still be adventageous for progress. Many postmodern scholars feel the universe is fragmenting. It's only because our present media create the perception of fragmentation. Truth is still out there. It's still attainable. The over-emphasis of the visual compartmentalizes the truth. The reason you think you can't know the truth is because the visual is dominating the aural. When they exist in balance is when the truth fully manifests. (Note: do not try to interpret this on a physical level, this is more of a metaphor for your methodological approaches when engaging in discourse. Deaf and hard of hearing people can listen... Often better than hearing people. This paradox is imporatant to note because listening is not about the tools so much as it is about the process.) You wouldn't use a freezer to cook an egg. Why do you search for the truth with your eyes? Listen, and perhaps you will find something unexpected.