February 14, 2006

• MATING RITUALS IN THE CYBERNETIC AGE

  

  It’s Valentines Day.  This morning I heard a giggle-inducing bit
  on NPR’s Morning Edition, where Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne read
  several ads targeted toward the occasion and trying to sell things as
  diverse as furnaces and laser hair removal.  Long live romance…
  long live commerce.

  In New Mexico, it is Extraterrestrial Culture Day, the second Tuesday
  in February, just happening this year to coincide with Valentines
  Day.  I don’t know what Daniel Foley, the state representative
  from Roswell, had in mind when he proposed the memorial four years
  ago.  I imagine there was an element of tongue-in-cheek humor in
  it, as well as some commercially motivated civic boosterism.  I
  don’t really care why he did it.  I simply appreciate the
  opportunity to consider and discuss ET culture.

  I think it would have been more appropriate to have made it ET Cultures
  Day, because there must be more than one distinct culture out
  there.  Even among the Grays that we know who have visited us
  there is cultural diversity.  There are the somewhat primitive
  Grays, the ones with the beady little eyes, who messily investigated
  the interior anatomy of cattle and invasively used a few humans for
  their genetic experiments.  Then there are the more highly evolved
  ones with the big wraparound eyes who are trying to help preserve our
  ecology.  But I digress….

  I have been reflecting on the Xangan youths who have been posting
  photographs of their genitals.  I suppose it had to come to
  this.  I wonder what Gregory Bateson would think of it, what
  Desmond Morris’s take on it is, and what Marshall McLuhan would have to say.

  Often I wonder what Gregory Bateson
  would think of one thing or another, because he had a gift for seeing
  aspects and ramifications of things that might escape many
  people.  In the 1960s, when I found his writings for the first
  time, they excited me because he challenged me to run to a dictionary
  and expand my vocabulary so that I could understand the words with
  which he informed my vision and expanded my mind.

  Gregory was a twentieth-century Renaissance man: an anthropologist,
  psychologist, cybernetic theorist, ecologist, etiologist, social
  scientist, ethnographer, biologist… a limitless thinker with a
  holistic perspective.  He coined the word, “cybernetics”, for the
  then-new science of computers.  I am sure he would be interested
  in the way our culture has evolved to incoroporate these machines, and
  I imagine that he would be amused by some of the effects.

  Desmond
  Morris is a zoologist and anthropologist whose specialty is sex: 
  mating behavior and the behavioral differences between sexes.  He
  said, “Biologically speaking, if something bites you it’s more likely
  to be female,” and, “…the city is not a concrete jungle, it’s a human
  zoo.” 

  His book, The Naked Ape,
  published October 12, 1967, described many social and cultural
  practices in zoological terms.  He pointed out, for example, how
  cosmetic enhancements such as lipstick mimic the effects of sexual
  arousal.  I’d bet he also took note eventually of the use of
  collagen injections to emphasize that cosmetic effect.

  He identified twelve steps which Western couples pass
  through on the way to sexual intimacy. Occasionally a step may be left
  out, but they almost always occur in this order:

      1. Eye to body
      2. Eye to eye
      3. Voice to voice
      4. Hand to hand
      5. Arm to shoulder
      6. Arm to waist
      7. Mouth to mouth
      8. Hand to head
      9. Hand to body
      10. Mouth to breast
      11. Hand to genitals
      12. Genitals to genitals

  With adolescents now tending to gather online more than they do at
  the
  mall or malt shops, it makes sense that they are passing through the
  first three steps to mating electronically.  Showing off one’s
  body on a blog seems to me to be much healthier and safer than doing it
  in the smoky, alcohol-soaked meat-market singles bars frequented by the
  generation of these young people’s parents.

  Marshall
  McLuhan was a social scientist who specialized in exploring and
  speculating on the effects of technology on culture.  He had a
  real way with words, was a master of the one-liner, the succinct sound bite.  He said, “The medium is the message.” 
  He said, “The future is our permanent address;” and, “If it works, it’s
  obsolete.”

  It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he had foreseen
  the way the web has influenced mating behavior.  He might point
  out the layers of safety, the “comfort zone” provided by the distance
  the web imposes between participants.  He would also surely make
  note of the prevalent attitude of skepticism engendered in those who
  understand that the fourteen-year-old girl they’re eye-emming might
  very well be a middle aged man.

  Just because I found them and want to share them, here are a few more McLuhanisms:

  The story of modern America begins with the discovery of the white man by the Indians.

  Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

  The nature of people demands that most of them be engaged in the most frivolous possible activities—like making money.

  With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is “sent.”

  Money is the poor man’s credit card.

  We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

  You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?

  Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones?

  The trouble with a cheap, specialized education is that you never stop paying for it.

  The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

  When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.

  This information is top security. When you have read it, destroy yourself.

  The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

  One of the nicest things about being big is the luxury of thinking little.

  Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.

  In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can
  be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of
  lab for isolating dangerous viruses.

  Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

  Men on frontiers, whether of time or space, abandon their previous
  identities. Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away.

  A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.

  More can be found here.
  

  • 3:09 pm
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